I survived a nightmare scenario for CDP investors

 

Today's article is relevant to old-school investors who hold their stocks in CDP. I'm sharing my personal story for two reasons: first, to help CDP investors who haven't encountered this issue before; and second, to seek comments from other investors who have found better ways to deal with the situation.

So let's start with the investment that led to the fracas. I have an ETF called IS Asia HYG (Ticker: QL3). This is a good investment for me because it yields decently and is not correlated with banks and REITs on SGX, as it invests in high-yield Asian Bonds. It pays every 3 months at the end of March, June, September and December. Because payment is in USD, it is often delayed by a day or over the weekend, so it pays in the dividend dry months of January, April, July, and October in SGD directly into the bank account.

I was tracking the dividend, and on the 2nd of January 2026, not only did the dividend not arrive, but the Direct Credit Scheme, some sort of dividends pipeline that connects to a joint-account CDP of mine with a DBS joint account, was found to be suspended.

There was obviously some cause for panic, since this had never happened to me before, so I did the worst thing an investor can do: I consulted ChatGPT to find out why.

ChatGPT took me on a wild goose chase. It informed me that joint account connections are no longer valid and that banks will, based on events affecting the account, suspend these links in the future without grounds for appeal. 

As you can imagine, I panicked even further. 

I went online and tried to re-establish the link. On Monday, I went to the CDP office itself.

As it turns out, CDP no longer has counters. If you are physically present, there is a phone to dial in, and you wait like everyone else who calls a call centre. Eventually, I managed to get someone to explain to me that re-establishing the link was the right thing to do, and that the joint-account status just means the banks will take longer to activate the link. The call-centre staff explained that the breakage was a processing error caused on their side.

It took about 4 business days from link activation to re-establish the link, and the dividend came a day after that.

So the TL;DR of the story is: if a dividend is late, check the Direct Credit Scheme for the account; if it is suspended, just re-activate it using the bank account it was previously tied to.

 But the story is not over.

Before I even received my dividend, CDP decided to conduct a KYC check on me. Initially, I wrote back in anger, asking whether KYC was a prerequisite to re-establish my DCS, as it felt like a punishment when the processing mistake was theirs. 

At the moment, I submitted all my KYC documents as I did not want to delay subsequent payments, but that took at least 2 man-hours to generate my pay slips and bank statements.

So all-in-all, 2026 has been an administratively tough year because my dividend pipeline broke. 

I have no idea what would happen if the investor is an old boomer who suddenly finds his cash flow cut off and would need to go online to re-establish the link.