CEO’s Message

Happy New Year dear PRS members! New year calls for new resolutions and new habits – not bad old ones. There, I said it. The famous line, often credited to Albert Einstein, about insanity being the repetition of the same behaviour with the expectation of different outcomes, feels especially apt at this time of the year. The gap between expectation and reality is rarely narrowed by repetition. And so perhaps 2026 is the year for recalibration.

However, there are rituals that deserve to be respected and there are traditions worth to be repeated. I have a few of my own. Before a new year arrives, I’d be looking, without fail, for a new diary or notebook. This time I source mine from a local stationary brand “Ana Tomy”: a deep sienna A5 wirebound; leather, dot-grid and lined paper. And I suggest you do the same or find your own paper-and-pen solution. My
annual tradition is simple. I find some time to write down intentions for the one ahead and reflect on the past year. As time passes, there will always be something committed to page – a blue-or-black ink, nib nipping across the paper. Sometimes the news or events edge into what is written. Other times it is just about work, the banalities of daily life or the adventures of self-progress. These notes are not written
to be read by anyone else. Indeed, some who have seen mine think they need a code breaker a’ la Bletchley Park to crack my handwriting. At times, I also struggle to decipher my own scrawl. But that does not matter. They are important because these notes order your thoughts, make you focus on what is important, let you see howvarious narratives weave not only across the pages but through your life’s stories too.

As I prepare to write this letter, I reread my past lessons and recollections of 2025.Most of us, including those who would not call themselves a “prayerful” type of person, would invoke the name of “God” when we are at 35,000 feet above the sea level and the air gets rough. Bumpy flight or turbulence is caused by chaotic cross currents of airflows. And that precisely describes the episodes of financial markets in 2025.

The first half of the year was dominated by trade concerns as the United States raised tariff rates to levels not seen since the 1930s. Stock markets fell in April but ultimately regained control as investors focused on the positive implications of monetary stimulus and resilient corporate earnings. Artificial Intelligence (AI) remained the dominant theme driving the risk-on sentiment and supported stocks.
While medium-term inflation concerns remain elevated, fears of a tariff-driven price spike proved unfounded, and many central banks were able to continue normalising interest rates. This backdrop, combined with attractive yields and a weakening US dollar, helped bonds deliver positive returns. 2025 was the first year since the Covid pandemic where stocks and bonds (as well as precious metals) delivered positive returns. It was a good year for investors and savers, but it also served as a reminder of
the importance of diversification. Identifying opportunities for diversification should be at the top of everyone’s new year’s resolution list. Like any journey, there will always be bumps in the road.

As I reflect on my journey, I never imagined I – a law graduate – would build a careerin financial services. 18 years ago, I thought of myself as someone who disliked finance. I felt ill-equipped to know or care about money – either in my own life or the wider world. What changed my attitude, however, was realising this crucial point: my hostility towards the world of finance had been driven by fear, as much as anything else, since it was a “language” I did not really understand. So, I sat down to learn this language, much as I might have taught myself law. I realised that it was not nearly as difficult as I feared. Then I discovered something else: if you understand how money goes around the world, you can understand power and gain it in your life. Finance is like electricity: it enables everything else to happen. So, if you want to make sense of our world, and navigate it, it pays to invest a little time in learning the basics of this language to become empowered. Money and finance were virtually absent from my learnings in school. If I had the chance to go back to school, I’d line up every student in classroom by height. Some will be shorter, some taller, most clustered around the middle. Plot it on a graph and you get a bell curve, or what mathematicians call a “normal distribution”. But money is different. Line people up by wealth and the bell curve vanishes. You get something called a power law, a shape so violently skewed it looks like a mistake. Most people cluster near zero, while a tiny few (such as Elon Musk and Jensen Huang) are off the chart. If height was like wealth, the richest would be five miles tall (not five feet tall, mind you). Only about 3,000 people on Earth are billionaires. This point matters, because once you understand that wealth follows different rules, you stop comparing yourself to billionaires in the same way you would
compare yourself to someone slightly taller. I wish it was more widely appreciated that it is not easy to get rich and be wealthy. We see images of rich people from business tycoons to celebrities, but we are rarely told where this money comes from. It can seem like magic, making people vulnerable to get-rich-quick scams. There is no trick to making money: just valuable skills, hard work, some luck, and a willingness to save and invest sensibly.

This year is also a year for Private Pension Administrator (PPA) Malaysia to recalibrate its strategies, so we can extend our reach and strengthen the proposition and performance of Private Retirement Schemes (PRS). PPA will roll out enhanced engagements and coordinated campaigns-at-scale, work to expand products and providers base as well as improve members’ experience as we recalibrate PRS’
proposition. In this quarter alone, two campaigns will be launched to nudge savings behaviour of Malaysians. As a one-stop centre of the industry, we shall establish an objective fund benchmarking mechanism and actively monitor the performance of all funds under PRS. Members can expect a full disclosure of last year’s fund performance in the next quarter. To widen our reach, we aim to better coordinate all stakeholders, incentivise our providers and partners as well as improve resources
available to our members.

2026 promises to begin with a bang, so let us make it a year that we hold onto – in ink.

Warm regards,

Taufiq Iskandar
Chief Executive Officer
Private Pension Administrator Malaysia (PPA)