KUALA LUMPUR: Bond Pricing Agency Malaysia Sdn Bhd (BPAM) and Faculty of Business and Economics, Universiti Malaya (UM), have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) for academic-industrial collaboration between the two organisations.

In a joint statement, the organisations stated, the collaboration is important to meet the industry’s growing need for new knowledge and expertise in the rapidly changing financial market landscape. It is expected that both organisations will benefit from the collaboration by gaining access to research opportunities and expertise. The partnership will create a platform from which both organisations can benefit.

The MoU was signed by UM’s Associate Vice-Chancellor (Global Engagement) Professor Dr Yvonne Lim and BPAM’s CEO/ executive director Meor Amri Meor Ayob. This collaboration covers, among others, joint research projects in Environment, Social & Governance (ESG), Fixed Income and Data Science & Machine Learning, internship placements and training programmes. This partnership between the two organisations will pair BPAM’s experience and expertise in the Malaysian Fixed Income Market with the research know-how of UM.

According to Meor Amri, “There has never been a better time to have this type of smart partnership between market practitioners and academia. Data sciences have evolved tremendously. The need to make sense of the tremendous amount of data to make quick and informed decision requires a new way of data aggregation and analysis.

“This partnership was envisaged to quicken the time-to-market of innovative tools to support market practitioners, speed up their decision-making process and explore new ways of looking at risk assessment, benchmarking and investment strategies. In a nutshell, this is a one of the key strategies that is required to strengthen the national economy by enhancing and accelerating technologytransfer initiatives.”

Lim added, “Fostering collaborative university-industry partnerships has emerged as a critical imperative to sustaining global competition, and innovation and business competitiveness are greatly enhanced through the activities of research universities. To build a knowledge-based economy, we need to drive innovation by strengthening links between higher education, research and business practices.”

BPAM will be able to leverage research and knowledge exchange to strengthen BPAM’s core businesses. In particular, the collaboration will explore opportunities for student internships at BPAM and the appointment of BPAM experts as ELITE Fellows in UM to provide students with industry-relevant knowledge.

Engaging BPAM staff for postgraduate studies in UM would further strengthen the relationship between the two organisations as it would enable joint research activities as part of the studies.

Similarly, UM will be able to engage in industry-relevant research and knowledge transfer to understand the practical aspects of industrial knowledge application that can be further utilised in teaching and research. Efforts are focused on creating tangible impacts to enhance the competitiveness of both organisations.