Fostering a customer-centric culture encompasses fair and equitable dealings with customers to engender greater trust and loyalty among customers and serving customers in good faith by extending products and services that are appropriate to their financial requirements and circumstances. Greater innovation must therefore be complemented by higher levels of service quality. Greater attention on excellence in customer service requires continuous investment in staff development, which will be a vital part of the process. Harnessing the technology to deliver distinctive customer experience that combines the right mix of convenience and value is also an essential part of the process. In addition,  BIS Review 55/2006  5  adequate emphasis and resources need to be accorded to protecting customers' privacy and safeguarding their interests. In order to make a quantum leap forward, it is vital to continuously invest in human intellectual capital so as to create a pool of talent, skill and expertise that will drive the performance of the financial system. Skilled individuals are needed to be able to deliver high value-added products and services, adopt advanced business practices and have the necessary competence to build confidence in the financial market and trust of the consumer. Initiatives have been taken for putting in place specialised training organisations as part of the infrastructure for the development of highly skilled workforce for the financial sector.

The emphasis is on self-regulation, where stronger corporate governance, integrity and transparency are critical for banking institutions to achieve investor confidence and public trust. Moving forward, as market discipline improves and both banking institutions and insurance companies are better positioned to undergo self-regulation, further deregulation can be expected. A differentiated regulatory approach will increasingly be adopted, where banking institutions and insurance companies that exhibit strong corporate governance and risk management practices will be given greater regulatory flexibility. Whilst it is recognised that the regulatory framework should foster efficiency and competition, this has to be balanced with the objective of attaining soundness and preserving the stability of the financial system through the promotion of sound risk management practices. Commensurate with the diversity and complexity of products and services, the financial landscape of the future will require the continuous upgrade of the risk management practices with improvements in the governance standards and enhancing of information management systems. The rationalisation exercises aimed at maximising cost efficiency and reaping benefits of group synergies has led to the emergence of more complex group structures of more diversified financial conglomerates. In relation to this, a holistic and integrated regulatory approach is being adopted to ensure that the activities of these financial conglomerates do not introduce excessive risks to the financial system. Risk management standards are applied across the group and safeguards have been introduced to ensure risks are efficiently managed with necessary infrastructure for an overall view of the risk exposures within the group.