Investor Education Initiatives Under Investsmart®

In 2025, the SC continued to empower investors through its InvestSmart® initiatives, enabling Malaysians to make informed and confident investment decisions. This year’s efforts were characterised by extensive nationwide outreach, targeted programmes for underserved communities and strategic use of digital platforms to ensure investor education remained relevant, accessible and impactful.

As the Co-Chair of the Financial Education Network (FEN), the SC’s investor education initiatives throughout 2025 remained focus on enhancing Malaysians’ financial capability across key areas including financial knowledge, saving and budgeting, readiness for unexpected life events, and retirement planning. The SC’s programmes complemented FEN’s broader efforts to equip Malaysians with the knowledge and skills to make informed financial decisions and foster responsible financial behaviour.

Nationwide Engagement

The SC maintained a strong on-ground presence throughout 2025, demonstrating commitment to Investor education across Malaysia:

Target audiences included youths, gig workers, non-urban communities, persons with disabilities, religious groups and retirees. These engagements ranged from financial literacy workshops and investment clinics to scam awareness talks and retirement planning seminars, ensuring that diverse segments of Malaysian society had access to essential investment knowledge and tools for financial decision-making regardless of location, background, or circumstance.

Building on this broad geographic coverage, the SC’s flagship events served as anchor platforms for large-scale public engagement.

Mitigating Systemic Risks And Promoting Financial Stability

Enhanced Risk Governance Framework

In 2021, the SC-wide risk governance framework was enhanced as part of an overall initiative to have an effective integrated and predictive risk surveillance to maintain regulatory agility.

The structured risk governance framework integrated the wider spectrum of risks such as technology, cyber and conduct risk at the SC’s Systemic Risk Oversight Committee (SROC) and Accounting, Market and Corporate Surveillance Committee (ACMS).

Intensified surveillance

The SC continued to intensify its surveillance of systemic risk to maintain market resilience and stability. Regular SROC engagements were held to deliberate concerns emanating from various segments across the capital market. Domestic equity and bond market, foreign fund flows and trade participation continued to be monitored closely for potential stress points.

In addition, measures and economic stimulus packages introduced by the government to weather the impact of COVID-19, market trading conduct and the financial position of listed companies were among the focus areas for discussion.

Thematic assessments

The SC also conducted thematic assessments covering investors’ fund flows, the position of firms, and policy decisions to ascertain the possible impact on the capital market. In 2021, the SC reviewed and enhanced its crisis indicators on potential emerging risks in the
capital market.

The enhanced crisis indicators provided a reference point for escalation to SROC when the identified indicators and triggers materialised and ensured prompt response to manage and prevent any issues of concern that might lead to a systemic crisis.

Joint regulatory discussions

In 2021, the SC conducted frequent joint regulatory discussions with other authorities such as Bank Negara Malaysia (BNM) and Labuan Financial Services Authority (Labuan FSA) to identify systemic risk concern areas within the financial and capital markets in Malaysia.

Monitoring of various components of the capital market

The SC continued its efforts to undertake a methodological and integrated approach to ensure any potential systemic risk was being monitored, mitigated, or managed. Figure 1 highlights the findings from the following risk assessments on the various components of the capital market.