The growth in Malta’s financial services industry came from increases in investment services, insurance operations, retirement schemes, trusts, securitisations, new fund licences and financial institutions with year on year growth rates ranging from five to 17 per cent, according to Finance Malta chairman Kenneth Farrugia.
Mr Farrugia was addressing Finance Malta’s 11th annual conference entitled ‘Finance without Frontiers’ which was attended by almost 500 delegates and included representatives from organisations based in 21 countries.
Mr Farrugia added that the results achieved were driven by various initiatives of the industry and the visibility achieved through the events held by Finance Malta to sustain the industry’s growth.
Last year Finance Malta delegates and members attended 54 national and international events in major financial centres including the US, London, Switzerland, Italy, Hong Kong, Singapore Abu Dhabi and Dubai. Furthermore, Finance Malta’s digital initiatives helped to increase visits to its dedicated website by 33 per cent.
Mr Farrugia spoke on the need for the industry to be more dynamic in working closely with education providers to offer bespoke educational programmes and 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 it 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 the industry needs a three-pronged political, regulatory and industry PR outreach programme to support key initiatives in mainstream communication channels.
The morning session continued with two presentations and panel discussions on cyber security and Bitcoin, Blockchain and initial coin offerings. Two presentations, one on RegTech and the other on the EU supervisory framework closed the session.
In the afternoon, four workshops ran concurrently where delegates could 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 and a discussion panel addressed the future of Europe.