Many banks, which once actively sold complex structured products, now woo customers with products that are less risky and easier to grasp though the returns may be lower.

It is back to basics for investors who are choosing safety having seen assets mauled by the global financial crisis.

Hence, plain-vanilla products - from endowments (long-term regular savings plans with built-in life insurance) to monthly savings plans - are back in favour.

While 'core offerings' like fixed deposits are not new, they were sometimes viewed by investors as 'poorer cousins' of structured products.

These entered the mass market in 1999 and generally dangled higher returns than, say, fixed deposits.

Depending on the complexity of the structured product, they could yield returns from 1 per cent a year to a fixed first-year payout of 10 per cent.

In 2007, an estimated $3 billion worth of structured products were sold here, including High Notes, Pinnacle Notes, Jubilee Notes and Minibonds.

But the market for these instruments plunged after the Sept 15 bankruptcy of US investment bank Lehman Brothers, triggering an uproar about how investors were allegedly mis-sold products linked to it, and protest rallies in Speakers' Corner.

The total issue size of the Minibond programme, for example, was $508 million, of which $375 million's worth was sold to about 8,000 retail investors through nine distributors.

Maybank, which sold Minibonds, is not marketing structured products for now. 'We'll now focus on bancassurance and deposits,' said Ms Helen Neo, Singapore's head of consumer banking.

'We're offering attractive deposit interest rates when customers take up insurance products with us,' she said, noting that given the current downturn, it is prudent for people to be sufficiently insured.

With the insurance bundling, time deposits give a yield of 6.88 per cent per annum for three months.

Other bankers said they are also seeing a rise in demand for lower-risk products like time deposits and monthly savings accounts, and less demand for aggressive equity funds.

Read the full story in tomorrow's edition of The Sunday Times.