Business Owners

• The U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) has issued a final rule permanently ending beneficial ownership reporting requirements. • Under this new rule, U.S. companies and U.S. persons are no longer required to report beneficial ownership information as previously mandated by the Corporate Transparency Act. • FinCEN has further committed to deleting information that was already reported by U.S. persons prior to this rule change.

Initiatives including cutting permits just to serve ice-cream amount to a sweeping program of deregulationRed Scare? The democratic socialist mayor of New York City spent this week talking about red tape.On Tuesday, Zohran Mamdani – the politician at the center of a revived rightwing panic about socialists and purported communists winning elections across America - posted a video on X of himself putting a sheet of paper with the phrase “RED TAPE” into a paper shredder. Other pieces of paper, with phrases like “cumbersome fees and fines” and “a permit you need just to serve ice-cream”, were shredded too. The video, set to Wu Tang Clan’s If Time Is Money, shows Mamdani joining a handful of city officials and small business owners throwing the resulting paper shreds into the air like confetti. Continue reading...

• OCBC Malaysia has integrated Singpass to allow Singaporean and Singapore Permanent Resident business owners to remotely authenticate their identities for account applications. • This digital transition aims to significantly accelerate the business account opening process, reducing the turnaround time from approximately three weeks to as little as five working days. • Eligible customers holding business accounts in both Singapore and Malaysia can now apply for single sign-on access to manage both accounts via a unified dashboard.

• The number of small businesses in the United States continues to grow amid entrepreneurial optimism. • Owners report increasing difficulty securing startup capital needed to launch and expand operations. • Policies associated with President Trump are cited by business leaders as dampening access to financing for new entrepreneurs pursuing the American Dream.