The Government has launched the SkillsFuture initiative last year, to allow all Singaporeans to acquire a mastery of skills and to be better prepared for future jobs. This can be helpful to financial market professionals such as our trading representatives as example. 48. The Institute of Banking and Finance (IBF) has worked with SGX to conduct a survey polling some 1,200 trading representatives last year for their feedback on their training needs and professional development. IBF has also organised extensive consultations with multiple stakeholders such as Securities Association of Singapore (SAS) and the Society of Remisiers of Singapore (SRS), as well as arranged focus group discussions with individual remisiers and dealers. 49. As a follow up to these consultations, IBF will be introducing a new set of competency standards to help trading representatives acquire competencies to service their clients better. IBF will also be working closely with the SGX Academy, SRS as well as the larger brokingfirms to have in place a wide offering of training programmes to be made available to trading representatives 50. MAS will continue to support the various training initiatives. All learning and development programmes formally recognised by IBF will receive at least 50% funding subsidy 2 2 from the Financial Sector Development Fund (FSDF). In addition, trading representatives who are prepared to undergo the IBF Standards certification programme will receive 70% funding subsidy. You might be aware that the SkillsFuture Credit has already been rolled out early this month. Trading representatives can use the $ Credit for eligible training programmes.
Starting with the institutional limitations, the key innovation of the SSM is that it creates genuinely European supervision, by which I mean supervision on both core and peripheral banks. From November next year, every bank in Europe will be part of the same system. This puts supervisors in a better position to prevent boom-bust cycles caused by excessive cross-border lending – and if they fail to do so, there will be collective responsibility for that failure. In line with the subsidiarity principle, European supervision will involve centralised and decentralised elements. For the big significant banks (around 130), the ECB will be the direct responsible supervisor, but supervision will take place at both the European and national levels. We will integrate these levels by setting up Joint Supervisory Teams (JST) for each significant bank. Let me use the example of Santander to illustrate how this will work. For the parts of the banking group resident within the SSM, there will be a core supervisory team comprising of staff from both the ECB and the national competent authorities (NCAs) in the countries where Santander is active – that is 9 within the euro area. Within this team there will be a national coordinator for each country, drawn from the respective NCA, and an overall coordinator, who will be an ECB staff member. The national coordinators will manage the permanent experts working at the national level, while the ECB coordinator will ensure quality and take responsibility for output sent to the Supervisory Board.