RBI to move next-gen treasury application for managing forex, gold reserves

In a bid to improve its functioning, the Reserve Bank has decided to move to the Next Generation Treasury Application (NGTA) for managing the country's foreign exchange and gold reserves.

The NGTA, according to the RBI, would be a web-based application providing scalability, maneuverability and flexibility to introduce new products and securities, besides supporting multi-currency transactions and settlements.

The NGTA, for which the RBI has invited bids from eligible vendors, would be supporting various transactions in asset classes like Fixed Income (FI), Forex (FX), Money Market (MM) and Gold.

"RBI proposes to implement the NGTA which would be used for managing the foreign exchange reserves in a more efficient way, mitigate risk, achieve operational efficiencies, dealing in various asset classes and reporting," the bid document said.

The RBI said the objectives of the proposed system includes, dealing in various asset classes (like Fixed Income Securities, Forex, Money Market, Gold); portfolio management; workflow management; reserve management; integration with various third party and in-house systems; and dashboards, reports, widgets.">/p>

Besides other things, the propose NGTA should automatically fetch all the relevant details of a security/contract from a trading platform. It should support all internationally accepted conventions pertaining to day count, interest computation, holiday logic, shut period-dividend, ex-dividend, cash flows, and odd coupon.

With respect to transactions in gold, the NGTA should support purchase, sale, deposit (including rollover and premature withdrawal). On maturity of a gold deposit, there can be exact, under or over delivery, the document said.

As per the document, the prime bidder should be a registered Indian entity under the respective Acts of India. Also, The prime bidder should have a minimum annual turnover of at least Rs 475 crore 2017-18, 2018-19 and 2019-20.

India's foreign exchange reserves rose by USD 3.618 billion to reach a life-time high of USD 545.638 billion in the week ended October 2, 2020.

The gold reserves were up by USD 486 million in the reporting week to USD 36.486 billion.

The special drawing rights with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) rose by USD 4 million to USD 1.476 billion and reserve position with the IMF was also up by USD 23 million to USD 4.631 billion during the reporting week.