Singapore Exchange eyes stronger connections

"As capital controls ease, the need for investors to hedge their currency risk premiums is increasing," Syn said. "We've had great success in currencies like the Indian rupee and this month we had another hit with the renminbi futures. Investors injected 1 billion renminbi into our clearing house."

Singapore has been competing with Hong Kong to become a trading hub for the Chinese currency as Beijing seeks to promote the wider use of the yuan overseas.

The yuan accounted for 8.7 percent of global trade in October 2013, up from 1.9 percent in January 2012, according to data cited by Aite Group LLC in a report from September.

Yuan deposits in Singapore had reached 254 billion yuan as of June compared with about 930 billion yuan in Hong Kong, data compiled by Bloomberg showed.

SGX is heading for a 3.2 percent slide this month, the biggest such decline since January, after the bourse reported its fourth quarterly drop in profit amid trading volume that tumbled 28 percent.

Singapore is strengthening its securities rules to help restore investor confidence after a penny-stock slump erased $6.9 billion in market value of commodity companies over three days in October 2013.

"We expect securities volumes to normalize with a lowering in the standard board lot size and uptick in volatility," Krishna Guha, an analyst at Jefferies Singapore Ltd, wrote in a note on Thursday.

Investors face disconnect as 'through train' stalls	Stock Connect set to buoy use of more financial instruments