Mumbai: The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) is currently working with other financial sector regulators like Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi), PFRDA (Pension Fund Regulatory and Development Authority) and Irda (Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority) to develop an interest rate market where mutual funds, pension and insurance funds could participate in securities lending to deepen market based finance and develop an alternate to bank finance.
“We are working with regulators to develop a securities lending product that could enable these entities to participate in securities lending,” BP Kanungo, Deputy Governor, RBI recently said at FIMMDA meeting in Moscow.
FIMMDA is a representative body of participants in the fixed income market in India.
Kanungo said the Indian financial sector which mostly has been a bank-based one needs to develop a robust fixed income market to bring in market discipline, to augment bank finance and indeed free up bank finance for uses that cannot access the market directly.
Development of the fixed income market has been an important objective of the Reserve Bank, the Government, the SEBI and other regulators these many years. Significant progress has been made, yet a lot remains to be achieved.
The Banking regulator is also currently looking at refurbishing some regulations on treatment of cash margins as deposits, payment of interest on such margins, posting of collateral abroad to enable participants to move to global margining standards.
“The risk management at market level is pretty robust, with central counterparty settlement, exchange traded products, trade repositories, legal entity identifier.
But there is scope of improvement at entity-level as far as financial institutions are concerned, which will be tested with the introduction of new accounting standards.
Kanungo further said in the next 5 years the demand for bonds will significantly outstrip the supply.
“It is estimated that five years down the line, the demand for bonds will significantly outstrip the supply,” he said.