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Judges will apply more rigorous criteria when assessing companies in the running for the Securities Investors Association Singapore's annual awards. The association is partnering the Sim Kee Boon Institute for Financial Economics (SKBI) at SMU to develop a new scorecard. This will be used to benchmark its Corporate Governance and Most Transparent Company awards. Under the three-year collaboration, the SKBI will also research the corporate governance and transparency of companies for the awards.

At a corporate governance event, SMU Associate Professor Jeremy Goh presented the finding of a running corporate governance study, which showed that few companies made public their shareholder meeting minutes and noted in a working paper pertaining to the index that the use of cross-ownership, or pyramid shareholding, is a common practice. Under the Singapore Corporate Governance Index managed by SMU's Sim Kee Boon Institute for Financial Economics, companies are scored on their performance in five categories that are aligned with the OECD governance principles. The poorest score was on shareholder rights, with a mean of 35.28.

Regulations alone, without effective enforcement and joint action by various stakeholders, do not adequately raise corporate governance standards among companies. This was the key message highlighted at a Memorandum of Agreement (MOA) signing ceremony between Securities Investors Association Singapore (SIAS) and SMU on Wednesday. Under the three-year MOA, SIAS has appointed SMU, represented by its Sim Kee Boon Institute for Financial Economics - The Centre for Corporate and Investor Responsibility, to provide research support for the Singapore Corporate Governance Award and the Most Transparent Company Award.