The Monetary Authority of Singapore has announced a reshuffle of its senior management, naming Loo Siew Yee deputy managing director for corporate development. The central bank and financial regulator set out the changes in a media release at the start of October, with all of them taking effect at the beginning of next month.
Loo moves up from assistant managing director for policy, payments and financial crime, a portfolio that has carried much of the authority's most contested work in recent years, spanning the payments licensing regime, anti money laundering supervision and the enforcement actions that follow from it.
She succeeds Jacqueline Loh, who becomes principal advisor in the managing director's office after serving as deputy managing director for corporate development. Loh remains chair of the board of the authority's payments network company.
Two further moves complete the chain. Gillian Tan, previously assistant managing director for development and international, takes Loo's former policy, payments and financial crime portfolio. Thong Leng Yeng, executive director of the anti money laundering department, steps up to assistant managing director for development and international.
The pattern is worth reading. Every one of the four moves is internal, and three of the four are promotions along a line that runs through supervision and financial crime rather than through markets or monetary policy. For a jurisdiction whose standing rests on being both open to capital and demonstrably hard to abuse, that is a deliberate allocation of its most senior people to the second half of that proposition.
The corporate development portfolio that Loo inherits covers the authority's own organisation, its people and its internal capability, which is the quieter of the senior roles and the one that determines whether the institution can staff the other ones. Singapore competes directly with Hong Kong, Dubai and London for the same supervisory and technical talent, and it does so against private sector pay.
The Monetary Authority of Singapore combines the functions of a central bank with those of an integrated financial regulator, which is unusual among major financial centres and concentrates an uncommon amount of authority in a single institution.
The authority has used internal succession for its most senior management roles consistently over the past decade, which is unusual among financial regulators of comparable standing. Several of its peers have recruited externally for supervisory leadership, often from the industry they oversee, accepting the conflict management that follows in exchange for market experience. Singapore has taken the other path, and the result is a management bench whose members have typically spent their careers inside the institution.
That choice has a cost and a benefit, and both are visible in this set of moves. The benefit is institutional memory and a consistent supervisory philosophy. The cost is that the authority must grow its own senior people, which is precisely what the corporate development portfolio exists to do, and which is why the role is a more consequential posting than its administrative title suggests.
