MFSA Supervisory Strategy Success Reflected In Academic Paper

Since then, the MFSA has increased its workforce by 160% – up to 575 people as at the end of 2025.

It also introduced specialised technical training via the MFSA’s Financial Supervisors Academy, resulting in a 350% increase in overall supervisory engagements, up over 1,800 in 2025.

An academic article about its strategy and approach was recently published by its chief officer Christopher P. Buttigieg and one of the managing editors of the MFSA’s Journal of Financial Supervisors Academy, Benjamin Ellul, in pre-publication platform SSRN.

In 2024, the MFSA restructured its communication strategy and complemented traditional supervisory methods with a more structured outreach in the form of industry guidance, circulars, technical conferences, and ‘Dear CEO’ letters.

The latter have proved to be very effective in articulating supervisory expectations while also shaping corporate compliance cultures. They disseminate findings from specific entities and cases, communicating the ensuing expectations to boards and senior leadership of other firms, thereby driving industry- wide change “without requiring the operationally resource intensive expenditure of executing individualised inspections across every licensed market participant”.

The paper explains: “Crucially, by addressing these instruments to all licensed entities within a given sector, irrespective of whether they were included in the empirical inspection sample, the MFSA achieves a significant regulatory scaling effect. This structural approach effectively transmits a localised, sample based supervisory exercise into a binding, market wide behavioural signal.”

Read the whole document here: The MFSA's Outcomes-Based Approach to Supervision: The Importance of Outreach by Christopher P. Buttigieg, Benjamin Ellul.