THE FINANCIAL SECTOR: KEY SUPERVISORY AND REGULATORY INITIATIVES       Content Page Supervision Regulation Risk-based Regulatory Regime Fine-Tuning Regulatory framework Ensuring Sound Market Conduct Innovative Systems for Efficient Payment and Settlement     SUPERVISION   . Enhancing Risk-focused Supervisory Approach . Box 1 – Fostering a Sound and Progressive Financial Services Sector . Enhancing MAS’ Supervisory Capabilities . Box 2 – Stress Testing of Life Insurers . Box 3 – Streamlining Inspection Function . Thematic Inspections to Improve Surveillance   Enhancing MAS’ Supervisory Capabilities   MAS took several steps in 2003 to enhance our risk-based supervisory capabilities. These include: • Revision of Regulatory Reporting   MAS completed a revision of the statistical returns from banks and merchant banks as part of our efforts to enhance off-site supervision and financial system surveillance as well as streamline data collection. A new data submission system was implemented to allow financial institutions to input their data offline, enabling better security of sensitive data. This system also enables auto-computation of form fields, saving effort and time. The first revised returns at end-March 2004 data were submitted in April 2004. Together with the revision of the returns, MAS is enhancing the quantitative indicators that we use for monitoring banks’ activities, risk profiles, financial conditions and emerging trends, to complement the qualitative information from the risk-rating systems. • One-stop information portal for Financial Supervisors   Following the introduction of the Banking Supervisory System in 2002, a similar web-based one-stop information portal was completed last year for supervising capital market intermediaries. This portal allows the supervisors to have easy access to key financial statistics and ratings as well as the licensing information and supervision plan for each capital market intermediary. • Tool-kit to improve the efficiency and consistency of technology risk assessment   MAS developed a new supervisory tool-kit to facilitate our assessment of financial institutions’ capability and effectiveness to manage their technology risks and implementing security controls. The tool-kit comprises a central risk profile database which integrates our control checklists, questionnaires, guidelines and security evaluation programmes. The tool-kit will reduce MAS’ on-site inspection and off-site review of institutions, facilitate planning of supervisory work, and ensure more targeted inspection of important risk areas. It also allows us to customise the risk profile database to suit institutions of varying sizes and complexities. With the toolkit, we have implemented a technology risk-rating system uniformly across all financial institutions.