The Singapore-headquartered bank has signalled its intent to promote structured products into the Hong Kong and Singapore markets.

Bank of Singapore, the private banking firm, has licensed a trademarked index from fund research firm Morningstar as part of a drive to supply structured products for the Hong Kong and Singapore markets.

The bank has licensed the Morningstar Exponential Technologies Moat Focus Index, which tracks undervalued but high-quality businesses expected to generate returns on capital above the cost of capital. Based on the concept of the “economic moat”, or sustainable competitive advantage, Morningstar defines this as a sustainable advantage that enables the company to keep competitors at bay for an extended period of time.

Companies with such an advantage are, Morningstar says, likely to achieve normalised excess returns beyond 10 years while “wide-moat” companies are likely to sustain excess returns beyond 20 years. 

The Morningstar index is designed to provide exposure to 50 wide- or narrow-moat companies from among the constituents of the 200-stock Morningstar Exponential Technologies Index that are trading at the biggest discounts to Morningstar’s fair value estimates, it said in a statement.

The index represents companies worldwide that offer exposure to technological transformations across areas such as big data and analytics, nanotechnology, networks and computer systems, energy and environmental systems, medicine and neuroscience, robotics, 3-D printing, bioinformatics, and financial services innovations.

Separately, as reported previously, Bank of Singapore has appointed a new chief investment officer and made a number of other investment area changes. (For more details, see here.)