A closer look at Brunei’s 2024 Financial Stability Report — and what the reassuring numbers may not fully reveal about savings, debt, household pressure and everyday financial reality.
By Malai Hassan Othman
Part of the KopiTalk with MHO public-interest opinion series on Brunei’s economy, governance and everyday realities.
Brunei’s latest financial stability report contains plenty of good news — and much of it is justified. But beneath the reassuring numbers are quieter questions about savings, debt, household vulnerability and how financial “stability” is actually experienced in everyday life.
The Brunei Darussalam Central Bank has released its Financial Stability Report 2024 — the latest and most comprehensive snapshot of where our financial system stands. It captures the numbers up to December 2024. It reflects the realities of the world we are living in now: global trade tensions, rising fraud risks, and the long, unfinished task of building an economy that works not only on paper, but in people’s daily lives.
It is a serious document — thick with charts, ratios and technical language. Useful, necessary, and carefully prepared. But it is written mainly for regulators, economists and bankers, not for the ordinary Bruneian sitting at a kopitiam quietly wondering why his salary still never seems to stretch far enough.
So I read it for you.
And after going through it carefully, one thing becomes clear: behind the reassuring headlines — and yes, there are genuinely reassuring headlines — there are also quieter numbers that deserve a more honest public conversation.
Not a hostile one.
Not a fearful one.
Just an honest one.
Let us begin with the good news, because there is real good news and it should be said plainly.
Brunei’s economy grew 4.2 per cent in 2024. Prices eased slightly, meaning the cost of living came down a little compared with the year before, helped in part by subsidies that are still holding. The banking system remains well-capitalised, liquid and stable. There is no sign of immediate distress in the system, and the Central Bank deserves credit for the care and discipline with which it continues to supervise it.
That part matters.
But stability and fairness are not the same thing.
A system can be financially sound and still raise legitimate questions about who benefits most from that soundness. And it is that quieter question — the fairness question — that deserves closer attention.
Because sometimes a system can look healthy in aggregate, while the people living underneath it still feel squeezed in very ordinary ways.
Take one of the report’s most striking figures.
More than half of the money held by Brunei’s banks — over BND11 billion — is not being used in Brunei at all. It is placed and invested overseas. Singapore accounts for the largest share. Gulf financial centres take up much of the rest.
This is not hidden. Nor is it improper. The Central Bank states it openly.
Banks do this because, in their assessment, there are not enough suitable local opportunities to absorb all that liquidity domestically.
That may be commercially understandable.
But it naturally leads to a very simple question:
Where does the banks’ money come from in the first place?
Again, the report answers that clearly.
The single largest source of funding for Brunei’s banking system is household deposits — the savings of ordinary people. Your salary savings. Your retirement money. Your fixed deposit. The money that families, pensioners, civil servants, private sector workers and small business owners place in the bank month after month for safekeeping.
That is the foundation.
And what does the ordinary saver receive in return?
By regulation, the minimum savings rate remains around 0.33 per cent per year. It edged up slightly in 2024, yes — but let us not over-romanticise that. If you keep BND10,000 in a savings account, you earn roughly BND33 over a year.
That is not a typo. That is the arrangement.
No accusation is being made here. The banks are operating within the legal and regulatory framework set by the authorities, and the authorities are clearly supervising the system with care.
But surely it is fair — and necessary — to ask this out loud:
Is this arrangement working as well for the ordinary saver as it should?
Because if ordinary Bruneians provide a very large share of the financial foundation on which the banking system rests, then it is not unreasonable to ask whether they are being rewarded fairly enough for carrying that role.
That is not a radical question. It is a healthy one.
And healthy societies should not be afraid of healthy questions.
“A system can be financially sound and still leave ordinary people quietly squeezed.”
Then there is debt.
And the debt story in this report is not merely about borrowing. It is really about how we live.
The largest category of household borrowing in Brunei is not housing.
It is cars.
More than a third of all household loans are tied to automobile financing. Total car financing rose again in 2024, reaching around BND1.7 billion.
That figure alone says a great deal.
Because if cars dominate household debt, then we should ask why.
And the answer is not simply lifestyle. Or vanity. Or preference.
It is infrastructure.
In Brunei, the car is not just a convenience. For many households, it is the only realistic way to function. It gets children to school. It gets adults to work. It gets groceries home. It gets the sick to clinics. It gets families through life.
There is no rail system. There is no fully reliable, everyday public transport network that truly serves the rhythm of working families across the country.
So when we see BND1.7 billion in car loans, we are not just looking at a consumer habit.
We are looking at the private financial cost of a public transport gap that was never fully solved.
Every monthly car instalment, in some measure, is also a quiet bill for a system that was never properly built.
And that matters.
Because when fuel subsidies eventually come under greater pressure — as fiscal realities suggest they may — the burden does not land on theory. It lands on households.
The housing picture is more complicated than it first appears.
On the surface, falling property prices sound like relief. And for some families, they may be.
The report shows that the median house price fell to around BND249,000 in 2024.
For young couples trying to enter the market, that should sound encouraging.
But there is another side to that story.
Transactions also fell. Demand softened. Fewer people were buying.
And tucked away in the same report is another detail worth paying close attention to: government deposits in the banking system fell by nearly 17 per cent.
That is not just an accounting movement. It suggests the government is drawing down more of its own liquidity — which, to anyone watching public finance carefully, is a sign of real fiscal pressure behind the scenes.
And when government finances tighten, the consequences rarely stay inside spreadsheets.
A government under pressure has less room to sustain everything at the same level — whether subsidies, support schemes, public spending, or the many cushions people have quietly come to rely on over the years.
That is not politics.
That is arithmetic.
And arithmetic, sooner or later, always reaches the household.
Then there is insurance — one of the quieter but more important warning lights in the report.
Brunei’s insurance penetration rate is 1.7 per cent of GDP.
The Southeast Asian average is 3.2 per cent.
In other words, we are operating at roughly half the regional norm.
That matters because it suggests many Bruneians remain lightly protected against shocks that could seriously affect a family’s finances — illness, accidents, loss of income, or unexpected disruption.
To be fair, the report notes that one reason for this is that Bruneians have long depended on the state for support: healthcare, pensions, housing assistance, welfare, and other forms of public protection.
That logic makes sense — as long as the state can continue carrying the full load indefinitely.
But that is precisely where the question becomes uncomfortable.
Because we are no longer living in the era of endlessly comfortable oil assumptions.
Revenue pressures are real. Demographic pressures are real. Long-term obligations are real.
And the danger with underinsurance is that it does not usually arrive dramatically.
It creeps in quietly.
A service that takes longer.
A support scheme that covers less.
A family that suddenly has to absorb more on its own.
An underinsured society entering a fiscally constrained future is not an ideal combination.
And the sooner we talk honestly about that, the better.
Finally, fraud.
And if there is one part of modern financial life that now feels less like a technical issue and more like a daily social threat, this is it.
The Central Bank added 49 names to its Alert List in 2024. That brings the total to 274 names — entities and individuals believed to have misrepresented themselves as licensed or regulated.
That is not a small problem.
And the worrying part is this: scams are no longer obviously sloppy.
They are now polished. Convincing. Professional-looking.
Artificial intelligence has made that worse.
Today, fraudsters can clone voices, generate faces, imitate institutions, and build fake investment platforms that look more legitimate than some real ones. A message may carry the right logo. A phone call may sound like a real officer. A website may look cleaner than the bank’s own.
And in a country where ordinary savings returns remain painfully low, the promise of “better returns” becomes even more seductive.
That is where the financial and human story meet.
Because scam victims are often not reckless people.
They are often people trying to do the right thing with limited means.
Retirees trying to stretch savings.
Older parents less fluent with digital systems.
Working people hoping to make a little extra.
Families trying to get ahead.
So yes, awareness campaigns matter. Regulation matters. Enforcement matters.
But family vigilance matters too.
Talk to your parents.
Check before transferring.
Verify before trusting.
And when something sounds too good to be true, it almost always is.
To be fair, the Financial Stability Report 2024 does what it is meant to do.
It assesses the strength of financial institutions, maps emerging risks, and gives the public a transparent view of the system. On those terms, it does its job well — and the people behind it deserve recognition for that.
But financial stability, by itself, is not the whole story.
It is the foundation.
Not the house.
The bigger question is what kind of economic life gets built on top of that foundation.
Can ordinary Bruneians save meaningfully?
Borrow affordably?
Protect themselves adequately?
And genuinely feel they are participating in the prosperity the numbers appear
to describe?
Those are not hostile questions.
They are public-interest questions.
And the public has every right to ask them.
The data is there.
The numbers are real.
And the kopitiam table, as always, is open.
Ending note
KopiTalk with MHO is a public-interest opinion column by Malai Hassan Othman, offering reflective, accessible and grounded commentary on Brunei’s economy, governance and everyday realities.
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