The changing priorities and lifestyles of this new generation, growing wealth and increasing proportion of middle income population will also support continued and further growth in demand for investment-linked and wealth management products. As a result, the insurance industry has, and will continue to, expand its role beyond merely providing protection products. Against this backdrop, prospects for increasing the insurance penetration rate in our economies are clearly positive. However, this will hinge on the ability of the industry to respond to these changing demographics and dynamics in the financial system. In 2006, the insurance premiums averaged 2.95% of GDP in South East Asia as compared with 8.8% in the U.S. or 16.5% in the U.K. Compared to the  BIS Review 134/2007  1  banking sector, the insurance industry remains relatively less developed and commands a significantly smaller percentage of the total financial assets of the region's financial system. To tap these opportunities, appropriate strategies, new thinking and approaches will be required. In this regard, a significant development has been the evolution of alternative distribution mechanisms for insurance products and services in the region, notably through bancassurance. Indeed, bancassurance has developed in a number of ASEAN markets into a viable alternative distribution approach to the traditional agency force. Perhaps, in those markets where the insurance distribution channels through agency force have yet to be firmly established, bancassurance could provide a quantum leap to allow insurers to rapidly widen their outreach by tapping into an established banking network and client base.
Directors must devote their time to the bank, cannot be a director of more than three other profit-seeking companies, as well as disallowing of borrowing where cross ownership is more than one percent of the paid up capital of the borrower. Of the 92 people involved, 53 have now complied, and arrangements have been made for most of the others to comply, with the possible exception of the representatives of the Ministry of Finance who may find that their representatives are not the sort of people who can devote that much time to the bank because they are not part of the ownership or operation of the bank, but are just government representatives. We are looking into this and will discuss with the Ministry when the time is right. The problem in fact is not as innocuous as it looks as state bank remunerations are affected by considerations other than just how should directors be rewarded so that shareholders’ value can be maximised. But all this is being done through sanctions and coercion, and in the New Commercial Bank Act the authority will be explicit. My last words on commercial banks, the intervened banks might not yet be completely taken care of, but at least the cost of rescue can now be well estimated. The proper financing of the debt burden is probably one of the first jobs of the new government.