Steering Committee announces successful completion of transition from SOR and SIBOR to SORA

25 March 2025

On 25 February 2025, the Steering Committee for SOR & SIBOR Transition to SORA (“SC-STS”) announced the successful completion of the transition from the Singapore Dollar Swap Offer Rate (“SOR”) and Singapore Interbank Offered Rate (“SIBOR”) to the Singapore Overnight Rate Average (“SORA”). This comes after banks successfully completed the SIBOR to SORA transition on 31 December 2024, which involved the transition of about 87,000 retail loans out of SIBOR. 

SORA is now the de facto standard for Singapore Dollar loan products. Derived from actual overnight interbank lending transactions in Singapore, SORA is seen as a more robust and transparent benchmark than SOR and SIBOR. SORA is widely adopted by financial institutions and borrowers, and the SORA market has since grown to more than S$3 trillion in outstanding derivatives, bonds, and loans, comparable to the size of the SOR and SIBOR market before the start of the transition exercise. 

As SIBOR was largely used in retail mortgage loans, the SIBOR transition involved mainly retail customers of banks. The completion of the SIBOR to SORA transition, following the completion of the SOR to SORA transition on
30 June 2023, marks the conclusion of the overall SOR and SIBOR interest rate benchmark transition exercise which began since 2019. This was part of the global benchmarks reforms to transition away Interbank Offered Rate (“IBOR”) benchmarks, which were based on the non-binding quotes by banks, to more robust overnight interest rate benchmarks based on actual transactions. Since its establishment in 2019, the SC-STS has worked closely with industry stakeholders and implemented initiatives to standardise and deepen interest rate markets based on SORA and facilitate the smooth conversion from legacy SOR and SIBOR contracts to SORA. 

With the successful completion of the interest rate benchmark transition to SORA, the work of the SC-STS will draw to a close. 

Reference materials 

The media release is available on the website of the Association of Banks in Singapore www.abs.org.sg.