Date: May 8, 2015
SIAS is pleased to announce that as of today, SIAS is registered as a Charity under the Charities Act. SIAS will proceed now with its application to become an institution of public character (IPC) to facilitate funding of SIAS programmes which will be for the benefit of all Singaporeans.
Following the resolution of the CLOB crisis, SIAS embarked on championing investor education as its major activity to help ensure that Singapore citizens make informed investment decisions. Almost all SIAS investor education programmes are designed to benefit the community at large, and offered free. Since 2000, SIAS has organized over 1000 investor education programmes benefiting almost 130,000 Singaporeans. As a Charity, SIAS intends to continue to drive more investor education programmes towards the community. The recent collaboration with Peoples’ Association to help Singaporeans make better money decisions among both the senior citizens and young working adults is seeing more Community Centers adopt this programme. In addition, our new Investment Chapters initiative, to help new and returning investors overcome the fear of investing, has been well partonised with the recent workshops fully subscribed. Tomorrow, SIAS will also be commencing the 4th Singapore Investment Week 2015 and has seen over 1200 people sign up for the opening seminars. Investment education programmes will be spread through out the year. SIAS is also actively engaging the youth at various tertiary institutions.
Singaporean investors can expect more to come from SIAS. Our proposal going forward is to pose 3 questions on all Annual Reports of listed companies to not only assist shareholders at meetings but also to raise the quality of meetings. Along with it, SIAS also proposes to publish research reports on the corporate governance of all listed companies to help investors identify well governed companies. These initiatives will materialise upon SIAS securing sufficient funding and will, no doubt, go a long way to help educate investors, which will consequently improve our capital markets.
David Gerald
Founder, President & CEO
Securities Investors Association (Singapore)
