That age is over.
Today’s markets are shaped by activist investors, social media velocity, cyber breaches, and growing scrutiny of board conduct and executive judgment. In this environment, a compliance-only mindset is no longer enough.
What markets now need is not less regulation, but a different culture: one of disciplined collaboration between exchange regulators and listed companies to produce better transparency, stronger governance and more credible oversight.
This is not a case for regulatory softness. It is a case for regulatory maturity.
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The true test of a market is not whether it has rules on paper. It is whether those rules produce trust in practice.
Why the old model is no longer sufficient
A compliance culture asks: What must we disclose? A governance culture asks: What would a reasonable investor need to know?
That difference matters more than it sounds.
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In too many listed companies, disclosure is still treated as a legal hazard to be managed rather than a governance duty to be honoured. Sensitive matters are escalated late. Boards are briefed defensively. Advisers are asked how little can be said without breaching the rules.
The result is often technically compliant communication but strategically inadequate.
Regulators, too, can unintentionally reinforce this behaviour if engagement is seen only through the lens of enforcement. When companies believe that every early conversation may trigger disproportionate regulatory consequences, they become more guarded, not more transparent.
This creates a poor equilibrium. Regulators receive incomplete information. Boards make decisions in partial fog. Investors learn too much too late.
A healthier market requires a different relationship — one in which candour is encouraged earlier and accountability is exercised more intelligently.
What a new regulatory culture should look like
First, exchange regulators must continue to be firm enforcers - but also become more visible stewards of market integrity.
That means preserving tough sanctions for fraud, concealment, repeated governance failures and misleading disclosures. But it also means creating space for earlier, structured engagement when companies confront difficult grey-zone issues: whistleblower allegations, cyber incidents, executive misconduct or internal control lapses.
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The aim should not be to punish every difficult issue at inception. It should be to encourage companies to surface concerns earlier, while facts are still developing and corrective action is still possible.
Second, listed companies need to stop treating the regulator as an external obstacle and start seeing it as part of the market ecosystem on which they themselves depend.
Put simply, a listed company is not just a private business with a ticker symbol. Listing is a public trust. It comes with a duty not just to comply with rules, but to help sustain confidence in the market itself.
That requires a different boardroom posture: less “Can we defend this legally?” and more “Would silence erode trust if this later became public?”
Three changes that would make a real difference
One, create a formal framework for early supervisory engagement.
Many governance crises begin as weak signals: an anonymous complaint, unexplained control failures, tensions with auditors, repeated near-miss disclosures, or unusual executive departures.
Exchanges should institutionalise confidential channels for boards and issuers to engage regulators early on such matters, with clear expectations regarding escalation, documentation and board oversight.
This would not replace disclosure obligations. It would strengthen them by enabling earlier intervention.
Two, raise the standard of disclosure from boilerplate to decision-useful.
Too many announcements remain dense in legal language but thin in substance. Investors do not simply need to know that something happened. They need to know what happened, why it matters, what actions were taken and what risks remain.
This will matter even more as sustainability and climate-related reporting become more rigorous. The next phase of market governance will not be won through template compliance, but through the quality of judgment and honesty behind disclosures.
Three, treat boards as the first line of market trust.
A surprising number of governance failures are not failures of law. They are failures of judgement, curiosity and courage. Independent directors cannot be ceremonial. Audit and risk committees cannot be retrospective. Chairs cannot confuse collegiality with effectiveness.
The next step in governance reform is not merely better board composition, but better board behaviour - with deeper capability in cyber risk, crisis governance and disclosure judgement.
Collaboration is not capture
Some will worry that a more collaborative model risks making regulation too soft or too cosy. That concern should be taken seriously. But it confuses openness with weakness.
The strongest regulatory systems are not those where regulators and issuers barely speak. They are those where both sides engage candidly, early and professionally — with clear boundaries and no ambiguity that cooperation does not excuse misconduct.
Collaboration should never dilute accountability. It should improve it.
In fact, the best-regarded markets increasingly recognise that good governance is not simply about punishment after failure. It is about creating incentives and behaviours that reduce the likelihood of failure in the first place.
The bigger prize
A more mature relationship between regulators and listed companies is not just about avoiding scandals. It is about making markets more investable.
When investors believe disclosures are timely, boards are serious and regulators are both firm and fair, trust deepens. Capital becomes more willing. Stronger companies are distinguished from merely better-lawyered ones.
That is the real prize.
At a time when confidence in institutions is under pressure everywhere, serious financial centres like Singapore have an opportunity to lead — not by choosing between regulation and enterprise, but by building a more sophisticated compact between them.
Public markets will not be strengthened by thicker rulebooks alone.
They will be strengthened when regulators and listed companies alike accept a harder truth: that transparency is not a compliance event, governance is not a communications strategy, and oversight works best when candour arrives before crisis.
That is the culture shift markets now need.
Jeffrey Tan is group general counsel of Jardine Cycle & Carriage. He is a senior accredited director of the Singapore Institute of Directors who serves on several boards, including the Global Guiding Council of One Mind at Work and the SGListCos Council.
