HSBC An agency of the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation was first set up in Singapore in 1871; a branch office was opened in December 1877 (on Battery Road), although it did not achieve full branch status with the right to issue currency notes until 1881. It was often called simply the ‘Hongkong Bank’. After acquiring the premises of A.L. Johnston and Co. (see Johnston, Alexander) at Fullerton Square in 1890, the bank completed a new building on the site in 1892, the first of three successive buildings in that location. The bank continued to acquire adjacent properties, and a new building was put up in 1925. This in turn was demolished in 1979 and replaced by a 21- storey building— the Hongkong Bank Building, completed in 1982. All three buildings were designed by Swan & Maclaren.
Other important buildings put up by the bank include the bank’s former house at Mount Echo, designed on a grand scale to replace an earlier house in 1912 (which was later demolished); and Macdonald House, which accommodated the Orchard Road branch for many years.
The bank has played an important role in financing Singapore’s business community for more than a century, its focus reflecting the broader evolution of Singapore’s economy as a whole, with, for example, tin and rubber playing important roles in earlier years. In 1959, two big names in Singapore’s banking scene came together, when the Hongkong Bank acquired the Mercantile Bank, with its prominent premises in Raffles Place.
A qualifying full bank (QFB) since 2001, HSBC has maintained a large network of offices in Singapore (QFBs are non- Singaporean banks licensed by the Monetary Authority of Singapore). It has been approved as a primary dealer in Singapore government securities, and listed as an approved bond intermediary (ABI). In 2005, the HSBC Group’s profit before tax was US$61,704 million, with a net operating income of US$20,966 million.