This has resulted in leaner and more effective entities where common functions and capabilities have been pooled leading to more cost-efficient entities as well as allowing for greater focus in the marketing and customer management. Following this rationalisation, the cost to income ratio of the domestic banks have improved from 55% in 2003 to 51% in the first quarter of this year. On the aspect of improving customer interface and improving time taken to conduct banking transactions, branches have been redesigned with new business models. With this move, branch staff now have greater opportunity to provide value-added consultations and interface with clients. Increased investments have also been made to improve information systems - to be better positioned to understand customers' profiles and needs, as well as enhance overall risk management. Technologies such as data warehousing are now readily available to aid banking institutions to be more customer-centric and thus be more focused in their approach. As a result, more institutions have undertaken to offer greater product differentiation and value added services. The robust growth in the Malaysian economy has also contributed to an increased demand for life insurance coverage. The growth in premium income has continued to outpace economic growth. Over the period 2000-2004, the market penetration rate increased from 31% in 2000 to 39% in 2005. The per capita spending on life insurance products also increased at an average annual rate of 10% over the same period.

Properly designed and implemented, such an overshoot can offset the inflation undershoot during “bad” times so that the longer-run average inflation rate and inflation expectations are in 2/3  BIS central bankers' speeches  line with the target. The third option is price-level targeting, including its various offshoots, such as nominal GDP targeting and temporary price-level targeting. In such a regime, the central bank commits to keep the price level near a steadily growing target path. Like average-inflation targeting, this strategy promises to overshoot the target inflation rate in “good” times to make up for the inflation undershoot when policy is constrained. In theory, both average-inflation and price-level targeting can solve the problem of anchoring inflation expectations at the target rate while maintaining a low inflation target rate amid low neutral rates. Although price-level targeting is a bigger leap from inflation targeting than averageinflation targeting, each can be implemented in ways that are very similar to standard inflation targeting, either in terms of forecast-targeting or a policy rule.6 Importantly, neither will likely be effective in practice unless communicated clearly and carried out consistently over time. More broadly, all of these proposed strategies face potential costs and benefits—in terms of macroeconomic performance, communication, and robustness to uncertainty—which require careful study. In considering alternative monetary policy strategies, academic experts, policymakers, and others from around the world have an important part to play, sharing and discussing ideas and comparing experiences to help all of us to think through these issues.