The main role of private equity is to fill the gap between internally generated financing and conventional market sources, such as bank loans and public equity. Unlike most stock market investments, equity investment enables shareholders to adopt a long-term and hands-on approach in their investee companies, fostering sound corporate governance and transparency, making appropriate contributions to business strategy and optimizing management. Crucially, however, it also contributes to the transfer of skills and has positive demonstration effects in terms of the development of local capital markets and competitive market-oriented behavior10. These modalities such 10  EBRD Transition report 2015-2016. 12  as, venture capital, crowdfunding, business angels, are relatively modest in the CESEE, although the same holds for the EU as well, where private equity has a share of around 0.3% in GDP. Debt market in the region is larger compared to the equity, averaging around 50% of GDP, which is still much lower compared to the EU-28 average of close to 160%. Yet, dominant part of this market segment is related to government securities, while the corporate issuance remains modest. In fact, in most CESEE countries, corporate bond markets remain small, or even nonexistent. Chart 14: Stock and debt market capitalization  Source: ECB and central bank websites. To recap, the region needs to mobilize finance, which amidst burdened government financing and structurally difficult access to bank finance for new and innovative companies, requires further development of the capital markets and more diversified portfolio of financial instruments.
These efforts have helped to avoid retrenchment of staff who might otherwise be displaced, and contributed to the steady decline in retrenchments in the financial sector, from the peak of 2,300 in 2016 to 1,300 in 2019.7 However, given the accelerated pace of digitalisation, we need to do more, and at scale. We are now experimenting an Artificial Intelligence (AI) platform with 13 FI partners to automate the process of identifying adjacencies in jobs and skills, so that more workers can benefit from reskilling and pivot into suitable roles. We hope to share more about the platform early next year. Creating Opportunities Our second priority is to expand opportunities for those aspiring to enter or reenter the financial sector workforce. 9. The National Jobs Council has been set up to mobilise tripartite partners’ resources to create opportunities amidst the weak labour hiring conditions. I am pleased to note that the financial sector is one of the top contributing sectors to 2/6  BIS central bankers' speeches  the jobs and traineeships programmes, offering a wide range of opportunities, including in technology and innovation, retail and corporate banking. Close to 60 FIs have offered about 1,300 SGUnited Traineeship positions for fresh and recent graduates in this challenging job market. As of end July 2020, 50 FIs have committed to hiring 900 Singaporeans over the next 3 years to be groomed for future leadership and specialist roles under structured talent development programmes supported by MAS.