“Malta’s financial services industry has registered sustained growth”

“Malta’s financial services industry has registered sustained growth in the overall ecosystem. This growth in the industry came from increases in investment services, insurance operations, retirement schemes, trusts, securitisations, new fund licenses and financial institutions with year on year growth rates ranging from 5 to 17 per cent. Furthermore, last year Malta saw a total of 573 new notifications from international firms passporting to Malta”.

This was stated by the Chairman of FinanceMalta Mr. Kenneth Farrugia during his address of FinanceMalta’s annual conference, this year entitled ‘Finance without Frontiers’.

In his address Mr. Farrugia stated that in the future the industry needed to be more dynamic in working closely with education service providers to offer bespoke educational programmes as well as create an efficient process to recruit foreign nationals. He also spoke of the need to increase engagement with the banking sector and the Malta Financial Services Authority to ensure that the industry remained agile in servicing growth objectives.

Mr. Farrugia also explained that there needed to be stronger industry engagement with the regulator and policy-makers to induce financial services innovation and, finally, the industry needed to engage a three-pronged political, regulatory and industry PR outreach programme to support key initiatives in mainstream communication channels.

The conference which also had workshops tackling the GDPR, MiFiD II, MiFiR, the Payment Services Directive II and the Insurance Distribution Directive was also addressed by the Prime Minister of Malta Dr. Joseph Muscat who spoke of Malta as a leader in DLT technology.

War Chest Fiduciary Services Limited is a member of FinanceMalta.