Industrial resilience and sustainable finance part of MFSA’s 2023 supervisory priorities

The Malta Financial Services Authority (MFSA) has released its supervisory priorities for 2023, which supplements its strategic statement for 2023 – 2025.

The three new high-level priorities for 2023 are as follows:

• Resilience of supervised entities
• Digital finance
• Sustainable finance

They are complemented by the following three ongoing supervisory priorities which were identified as crucial for the MFSA’s day-to-day activities:

• Governance, risk & compliance
• Financial crime compliance
• Consumer protection & education

They high-level priorities for 2023 were identified after taking into consideration the market environment, regulatory developments, the European Union strategic priorities and the work programmes of the European system of financial supervision (ESFS), recommendations of international standard setters, as well as regulatory and supervisory experience.

The priorities are focused on developing Malta into a more resilient jurisdiction for financial services.

This can be seen through its ongoing commitment to deeper implementation of AML/CFT practices in its authorisations and supervision.

During the authorisation stage, the MFSA has also started asking firms to set out their digital strategies, as it assesses the IT investment strategies of banks so it may review the extent to which they are able to move their customers to online channels.

Furthermore, by emphasising sustainable finance, it will ensure banks are integrating climate change and environmental risks into their governance and risk management approach, so they may reach their environment, social and corporate governance (ESG) goals.

The MFSA also announced that it is integrating financial institution supervision into fintech supervision, which until February 2023 was within the remit of the banking supervision function.

It its statement, the MFSA said, “the integration of these teams will also help the MFSA to maximise synergies that exist across the sectors and better understand the opportunities and potential risks posed by new technologies being used in financial services.”

The full document can be viewed here.