This can be achieved if companies, agency managers and life agents take a collective long-term view and seek to build sustainable win-win relationships with their clients. Integrity pays off in a long-term relationship. Take care of clients’ interest, and the companies’ and agents’ interest will take care of itself. Management and supervisors play a critical role in ensuring that agents on the ground who interact with and advise consumers adhere to regulatory requirements, and to the fullest extent possible, industry guidelines on professional best practices. This is especially so for the more vulnerable segments of the population – the elderly and the illiterate, or the cashstrapped, who may fall easy prey to get-rich-quick schemes. I believe that with the collective partnership of all industry participants, individuals and regulators, we can preserve the credibility and reputation of Singapore as an insurance hub. Initiative The second value is initiative. As part of a national effort to raise the level of skills and competencies of Singapore’s financial sector workforce, the FICS was established to benchmark competency standards of financial professionals to international best practices. I congratulate GE Life for taking the initiative to become the first insurer to be successfully accredited for its assessment capabilities in underwriting, relationship management and claims handling under the FICS. GE Life’s agency force also forms the first batch of candidates who have successfully attained FICS certification in the insurance industry. Involvement The third value is involvement. The FICS awards reflect a whole-of-company involvement.
Before EMU, it was common practice for institutional investors to make geographical diversification their first priority, and, secondly, to select securities in accordance with a sectoral diversification pattern. There is some evidence that the “home bias” has weakened since the introduction of the euro. For instance, assets held by pan-European investment funds represented 8 25% of total assets at the end of 2000, up from 12% in 1998. The development of a genuine panEuropean approach is also illustrated by the introduction of various European stock indexes. The turnover on options based on these indexes - for instance, the volume of options traded on the Eurostoxx50 contract - now matches the turnover of options based on well-established domestic indexes such as the CAC in France. This provides evidence that large investors are looking for - and actually have recourse to - hedging products that are suited to a cross-border oriented strategy. However, this evidence of a strong impetus towards integration does not necessarily support the argument that a brand new asset allocation is overwhelmingly dominant. Let me emphasise two aspects. First, pan-European sectoral strategies have also embraced non-euro area stocks in order to reach an appropriate level of diversification. This is the case in sectors such as pharmaceuticals, or telecom equipment, with stocks listed in non-euro area countries such as Switzerland, the United Kingdom and Sweden. This is in line with some theoretical assumptions, which are stating that currency risk is outweighed by the risk-return parameters, as far as investing in equities is concerned.