FJ Benjamin

Fashion and lifestyle retailer FJ Benjamin Holdings' rights cum warrants issue exercise to raise up to $39 million for working capital and expansion has been oversubscribed by 48.6 per cent.

The rights shares, priced at 3.5 cents apiece, will raise net proceeds of $7.8 million. This comes at a time when the group is "returning to profitability, following a multi-year restructuring programme to terminate loss-making businesses, close down unprofitable stores, streamline backend operations and cut costs", it said.

As the demand for the three-for-five rights issue exceeded supply, founder Frank Benjamin and investor Peter Lim Eng Hock will not be allotted excess shares with warrants. Both had undertaken to take up all excess rights cum warrants if the issue was not fully subscribed.

DBS Group Holdings

DBS Bank said yesterday it will help corporate clients reduce cheque use by 30 per cent from current levels within the next two years, to help them keep pace with the increasing popularity of digital payments among consumers.

Mr Raof Latiff, head of digital at DBS' Institutional Banking Group, said that the bank has seen a fivefold increase in corporate clients requesting digital payment solutions to be embedded into their payments processes over the last 12 months. "The ubiquity of the mobile phone means that cheque payments will soon be a thing of the past and forward-looking companies are reworking their business processes to stay relevant, save time and serve their customers better," he said.

Instead of issuing cheques, corporate clients can plug into the lender's PayNow solution through its application programming interface to instantly pay retail customers, DBS said.

Keppel Corp

Alpha Asia Macro Trends Fund II (AAMTF II) has sold Shanghai International Plaza, an office-and-retail property, to LaSalle Investment Management. AAMTF II sold the property through its wholly-owned entity Bravo (II) while LaSalle made the acquisiton on behalf of LaSalle Asia Opportunity V, the fifth in a series of closed-end, pan-Asian opportunistic funds. Both sides did not disclose the price.

AAMTF II is managed by Alpha Investment Partners (Alpha), the private fund management arm of Keppel Capital Holdings, a unit of Keppel Corporation.