FinanceMalta 11th Annual Conference discusses finance without frontiers

“Malta’s financial services industry has registered sustained growth in the overall ecosystem. This growth in the industry came from increases of in investment services, insurance operations, retirement schemes, trusts, securitisations, new fund licences and financial institutions with year-on-year growth rates ranging from 5% to 17%. Furthermore, last year Malta saw a total of 573 new notifications from international firms passporting to Malta.”

This was announced by Kenneth Farrugia, chairman of FinanceMalta in his inaugural address at FinanceMalta’s 11th annual conference entitled Finance without Frontiers. This conference was attended by just under 500 delegates and included representatives from organisations based in 21 countries.

Farrugia went on to explain that the results achieved so far were driven by the various initiatives of the industry and the visibility programme achieved through the various events organised by FinanceMalta in an effort to sustain the growth of the industry. Suffice to say, last year FinanceMalta delegates and members attended 54 national and international events in all major financial centres including the USA, London, Switzerland, Italy, Hong Kong, Singapore, Abu Dhabi and Dubai, among others. Furthermore, FinanceMalta’s digital initiatives helped to increase visits to FinanceMalta's dedicated website by 33%.

Going forward Farrugia expounded on the need of the industry to be more dynamic in working closely with education service providers to offer bespoke educational programmes as well as create an efficient process to recruit foreign nationals. The industry also needs to increase its engagement with the banking sector and the Malta Financial Services Authority to ensure that the industry remains agile in servicing the growth objectives. There also needs to be stronger industry engagement with the regulator and policy-makers to induce financial services innovation and finally the industry needs to engage into a three-pronged political, regulatory and industry PR outreach programme to support key initiatives in mainstream communication channels.

The conference was also addressed by the Prime Minister, Dr Joseph Muscat, via a video message, who spoke about Malta’s achievements in financial services and the digital economy, and its progress as a leader in DLT technology.

The morning session continued with two stimulating presentations and panel discussions on Cybersecurity and Bitcoin, Blockchain and Initial Coin Offerings.

Two presentations, one on RegTech and the other focusing on the EU supervisory framework brought the morning session to an end.

The afternoon continued with four workshops that ran concurrently where delegates had the opportunity to attend any of the discussion sessions that tackled GDPR, MiFiD II and MiFiR, Payment Services Directive II and The Insurance Distribution Directive.

The final presentation, followed by a discussion panel, addressed The Future of Europe.