Therefore, in the present exercise MAS will allow the principal shareholders to continue owning indirect stakes in the banking groups through the non-financial entities that they control. MAS will review this arrangement later. Management To avoid conflicts of interest, the management of the financial entities should be separate from the management of its non-financial affiliates. There should be no sharing of executive directors and management staff, such as the chief financial officer and chief operating officer. On the board of directors of a regulated financial entity, a majority of the directors should not be holding directorships on the boards of the non-financial affiliates as well. Name-sharing Mixed conglomerates usually leverage on common brand building. Many of the non-financial affiliates of local banks share the name of their parent banks. Financial and non-financial entities alike have built up goodwill in the brand name over the years. But reputational and contagion risks can result from sharing of names and corporate badges between the bank and its non-bank affiliates. Where an unregulated entity sharing a name fails or falls into disrepute, the public may attribute its problems to the bank, causing a bank run. MAS will therefore disallow the sharing of names and logos between the financial and non-financial entities. We are considering amending the Banking Act, to prevent the use of names or acronyms by companies that may confuse the public, or give the impression that a company is related to or associated with any Singapore-incorporated bank.
Jean-Claude Trichet: Global capital – surrender of national policies? Lessons from the recent events in credit markets Speech by Mr Jean-Claude Trichet, President of the European Central Bank, at the 17th Frankfurt European Banking Congress “Global Capital – Threat or Salvation?”, Frankfurt am Main, 23 November 2007. *  *  *  Ladies and Gentlemen, Let me start off with one general remark: The present significant market correction with episodes of turbulences should not come as a surprise to us. The ECB, as well as the other central banks, has issued warnings in the past on the global phenomenon of under-pricing of risks. In many respects the present episode can be interpreted as bringing to the forefront anomalies and structural deficiencies which we have identified earlier. While it is too early to make a full assessment, I believe there are some first provisional lessons which can already be drawn at the current stage. A lesson that can be drawn is that the growing complexity of instruments has to be monitored very closely. Structured credit markets are exposed to valuation problems, which make the market very vulnerable to a shift in investor sentiment. In the absence of reliable market prices, instruments need to be valued by models. But estimates which the models produce are highly sensitive to underlying assumptions.