More often than not, handling the politics is the most difficult part. You can be 100 per cent right technically and you can spend all day explaining all the fine details, relating them to the policy objective and the public interest. But if you are not skillful enough in the handling of the politics of the issue, particularly an issue in whose success the confidence of the people plays a crucial part, all your efforts might be wasted. A totally different perception than that intended could well result, undermining the chance of success of what you are trying to achieve. 8. Let me focus specifically on the management of the political process concerning monetary issues. I must say that this task is, for the HKMA, becoming increasingly difficult and time-consuming. Monetary issues are unfortunately very technical and elusive, but they affect everybody. Money is dear to the heart of everyone. We work hard to earn it. And we use it everyday, which can often be, thank goodness, the more pleasant aspect of it. So, quite naturally to us, the price and the value of money are things that we should be concerned about. Here, already to a layperson or to the average politician, we are being esoteric. What is the price of money? What is the value of money? And what are the differences between the two? Why should we be concerned about them? These are very legitimate questions. And they are in fact not easy questions to answer or easy concepts to put across. 9.
More institutions are expected to participate later this year. In this space, there are continuing ample and growing opportunities for Islamic finance to tap on as we ramp up in high value-added sub-sectors such as halal pharmaceutical and cosmetics, as highlighted in HDC’s sectoral development roadmap. Islamic finance also is primed to support initiatives under the National Investment Aspiration (NIA). As the new national investment policy strategy, the NIAs aim to increase Malaysia’s capacity to produce more complex and high-value products and create more high-skilled jobs5. This, in turn, will result in Malaysia producing new lines of goods and services beyond the traditional and upstream products, which will require support including in trade financing in developing businesses across these new product supply chains and penetrating new markets. The different nature of these needs, however calls for more well designed solutions that extend beyond readily available products. Conclusion Before I end my remarks, I would like to touch on the importance of calibrating trade finance processes with digitalisation. The World Bank’s Islamic Trade Finance Report recognises this as a priority area and calls for enhancements to online Islamic trade finance supply chain financing, and the use of blockchain technology. Such technological advancements that leverage distributed ledger technology and API-enabled trade finance platform can address long-standing issues in trade finance operations that mainly arise from the voluminous and manual nature of trade finance processes.