On 23 September, Mr. Franzi, President of the Monegasque Association of Financial Activities, presented the new professional certification diploma in what is known as Front Office work, at an official presentation ceremony in the presence of the Minister of State, at his residence.
What is the origin of this Professional Certification?
The kickoff was given over 4 years ago.
In fact, it was at the AMAF Committee session of 17 February 2011 that I first suggested setting up a mechanism that would offer any bank or asset management company customer an essential guarantee.
The guarantee that these customers’ various contact people in our firms have the professional and ethical skills to provide customers with the quality of advice they are entitled to expect from an international financial centre and to handle their transactions with the best conditions.
This proposal was positively welcomed immediately, both by the Committee and all of its close to 100 members, as everyone saw that such a step was essential for further improving our image and favouring our development, particularly at a time when some specific advantages at the origin of the financial centre’s initial boom in the late 1980s were fading.
This gave me great satisfaction and proof of our Community’s maturity and sense of responsibility.
Is the Professional Certification highly specific to the financial centre?
Despite the difficulty involved, from the outset we ruled out the ease of simply ‘making Monegasque’ whatever might already exist elsewhere. We set ourselves the goal of creating a training and knowledge control tool adapted to the specific features of our private banking work, which in these areas needed to be more demanding than in less-specialised financial centres, not overlooking a consideration of the specificities of Monaco, particularly in terms of ethics.
For this, we were obviously not international pioneers but nevertheless feel a certain pride that other, much larger, financial centres specialised in the same niches are considering such an approach but have not yet initiated it.
How was it created?
Very naturally, Mr. Anthony Stent-Torriani, our Vice-President responsible for management, was appointed to make these first guidelines a reality, with the active assistance of Mr. Jean Castellini - who at that time was a colleague on the AMAF Committee - and our Secretary General, Mr. Jean Dastakian.
The first step was to establish a regulatory framework for this new plan, in order to make it official and mandatory.
This was done in full collaboration with the Commission de Contrôle des Activités Financières (Financial Activities Supervisory Commission), which I wish to thank heartily, in the person of its President, Mr. Jacques-Henri David.
He fostered the progress of this project whenever necessary and also agreed to be the co-signatory of these new qualifications.
The final regulatory plan was approved by the Commission during its session on 14 December 2012, and the related texts - Sovereign Ordinance No. 4274 of 12 April 2013 and Ministerial Orders No. 2013-209 and No. 2014-168 of 12 April 2013 and 19 March 2014 - were presented and approved at the Council of Government by the Minister of Finance, Mr. Jean Castellini, who by chance of his careers thus found himself involved at both the origin and the completion of the process.
All that then remained to be done was to select the training providers to carry out the course and examinations, establish the various practical means of operation for all the phases, define the content up to the decisions of the Board, and finally bring all the above together in the Regulations for Professional Certification of financial activities in Monaco.
Are the employment contracts compatible with these new regulations?
It was indeed necessary to adapt the employment contracts to these new regulations.
There also, this was done in full agreement with the trade union and employers’ organisation Syndicat des Employés, Gradés et Cadres de Banques de Monaco, and of course with the approval of the Labour Inspectorate, Mr. Pierre-Franck Crespi, Secretary General of the SEGCB and Ms. Pallanca, who has since become Director of Labour, in full awareness of the importance of these developments.
