Zeti Akhtar Aziz: The Malaysian banking industry - gearing up for excellence Keynote address by Dr Zeti Akhtar Aziz, Governor of the Central Bank of Malaysia, at the Malaysian Banking & Financial Services Summit 2002 - “Gearing up for excellence”, held in Kuala Lumpur, 20 May 2002. *  *  *  Ladies and Gentlemen, The drive for excellence in the banking industry is a matter of priority, given that the well being of the banking sector is integral to the health and prosperity of the Malaysian economy. The advanced progress achieved in the restructuring and consolidation of our banking system in the recent year, has provided us with the strong foundation on which to develop and strengthen further the banking sector so that, it is better positioned to respond to the new and changing requirements of the economy and better abled to become more efficient and competitive. The focus of our strategies has therefore shifted from financial restructuring to that of capacity building and to ensuring the soundness and stability of the system. In essence, our drive for excellence in this phase of our development of the financial sector is to achieve an enhanced level of effectiveness and competitiveness in the banking sector. The issue before the banking industry is therefore the strategies and actions needed to gear up for this excellence. Ladies and Gentlemen, It is my pleasure to be here again at this year’s Malaysian Banking and Financial Services Summit organised by ASLI.
The quality of the indicators and the assessment of investments will further improve as more and better data sources become available. 5  See ESMA (2023). Progress Report on Greenwashing. May. 5  Several regulatory initiatives in the European Union will make new data available as a result of new climate and sustainability reporting requirements for financial and non-financial institutions. Currently we have the Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation (SFDR), that sets mandatory environmental, social and governance (ESG) disclosure obligations for financial markets participants, and the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD). With regard to the latter, the European Financial Reporting Advisory Group (EFRAG) is working on the details of the thematic standards for collecting information on ESG aspects, trying to reconcile CSRD with the recommendations of the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD) and the work of the International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB). As you know the TCFD issued a set of recommendations to disclose climate-related risks and opportunities, grouped into four categories: i) governance, ii) strategy, iii) risk management and iv) metrics and targets, but again they are voluntary. The ISSB is working on a global framework for sustainability but it has a different approach from EFRAG. For example, the ISSB considers single materiality while EFRAG considers double materiality. As you can see we have an alphabet soup to negotiate in the drive for transparency. In reality, there is as yet no global standard for disclosure, and it will take several years to achieve a complete framework.