Ravi Menon: Future of finance jobs Opening remarks by Mr Ravi Menon, Managing Director of the Monetary Authority of Singapore, and Chairman of the Institute of Banking and Finance, at the Launch of the Study on Future of Finance Jobs, Singapore, 23 April 2019. * * * Mrs Josephine Teo, Minister for Manpower, members of the IBF Council, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to IBF. IBF will be turning 45 this year. It is hard to imagine the financial sector today without the IBF. Not all countries have the equivalent of an IBF. Fewer still have as strong a collaboration as we do here in IBF – among financial institutions and between financial institutions and the regulator. And all for a common cause that has been consistent for the last 45 years – to equip the professionals in our financial sector to do their jobs better, and to make the Singapore financial centre more competitive IBF began life in much simpler times. Its primary aim in the 1970s through the 1990s was to provide training for the financial sector professionals. In the 2000s, IBF shifted its focus to setting competency standards and facilitating skills development for the industry. Looking to the future, the jobs and skills landscape in the financial industry is a lot more complex and uncertain. Technology is transforming finance – the way financial services are produced, distributed, and consumed. This means that jobs in financial services will also be transformed.
Furthermore, if market expectations of upside currency gains persist, it could invite even more capital inflows, along with greater pressures on the exchange rate and higher chances of imbalance buildups in the future. For the real economy, it may delay some of the necessary adjustments. Finally, FX intervention is not costless. We have to fund the intervention with local interest rates that are higher than what we would earn from our international reserves. 2  BIS central bankers’ speeches  Experiences have also shown that, even after a large appreciation of the currency, capital inflows could still seep in and fuel speculative activities in markets such as real estate and equity. To help deal with specific pockets of the economy showing signs of potential bubbles, macro-prudential measures could be used. A recent example is the risk-weights adjustment related to the loan-to-value (LTV) ratio of loans made to property purchases. While macro-prudential measures aim to help lessen the effects of capital that has already flowed into the economy, capital account regulations can be used to deal directly with the size and type of incoming and outgoing flows. With an aim of creating more balanced capital flows, the Bank of Thailand has continued to liberalize our capital outflows, while on the inflow side we at times resort to tighter regulations when the situation deems necessary. Implementing a capital account regulation, or less of it, requires a delicate balancing act.