Honestly if you ask me, it is because the scope of work has exploded but the organization is not agile enough to respond to it. Regular officers have become burdened with this massive increase work that they are expected to handle without any difficulty.

One prime example is on the regulatory front. There are huge loads of new regulations coming in simply because the world has become more complex to regulate. Much of these regulations arise from developments in the US and Europe that Singapore usually follows. This is natural and understandable. But what is not acceptable is that MAS is not hiring staff at a fast enough pace to keep up. The workload has increased by 50% but the staff count has only increased by 10%.

The choices are quite simple to me actually, you either make a real effort to address the staff shortage, or you stop being a hero and regulate within your means. There is no shame at all in being a less-sophisticated regulator. We ought to recall the trite saying that "one cannot have his cake and eat it too".

There are other issues that are not entirely the fault of MAS. During COVID-19, many other companies experienced a situation where everything went online and communications were expected to become instantaneous. A letter-by-letter exchange between 2 parties now warrants a response overnight. This is unsurprising, given that such convenience should have been adopted long ago. But what MAS sorely lacks is its ability to digitalize.

It is somewhat ironic that MAS keeps pushing its financial institutions to digitalize, but its own internal processes are so manual and slow. A lot of information is scattered all over the place and impossible to find. This is because for some departments, there seems to be the lack of a proper filing system, even for routine/mundane matters. Indeed, it is the routine/mundane matters that are most suitable for digitalization. Suffice to say, you have to actually join MAS before you find out about this. I try very hard not to blame management for this, but from the management personnel I have interacted with, they are very good at understanding their own policy area but are terrible at adopting digitalization practices in their departments (or perhaps there is just no such culture in the organization). In any case, digitalization usually does not fit into KPIs or maybe it fits in the wrong manner into KPIs.

One knows that banks have to digitalize quickly or risk being left behind by the competition. The regulator on the other hand faces no such pressure. Hear hear.