The word "boutique" conjures up images of a retail outlet that is relatively small in size selling designer clothes of excellent quality and targeted at a well-defined market niche. It is certainly not a department store that seeks to sell large volumes of the same thing to what can be described as the mass market.

A boutique is also very flexible in its offer and seeks to exceed its customer expectations at all times through excellent service, products that are tailored to the tastes of the individual clients and exclusivity.

We tend to associate the word with world class renowned names, that have slowly but steadily expanded their business by widening their product range and relying on the captive market that the brand has managed to attract. One consequence of this term has been in the hospitality sector where people refer to boutique hotels.

Normally a boutique hotel is found in a top notch resort area or the upmarket parts of a city, would tend to have a small number of rooms, but would deliver a service that is second to none. Another consequence has been in the banking sector, where we hear of people speaking of boutique banks that are very selective with whom they conduct their business.

Where does Malta come into all this? There is no doubt that our economy, because of its size, has limitations on its absorptive capacity. This has been amply proven in the distant and not so distant past. One good example has been the shortage of people in the accounting profession, following the influx of a number of foreign companies in the financial services sector and related sectors such as the gaming sector.

In this regard, one needs to remember a comment made by a former Minister of Finance, George Bonello Dupuis, who stated that even the morning dew can cause a flood in Malta, when referring to our economy's absorptive capacity.

This implies that we can never appeal to the mass market, in whatever sector we are operating. It means that we cannot possibly attract to Malta 50 manufacturing companies each employing a thousand persons, let alone companies that employ five thousand people. We can never find enough people to work in such companies.

On the other hand, for most companies that compete with us for foreign direct investment, 50 companies each employing a thousand persons would simply not be good enough, because they are too little.

The answer is, therefore, to attract a much smaller number of companies, maybe employing something between 500 and 100 persons, coupled with a sizeable number of companies employing less than 500 persons, all delivering an increasing level of value added and recognised as leaders in their field of activity. Hence, the boutique concept.

We can apply the same concept to financial services. Our success story in this area revolves around the very selective approach adopted by the Malta Financial Services Authority, which has shouldered fully its responsibility by focussing its efforts on those niches in the market that serve best Malta's interests. It was not a case of numbers at any cost but a case of few but excellent. And these excellent ones have served us well and we have serviced them well.

I believe that in most areas, the boutique concept has worked for us; sometimes by design and at other times by sheer coincidence or through luck.

However, we now have to keep in mind the government's vision for Malta for 2015, namely of making Malta a centre of excellence in a number of areas. By their very nature excellence and mass market do not sit next to each other. So we need to start looking at the opportunities that the global economy offers us through a different perspective.

We need to have the right mental attitude to such opportunities as we must appreciate that at times short term requirements to produce good numbers (in whatever sector) may be conflicting with our long term 2015 vision.

To my mind we can only achieve our 2015 vision and we can only become recognised as a centre of excellence if we create Boutique Malta.