The Financial Supervisory Commission (FSC) on Friday said it aims to send a high-level official to a private-sector meeting in China next month where financial supervisory issues will be discussed, in a bid to maintain relations even as political ties have chilled.
FSC Chairman Wellington Koo (顧立雄) said that the commission will send an official of “deputy bureau chief or higher” to the meeting, which he said would be organized by the private sector.
The last time Chinese and Taiwanese financial regulators publicly met was in 2015 at an annual cross-strait meeting.
Photo: Brenda Goh, Reuters
Those meetings, which began in 2011, have not been held since President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) took office in May last year.
Koo declined to give further details about next month’s meeting or comment when asked if there had been meetings with Chinese officials in the past two years.
“There definitely remains a need for information exchange; this can not be broken,” he said.
He added that while the commission hoped to revive the annual meetings, that would depend on the political climate.
“We will continue to go through private-sector events and seminars, and if they allow us to send someone there, we will send a suitable person,” Koo said.
China’s Taiwan Affairs Office was not immediately available for comment on the prospective visit.
Koo, who took the job after Tsai reshuffled the Cabinet in response to softening approval ratings, oversees the nation’s banking industry as well as its policy on financial technology.
Regulators around the world have taken varying positions on fund-raising via digital currencies, such as bitcoin, with Singapore saying in August that it would regulate so-called “initial coin offerings” (ICO) if it judges them to be securities under its laws, while China banned them completely in September.
The commission would look to emulate the Singaporean approach, as it values the blockchain technology that underpinned many ICOs and digital tokens, Koo said
“We cannot do what China did, but are we going to be open to it and treat it like securities with value, futures or derivatives?” Koo asked.
“We have not reached that level of evaluation,” he said.
He also said that the commission is concerned about foreign exchange risks facing local insurers as the New Taiwan dollar hovers near its strongest level against the US dollar in three years.
The insurers have invested heavily in foreign-exchange instruments, such as Formosa bonds, Koo said.
To mitigate such risks, the commission intends to raise the insurers’ reserve requirement ratios next year and also to roll out new management rules, he said.
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