BSE, Bank of New York Mellon to ease foreign investment rules

Move to make it easier for foreign investors to operate in India, reduce their costs of collateral

BSE Ltd and Bank of New York Mellon have signed an agreement enabling foreign investors to provide AAA rated sovereign bonds traded outside of India as collateral for trades done on the domestic exchange.

 

"The MOU would allow for acceptance of "AAA" rated foreign sovereign bonds, as approved by the regulators RBI and SEBI, as collateral for trades done on BSE," said a news release from the exchange on Friday. 

 

The move is expected to make it easier for foreign investors to operate in India and reduce their costs of collateral and trading in Indian markets significantly over a period of time. 

 

Earlier this year in April 2014, BSE had launched its equity trading platform on the new software 'BOLT Plus - an open source technology. This has helped reduce the mean response time to 200 microseconds and made it low cost as it can handle 5 lakh orders per second.