Apart from upgrading professional competency, consideration will also be given to the technical competency of company directors and other staff involved in the insurance business. We will work with industry to formulate an insurance manpower development strategy. We envisage industry players, training providers and tertiary institutions co-operating to develop programmes that will enhance professionalism in the insurance industry. Conclusion MAS will continue to work together with the insurance industry to achieve international best practices and standards. Over the past two years, MAS has worked hard to build a closer partnership with the financial sector. We will continue to promote an open environment and consult actively with the private sector for its views. The relationship between the regulator and the regulated should be arms length but not adversarial. The regulator has to be firm, but also friendly. Market practitioners can help regulators generate ideas, keep abreast of market developments, anticipate global trends and review  4  BIS Review 44/2002  our financial sector strategies. Candid, thoughtful feedback, including dissenting views, go a long way to ensure that policies are pragmatic and remain relevant. We hope that such a regulatory environment will help to develop well-managed insurers in Singapore, who will take up new challenges, and play a more active and productive role in upgrading our insurance industry, and thus our financial sector as a whole. I wish you fruitful deliberations. BIS Review 44/2002  5
Along with reflecting the risks, the agreement explicitly acknowledges how important the financial system should be for efficiently channelling the resources needed to transform our economy towards a sustainable model. These two factors, namely the risks and the opportunities and incentives associated with the change in economic model to combat climate change, have grown in significance on international financial agencies’ agendas. Allow me to mention, non-exhaustively, some of these initiatives: - the work on sustainable finance during the last three mandates of the G20, - the establishment of responsible investment principles by the United Nations, - the creation of the Financial Stability Board’s Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures, - the establishment of the OECD green finance and investment centre, - the Sustainable Banking Network established by the World Bank, - within the EU, the European Commission’s action plan on sustainable finance - in the central banking and banking supervision environment, the work by the Network for Greening the Financial Sector (NGFS), of which the Banco de España is a member. In sum, the Paris agreement message to involve the financial sector has hit home and is prompting numerous courses of action. 3/5  You will be discussing many of these initiatives at length in the ensuing roundtable. But in the rest of my speech I wish to briefly set out the role the Banco de España, as a central bank and as a supervisor, can perform regarding this collective challenge.