BAKU, Azerbaijan, May 30. Attracting foreign investors is one of the priority areas of the Kazakhstan Stock Exchange's (KASE) Development Strategy until 2024, a source at KASE told Trend.
"In particular, sponsored market-making programs have been developed and are being improved, including for the government securities market; work is underway to boost short sales and lending in securities, and trading through SMA (Simple Moving Average)," said KASE.
The Exchange noted that all the initiatives implemented by KASE are aimed at expanding opportunities for all market participants, increasing the attractiveness of the capital market for local and foreign investors.
"KASE constantly improves the quality of information for foreign investors. In particular, calculations of the government securities market's indexes have been introduced, and a new version of the IRIS Finance information terminal has been created," the organization said.
On an ongoing basis, work is carried out to bring the Exchange's activities in line with international standards.
"Thus, on an annual basis, the Exchange evaluates its activities for compliance with the IOSCO's PFMI requirements (Principles for Financial Market Infrastructures). The Exchange's financial indicators are currently being assessed for compliance with the IOSCO's Principles for Financial Benchmarks. It is planned to carry out IT and IB certification for compliance with ISO 27000 and ISO 270001 standards, respectively," the source said.
Furthermore, as noted by KASE, in order to attract additional foreign investments to the stock market, Kazakhstan's National Bank and the Agency for Regulation and Development of the Financial Market together with KASE work to improve the country's position to obtain the "Secondary Emerging Markets" status.
Currently, the MSCI and FTSE index services have confirmed that Kazakhstan meets the main quality criteria of the "Secondary Emerging Markets" category in terms of regulation, infrastructure, and legislation. Another key condition for the inclusion of Kazakhstan in these categories of international ratings is the achievement of quantitative parameters of these indices.