Our Malta attractiveness survey conference has come and gone. From an event taking up a couple of hours and drawing in less than 50 participants a few years ago, it has now become the national benchmark attracting over 60 speakers and 530 delegates, all gauging the winds driving foreign direct investment to our country. The theme we adopted this year was ‘The future is today’.

To us at EY, this is not a cliché or a marketing ploy. It is the guiding principle driving the future we see panning out before us, the future have to sink or swim in. In today’s fast-changing, digital and disruption scenario, rarely has being ahead of the game been more valid advice.

From our end, we have been doing our part. Following last year’s conference we spearheaded policy proposals in five sectors – FinTech, commodity trading, Malta as a gateway for Asian eCommerce, logistics and re-skilling regular immigrants.

This year we announced a new initiative that we think will serve the country well. Over the last few months we have been assiduously working to launch a think tank with the task of delving into what action should be taken in order to enhance further Malta’s future in the key economic, financial, educational and technological spheres.

Our vision is to generate a pipeline of concrete policy proposals grounded in solid research, acute insights and hopefully, national consensus. The scope is to create a structured and standing institution drawing into its fold the best minds in the public and private sectors, in academia and beyond our shores.

I am delighted that the Chamber has already agreed to work with us and we have invited the political parties, University, as well as other stakeholders to follow suit. We also plan to tap into the vast resources available from EY global to give depth and breadth to this initiative.

We are tremendously excited about this venture and from the feedback we have already received, it appears that we have struck the right chord.

Our starting point has been a detailed analysis of what our survey respondents told us in terms of what can be better and where opportunities lie. We would first like to delve into what the education of the future, and for the future, would look like.

Our survey has once again confirmed that the challenge of finding the right human resources is paramount to investors.

We will therefore endeavour to see what the best paths from the classroom to the boardroom are. And how innovative and creative thinking can be the norm, not the exception.

Secondly, our think tank will strive to draw the right policy conclusions from the massive and unprecedented way that technology and innovative ideas are disrupting so many aspects of our financial and economic world, our communications, and indeed the very way we hang together as nations and citizens.

For us, Fintech is only the beginning of a deeper and more historically significant change. Thirdly we plan to gear our think tank to address the challenge of infrastructure that Malta faces in the broadest sense. The era of patchwork, management by crisis and short-term planning is over.

Again, even in this respect, a healthy, solid and prosperous future can be met only if it is anticipated from today. The world and its shared economy will not wait for Malta to take its time to update legislation, to respond to the latest trends in technology and to change old ways of doing business.

We need to build a better working world and let us start by building a better working Malta – now.

The future is, indeed, today.