New regulations on financial products

A journalist ask me this question:
Hi Mr Tan,

Are you familiar with the Specified Investment Product rules that take effect from Jan 1 next year?

I would like your thoughts on the new rules as I can see a few potential problems such as raising the cost of selling investment products by forcing many people to go offline when purchasing unit trusts, ETFs etc?

Also, it does seem strange to group plain vanilla mutual funds with more complex hedge funds, structured warrants etc.

My reply

This is creating a lot of wasteful work without tackling the root of the problem. It is typical in Singapore to pass the buck to someone else, in this case the financial adviser or the relationship manager - but how on earth are they going to give the proper advice? Many relationship manager sold the toxic products to the consumers prior to the global financial crisis - because they are not suitable to give this type of advice. But (sigh), this is the Singapore way!