The Monetary Authority of Singapore has a pointed message for financial institutions that keep tripping over the same serious problems: fix the culture, not just the control. In a new Information Paper on Culture Capabilities for Effective Remediation and Sustainable Change, published on 12 August 2026, MAS sets out four culture capabilities it has observed in firms that remediate serious risk events more effectively and are less likely to see them recur. The paper shares supervisory observations and examples of good and poor practice, and MAS strongly encourages institutions to learn from them.
Why culture, not just controls
The paper’s starting point is that repeated failures rarely come down to a missing procedure. As MAS puts it, recurring serious risk events “are seldom explained by deficiencies in controls alone,” and remediation “is unlikely to be sustainable if the underlying cultural conditions that gave rise to those weaknesses remain unchanged.” In other words, a firm can rewrite a policy and tighten a checklist and still find the same issue resurfacing, because the behaviours and incentives that produced it were never addressed. The four capabilities are MAS’s answer to that pattern.
The four culture capabilities
MAS frames the capabilities as a connected set rather than a checklist, with board and senior management leadership driving the other three, and with monitoring feeding back into the whole cycle:
- Establish effective Board and senior management leadership and oversight to steer and sustain the desired culture.
- Conduct a robust and evidence-based root cause analysis to identify behavioural patterns and culture drivers underlying repeated serious risk events.
- Develop a set of interventions that target the identified culture drivers and address their interconnections sustainably.
- Monitor and validate effective and sustainable change towards the desired culture.
The sequence matters. Leadership sets the tone and holds the effort together, the root cause analysis works out what is actually driving the behaviour, the interventions target those drivers rather than the surface symptoms, and the monitoring confirms whether the change is real and durable rather than cosmetic.
A guide, not a rulebook
It is worth being precise about what this paper is. It is an information paper, not a binding Notice or set of Guidelines, so it does not impose new obligations. MAS strongly encourages firms to reference it and to work towards adapting the good practices over time, and it stresses that institutions should apply the capabilities in a way that is proportionate to their scale and complexity, recognising that firms are at different stages of maturity. The paper builds on MAS’s 2020 Information Paper on the culture and conduct practices of financial institutions, extending that earlier work into the specific problem of making remediation stick. MAS also notes the capabilities are not only for cleaning up after an event, they can be applied pre-emptively, before a serious risk event occurs.
What it means for risk and compliance teams
For boards and second-line functions, the paper is a useful benchmark even though it is not mandatory. It signals how MAS thinks about repeat risk events during supervision, and it gives firms a shared vocabulary for a conversation that often stalls, namely why the same issues keep coming back. The practical takeaway is to treat a recurring serious risk event as a culture question as much as a control question: run a genuine root cause analysis that looks at behaviour and incentives, design interventions that target those drivers, and put in place monitoring that can tell leadership whether the culture has actually shifted. Firms that can show that discipline will be better placed when a supervisor asks why a problem happened twice.
The full paper is available on the MAS website.
