Stefanie Yuen Thio was mentioned in The Edge by Jovi Ho, in his article announcing this year’s Singapore Governance and Transparency Index (SGTI) scorecard. Following the award ceremony, there was a panel discussion featuring Stefanie among the panellists. The panellists and board directors in the audience expressed that the coming enhancements could distort comparisons of scores across the years and penalise young, innovative companies that have yet to turn a profit.

Stefanie was quoted saying that incorporating financial value into the SGTI is akin to changing the grading of national exams. Drawing on her illustration, she elaborated that having the same SGTI tracker is a helpful indication of how one is doing compared to the previous year. Once you change the grading, all the ‘PSLE mums’ will be very upset because it would be hard to know whether their child is doing better when the grading is not on the same line anymore.

Stefanie warned that a future iteration of the SGTI that takes financial value into account could even hinder SGX’s efforts to attract high-growth companies in emerging tech sectors. She opined that value creation for a loss-making company with a lot of potential will not be yield-making today, so to only reward those metrics will not be encouraging for those companies to come and list here. Stefanie also cautioned that larger companies often have more resources at their disposal and thus enjoy an unfair advantage over their smaller peers. She added that she needs to speak up for the smaller companies since everyone on the panel are board members of very large companies with resources that enable compliance, so the discussion may not fully resonate with a small business owner.