With efforts on to deepen the country's corporate bond market, National Stock Exchange (NSE) CEO Chitra Ramkrishna today said that having an entire spectrum of products on a single platform would help ensure that liquidity does not get "fragmented".
Right from the shortest to the longest tenure products in the bonds segment should be made available on a single platform, she said, adding that Sebi and the RBI are looking at various products.
"Basically, we need to think of a suite of products which will work like an ecosystem with the underlying market and which will help the underlying market liquidity.
"At the same time, bring other users of the product also like non-banks to come and participate in the market," Ramkrishna, who is the exchange's MD and CEO, told PTI here.
Speaking on the sidelines of a conference, she said some of the products, such as repo and derivatives products, are being looked at by Sebi and the RBI.
"Markets, if they are fragmented, take away the liquidity. So must ensure that we are able to provide an entire spectrum of products on a single platform in the bonds segment," Ramkrishna said.
Right from commercial paper, the shortest tenure product, to a 15-year tenure offering, all of that should be available on a single platform, she noted.
According to her, the suggestion for having a single platform has come from the users such as banks and funds.
In response to a query about sluggish growth in corporate bond market, Ramkrishna said it would take off and that a lot has been done in the last three years.
The average daily volume in the secondary corporate bonds market is around Rs 3,000-6,000 crore on NSE.
Participating in a session at the conference, rating agency Crisil's MD and CEO Ashu Suyash said more incentives can help the bond market, from where around 23 per cent of the total system credit comes.
The conference was organised by IFC along with NSE, IIF and Exim Bank.
In the Union Budget for 2016-17, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley had said that to facilitate deepening of corporate bond market, a number of measures would be undertaken, including introduction of an electronic auction platform by Sebi for primary debt offer to develop an enabling ecosystem for private placement market in corporate bonds.
A complete information repository for corporate bonds, covering both primary and secondary market segments, would be developed jointly by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) and Sebi.
