The Namibia Financial Institutions Supervisory Authority (Namfisa) has received public and industry input on supplementary legislation to the Financial Institutions and Markets Act (FIMA) and feedback on this will be communicated during the last quarter of this year.

Speaking at the Legislative and Supervisory Reform conference in Swakopmund, Namfisa's CEO, Kenneth Matomola, says that to ensure Namibia's financial system is stable and sound, transformation is necessary from outdated legislative frameworks, which are a challenge to regulation and supervisory.

Namfisa, he says, has taken regulatory reform as a first step to ensure that national legislation increases prudential oversight, provides consumer protection, and allows the financial sector to adapt to shifting landscapes.

"Changes happen in the non-banking industry. We need to inform our key stakeholders. We need to have engagements with our stakeholders so that we interrogate the matters at hand so that nobody feels left out, be it the regulatory entities as well as the consumers, so that they can be part of the reforms that are happening in the non-banking sector."

He says the country should anticipate conflict between them as regulators and the industry as natural, as is always the case with any regulatory reform.
  
"What happens with risk-based supervision is that you need to place your resources where there is a high impact because we do not have unlimited resources; the resources that we currently have are limited, and thus we need to apply them optimally to ensure that there is a greater impact."

Over the next two days, participants will deliberate on topics such as risk-based supervision, corporate governance reforms, the role of retirement provision and savings as social security, anchoring relationships between regulators and industry in terms of general reforms, market conduct reforms, and market infrastructure supervision.