On Monday, London hosted a Russia-UK Moscow International Financial Center Liaison Group. The Group meets twice a year, taking turns in London and Moscow. For the first time, the meeting featured an open discussion session on Russian Financial Market Infrastructure Development, presenting new opportunities to London’s financial community.

Alexander Voloshin told RIA Novosti that regulation and infrastructure reform in the Russian market is primarily designed to serve Russian investors’ interests, but also works for the benefit of foreign investors.

“Foreign investors face two problems: some limits on foreign investment that in some way or another exist in every country, they normally apply to certain industries or sensitive areas. In this regard, we do not have something essentially new that other nations do not have”, explained Voloshin.

“Another thing is compliance of our market standards with global ones. We are making active progress in this aspect. The lack of a Central Depositary used to stop many, especially the most conservative foreign investors, from investing in Russian economy, for instance, many categories of US investors are banned from investing in countries that lack centralized registration of title and safekeeping”, he noted.

“We managed four key reforms in the Russian stock market in the past year”, Moscow Exchange CEO Alexander Afanasiev told the conference.

He stated that two trading floors with varying rules and standards had integrated into a single Moscow Exchange. Secondly, the Central Depositary had been established as a safekeeping hub that offers a radically different level of Russian stock holders’ interests protection. Thirdly, clearing had been centralized and the central counterparty had become operational. The CP had dramatically reduced the risk of default on stock market trades. Finally, the Russian market had switched to Т+2 trading (partial pre-deposit and deferred payment). This is the global stock market trading standard.

“All these reforms are welcomed by both Russian and foreign investors. They also make it possible to run major privatizations through the stock exchange. We are working on attracting to the stock exchange Russian businesses that are registered and traded abroad”, said Afanasiev.

Project Group №1