•  Have refined our rules to allow less complex ETFs which make limited use of derivatives to be reclassified as Excluded Investment Products (EIP) – these can be sold more easily to retail investors. 50. 80% of AUM of SGX-listed ETFs are now classified as EIP ETFs that investors can purchase as easily as they buy individual stocks. Third consumer initiative: spur competitive pricing for life insurance products 51. MAS worked with industry and CASE to create a new online portal, compareFIRST. BIS central bankers’ speeches  7  •  Will enable retail consumers to easily compare key features of life insurance products offered by various insurance companies  •  Since its launch in Apr, compareFIRST has registered healthy interest, with over 180,000 visits to portal and more than 110,000 product summaries downloaded. •  Consumers and industry have provided positive feedback on convenience and ease of use of compareFIRST. 52. (DPI). MAS has also worked with industry to make available Direct Purchase Insurance  •  DPI offers consumers access to selected term life and whole life insurance products sold without commissions or financial advice  •  More than 200 DPI policies have been sold in first three months of launch, with a further 100 applications pending approval by insurers. 53. compareFIRST and DPI have spurred more competitive pricing for life insurance products. •  Some insurers have lowered prices of both their DPI and non-DPI insurance products, since introduction of these initiatives. Fourth consumer initiative: enhance financial education 54.
4 For a full discussion of wage growth, see Cunliffe (2017) 3  7  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  7  judging the appropriate balance to be struck when faced with a trade-off between returning inflation sustainably to target and supporting jobs and activity, one must pay close attention to any sign that above target inflation is feeding through to ‘second round’ effects in domestic costs. So far that doesn’t seem to be the case. In summary, it is difficult to determine precisely why the supply side of the economy has behaved as it has in the period since the referendum. The weakness in real wage growth, and the subdued nature of domestically generated inflation mean I am not yet ready to discount the idea that labour market flexibility is continuing to intensify. If true it would mean there is a little more room than headline measures of slack suggest for the economy to grow without generating above-target inflation in the medium term. For that reason, in our November meeting I was willing to wait for more evidence on the evolution of wage and domestic cost growth before beginning to withdraw some monetary stimulus. So I voted for no change in Bank Rate. Deliver Once the decision is made, attention turns to the final phase of ‘end to end’ monetary policy: Deliver. A key part of being Deputy Governor for Markets and Banking is responsibility for delivering much of the Bank’s monetary, and indeed financial stability, operations.