The Monetary Authority of Singapore has allocated 1.45 billion Singapore dollars to five asset managers in the third batch of its Equity Market Development Programme, announced on 30 September 2026.
The five managers are Amundi, Franklin Templeton, HSBC Asset Management, M&G Investments and Natixis Investment Managers. The allocation brings cumulative commitments to 5.4 billion Singapore dollars across 14 managers in three rounds, of three, six and five managers respectively. The programme is sized at 6.5 billion Singapore dollars, raised from 5 billion dollars at its launch in February 2025.
Alongside the allocation the regulator committed 20 million Singapore dollars from the Financial Sector Development Fund to a new market making grant. The grant runs to 31 December 2028 and will initially cover about 80 eligible small and mid-capitalisation stocks listed on the Singapore Exchange, together with new listings.
The market making grant is the more significant half of the announcement, because it marks a change in diagnosis. Allocating capital to managers addresses demand: it puts money into the hands of institutions mandated to buy Singapore equities. Paying for market making addresses something different, which is whether an investor can get in and out of a position at a reasonable spread. Committing public money to that, on top of 5.4 billion dollars of allocations, is an acknowledgement that the binding constraint on the Singapore Exchange is tradability rather than capital.
That diagnosis is consistent with what has happened to the market. Singapore's exchange has long been dominated by a small number of large capitalisation names, with liquidity thinning sharply below them. Thin liquidity deters institutional buyers regardless of valuation, because a fund that cannot exit a position at scale will not take it, which in turn keeps spreads wide. It is a loop that capital alone does not break.
For boards of listed Singapore mid-caps there are two practical implications. The first is a defined window: subsidised liquidity support in roughly 80 counters through to the end of 2028, which is the period in which a company has the best chance of attracting coverage and institutional ownership it can retain afterwards. The second is that the 14 appointed managers are mandated to look beyond the blue chips, so investor relations effort directed at them has a better chance of landing than it did two years ago.
One note on figures. Dollar conversions of these amounts have varied across reports. The Singapore dollar figures are the ones published and are the ones to use.
