Six days a week, hundreds of people line up in a rundown mall abutting Raffles Place square to buy and sell hard currency at one of around 30 money changer stalls. All manner of notes can be had in minutes: Singapore dollars for British pounds? Coming right up. Indonesian rupiah for Vietnamese dong? Icelandic króna? Maldivian rufiyaa? No problem. Some 150 currencies are available.
“Cash will remain forever,” said Abdul Haleem, 65, a veteran of the industry whose kiosk sits at the entrance to the narrow, three-story plaza called The Arcade. The towering offices of global banking giants JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Bank of China Ltd. are just steps away.
The number of licensed money changers in Singapore dropped during the Covid-19 pandemic when many people were unable to travel and retail shops struggled to pay rent. But there are close to 250 physical stalls still operating, and new ones continue to spring up across the city state’s 284 square miles (735 sq km) of land. That is even though multicurrency payment apps such as YouTrip, Wise and Revolut have grown in popularity.
To understand how so many cash dealers can survive the digital age, you need to know a bit about Singapore’s place in the world. Though it is now among the richest countries – where financial titans from UBS Group AG to BlackRock Inc. manage more than US$4 trillion and billionaires including James Dyson, Ray Dalio and Sergey Brin have set up family offices – the island nation remains a shipping and transit hub at its core.
Hundreds of vessels anchor in Singapore’s harbour each day, many waiting to load and unload cargo at one of the world’s busiest maritime ports. For decades, that has made Raffles Place a prime location for money changers, just a few blocks from where the Singapore River empties into the Singapore Strait. Many sailors need to swap cash from their previous locations and change money for their next destination.
