Zeti Akhtar Aziz: Improving and expanding Malaysia’s cross-border financial flows and capital market transactions Speech by Dr Zeti Akhtar Aziz, Governor of the Central Bank of Malaysia (Bank Negara Malaysia), at the Official Launch of the Expansion of SWIFT Office in Kuala Lumpur, Kuala Lumpur, 24 November 2014. *  *  *  It is my pleasure to be here today on the occasion of the opening of this expanded SWIFT Kuala Lumpur Corporate Services Centre. We are most honoured with the presence of Her Royal Highness Princess Astrid of Belgium. Allow me to, first of all, welcome Her Royal Highness Princess Astrid of Belgium. It is also my pleasure to welcome His Excellency Didier Reynders, Federal Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs and European Affairs of Belgium, and His Excellency Pieter De Crem, Federal Secretary of State for Foreign Trade of Belgium to Kuala Lumpur. It is my honour to address such a distinguished gathering including the practitioners from the financial fraternity. We are pleased to welcome the expansion of the SWIFT office in Kuala Lumpur. Malaysia has aspired to be an important destination for international corporations and organisations to operate in. Malaysia has well-developed infrastructure, a dynamic workforce and costcompetitive environment to provide an enabling environment for mutually reinforcing benefits. Malaysia is now home to more than 5,000 foreign companies from more than 40 countries. Additionally, it also includes global and regional shared services hubs that serve worldleading financial services providers and international corporations.

Malaysia is also the host to a number of the international institutions in the area of finance that include the Islamic Financial Services Board, and more recently, the Alliance for Financial Inclusion. We are very pleased that SWIFT, an important market infrastructure service provider to the global financial community, has selected Kuala Lumpur as its Corporate Services Centre. Malaysia’s financial sector has in this recent decade made significant strides in facilitating the country’s cross-border economic linkages with other economies. Malaysia is part of a vibrant region, comprising ASEAN and of the greater Asia. The region has prevailing strong foundations and significant growth prospects with strong inter regional connectivity. Malaysia’s volume of cross-border trade and foreign exchange settlements with ASEAN economies alone has grown at an average rate of 10% in the recent four years, reflecting Malaysia’s increasing integration with the regional markets. A vibrant foreign exchange market has supported this growth, where the overall Malaysian foreign exchange market volume has increased by more than five-fold in a period of 8 years to USD11.1 billion per day, at a ratio of about 6 times of total trade. Like most regional blocs, the integration process for ASEAN seeks to promote greater regional connectivity which will in turn expand and reinforce the region’s growth potential. The aim of reinforcing the regional linkages in the payment and settlement systems is to enable the establishment of risk mitigation mechanisms such as Payment versus Payment (PvP) and Delivery versus Payment (DvP) to reduce the foreign exchange and securities settlement risk.