Taiwan Depository & Clearing Corporation

The 2018 Asian Roundtable on Corporate Governance held by The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) took place in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia on November 7th and 8th. Securities and Futures Bureau (SFB) of Financial Supervisory Commission R.O.C (Taiwan) led Taiwan Stock Exchange (TWSE) and TDCC to attend the routable, and TDCC’s Chairman and CEO, Mr. Sherman Lin was invited to speak at the session titled on “The use of flexibility and proportionality in corporate governance frameworks”. In the session, it was emphasized that corporate governance regulations shouldn’t be applied to the concept of “one size fits all.” Corporate governance regulations should be based on market characteristics and differences in supervision subjects; flexibility and principle of proportionality should be utilized to design relevant regulations to strike the balance among “increasing market transparency,” “maintaining market fairness,” and “ taking into account cost-effectiveness.”

In the seminar, corporate governance characteristics of Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan as well as the way to utilize flexibility and principle of proportionality were discussed. Mr. Lin shared Taiwan’s brilliant achievement through “Corporate Governance Blueprint” conducted by FSC. He also recounted Taiwan’s regulations on independent director setting, e-voting, and English version materials for shareholder’s meetings. He also talked about how to gradually implement the policies in response to the differences in company capital, industry, and foreign ownership shares ratio. Finally, he reiterated how Taiwan employed the power of innovative technology to construct efficient platform services to lower market participants’ overall costs of compliance and enhance market transparency as well as fairness.

It was also mentioned in the seminar by OECD’s Corporate Governance Commission that the global market has been faced with ‘the increase in institutional investors' ownership’, and the influence of institutional investors on corporate governance has been increasing. In light of this, except for the assistance in the execution of due diligence code of Taiwan’s institutional investors, TDCC is expected to launch the Chinese and English versions of “Corporate Investor Relationship Integration Platform” in 2019 for the new version of corporate governance blueprint policy. The project aims to improve the efficiency and quality of information communication between issuers and investors, facilitate investors’ inquiry of issuers’ information, further concentrate communication between issuers and shareholders, and elevate the visibility of Taiwan capital market in the world.