Regulatory Watch, Updated

Inside MAS’s Equity Market Development Programme EQDP, From Nine Managers to the First Fund on the Ground

Singapore’s push to bring fresh institutional money into its own stock market has moved from policy announcement to an actual product on shelves, with Eastspring Investments now the first of the newly appointed managers to show what its mandate looks like in practice.

When the Monetary Authority of Singapore set up its Equity Market Development Programme, the pitch was simple. Take a meaningful pool of public money, hand it to carefully selected asset managers, and use it to draw more capital and more research attention into Singapore listed companies, particularly the smaller names that large global funds tend to overlook. What has followed since is a steady drip of announcements, each one filling in more of the picture. This piece brings the two most recent developments together, the appointment of six additional managers to the programme, and the first concrete fund to emerge from that roster, so the story reads as one continuous update rather than two separate headlines.

How the Programme Has Grown

The Equity Market Development Programme started life as a S$5 billion initiative. MAS placed its first S$1.1 billion with three managers, JP Morgan Asset Management, Fullerton Fund Management and Avanda Investment Management, earlier in the year. A second batch followed shortly after, with S$2.85 billion placed across six further managers, Amova Asset Management, formerly known as Nikko Asset Management, along with AR Capital, BlackRock, Eastspring Investments, Lion Global Investors and Manulife Investment Management.

• First batchS$1.1 billion placed with JP Morgan Asset Management, Fullerton Fund Management and Avanda Investment Management
• Second batchS$2.85 billion placed with Amova Asset Management, AR Capital, BlackRock, Eastspring Investments, Lion Global Investors and Manulife Investment Management
• Budget 2026MAS confirms the programme is being expanded from S$5 billion to S$6.5 billion, following a top up to the Financial Sector Development Fund
• 30 July 2026Eastspring Investments launches the Singapore Income and Growth Equity Fund, the first fund publicly tied to a second batch mandate

Between the two batches, S$3.95 billion has now been committed to nine managers. Under the programme’s original S$5 billion ceiling, that left S$1.05 billion still to be placed, with a further round of appointments expected in the second quarter of 2026. Since then, MAS has confirmed it is lifting the total size of the programme to S$6.5 billion, following a top up to the Financial Sector Development Fund announced at Budget 2026. That expansion gives the programme meaningfully more room than originally planned, and points to further batches of manager appointments beyond what was initially scoped.

The Nine Managers Appointed So Far

Manager	Batch
JP Morgan Asset Management	First
Fullerton Fund Management	First
Avanda Investment Management	First
Amova Asset Management, formerly Nikko Asset Management	Second
AR Capital	Second
BlackRock	Second
Eastspring Investments	Second
Lion Global Investors	Second
Manulife Investment Management	Second

Eastspring Turns Its Mandate Into a Fund

Of the nine managers named so far, Eastspring Investments is the first to bring a specific, publicly named fund to market under the programme. The firm launched the Singapore Income and Growth Equity Fund, referred to as the SING Fund, on 30 July 2026, to be jointly run by portfolio managers Bryan Yeong and Daniel Lau, who together bring more than 40 years of investment experience to the mandate.

The fund is built to challenge a long standing assumption about the local market, that Singapore equities are useful mainly for income and dividends rather than growth. Eastspring’s chief investment officer, Vis Nayar, pointed to the performance of the Straits Times Index itself as evidence that this view undersells the market, noting that the index climbed 27 percent over the past year and 56 percent over the past three years.

Although investors do not typically view Singapore equities as a growth opportunity, and many asset allocators approach the sector primarily as a dividend play, the market has delivered compelling gains in recent years. We believe investors do not have to choose between income and growth, by combining Singapore’s strong income foundations with active research to uncover high quality small and mid-cap companies, we aim to capture both. Vis Nayar, Chief Investment Officer, Eastspring Investments

That philosophy shapes the fund’s construction directly. Rather than leaning entirely on the familiar large-cap, dividend paying names that dominate most Singapore focused strategies, the SING Fund commits to a minimum 35 percent allocation toward small and mid-cap Singapore stocks, a part of the market that typically receives far less research coverage and far less institutional capital. Eastspring’s chief executive, Rajeev Mittal, described the launch as a natural next step for a firm with a long history in the market. “We have deep roots in Singapore and Eastspring has been investing in the Singapore growth story for almost three decades,” he said. “We are excited to finally introduce this strategy to investors keen on tapping further into Singapore’s potential.”

The Bigger Argument Behind the Fund

The SING Fund launch did not appear out of nowhere. A month earlier, Eastspring published a whitepaper jointly with the Singapore Exchange, titled Singapore equities, from resilience to opportunity, arguing that global investors have consistently misjudged the market. The paper points out that Singapore holds only around a 3 percent weight in the MSCI AC Asia ex Japan index, a figure it says leaves the market under-allocated and too often grouped together with other Southeast Asian markets that carry very different risk, return, currency and institutional characteristics.

The whitepaper’s own portfolio modelling found that a mix of roughly 50 percent US equities and 50 percent Singapore equities produced the strongest risk adjusted return of the combinations tested, a result the authors use to argue that Singapore deserves a larger and more deliberate place in global portfolios. The paper adds that as the Equity Market Development Programme widens the pool of active investors, improves research coverage of small and mid-cap names, and supports new initiatives such as the dual listing bridge, Singapore’s visibility with global allocators should improve over the next two to three years.

Asked to respond to the critique, MSCI defended its methodology, explaining that Singapore’s weight in the MSCI AC Asia ex Japan index is a free float market capitalisation weighted output generated through its rules-based approach, sized relative to the other listed equity markets included in the index. MSCI added that institutional investors remain free to benchmark against whichever index best fits their own mandate and objectives.

Two More Pieces of the Puzzle

The manager appointments and the SING Fund launch sit alongside two further initiatives MAS has introduced to support the same goal from different angles. The first is a new dual listing bridge that will let Singapore companies list simultaneously on the Nasdaq and the Singapore Exchange using a single, shared set of documentation. It is aimed at quality growth companies with global ambitions and a market capitalisation above S$2 billion, the kind of firms that might otherwise default to a US only listing in search of deeper capital markets.

The second is a value unlock programme run jointly by MAS and the Singapore Exchange, backed by S$30 million in grants, intended to encourage companies already listed in Singapore to strengthen investor engagement and sharpen their focus on shareholder value creation. It responds to a long standing criticism that a number of Singapore listed firms trade at a discount partly because of thin engagement with investors and limited capital markets activity.

What the Full Picture Shows

Read together rather than as separate news items, these developments show a programme that has moved past the announcement stage and into implementation. Nine managers are now under mandate, one of them has turned that mandate into a named, structured fund with a clear investment thesis, and MAS has paired the capital push with complementary reforms on listings and shareholder engagement. The programme’s budget has also grown since it was first announced, suggesting MAS sees early enough momentum to commit more rather than less.

The real test now shifts to execution. Whether the remaining managers follow Eastspring’s lead with their own named products, whether the dual listing bridge attracts the growth companies it is targeting, and whether global allocators actually begin rethinking their Singapore weightings, are all questions that will only be answered over the next two to three years, not in a single quarter. For now, the programme has gone from a funding announcement to a functioning part of Singapore’s fund landscape, with the SING Fund standing as the clearest example yet of what that looks like in practice.

This article combines and updates reporting on MAS’s Equity Market Development Programme EQDP appointments and the Eastspring Investments SING Fund launch. Figures are drawn from public statements and reporting available at the time of writing and may be superseded by later announcements. This article is for general information only and does not constitute investment advice.