Permanent Committees>Inter-Regional Relations

Mr Abdul Farid Alias

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Last updated January 2, 2009

The ASEAN Inter-Regional Relations report was presented by the chairman, Encik Shariffudin bin Mohamad. The committee proposed to visit either Australia or Europe in the later part of 2009. A survey would be sent out to all NBAs before the middle of 2009 to poll on the timing and country to visit.

The suggested areas of studies were :

• consumer banking
• new sources of revenue for banks (e.g. In Australia - most banks have shifted from interest income to fee income)
• payment system : interbank transfers, cross border transfers
The regional developments through the 13th ASEAN Summit and 16th APEC Economic Leaders’ Meeting were noted by the Committee.

The Committee recommended that ASEAN countries can collaborate with each other to facilitate foreign workers to remit their salaries back to their home countries. Thailand and Laos agreed to work on a common model to adopt and if can be done on time, this would be submitted to ASEAN Summit for endorsement.

The Honorary Advisor suggested that banks which already have such bilateral remittance arrangements in place to send their models to ABA. He recommended Laos and Thailand to produce a model by mid December 2008 for submission to ABA who would then present to The ASEAN Secretariat for discussion at the ASEAN Summit.