Major stock market stakeholders have reached a consensus on transferring daily trading data of the treasury bonds (T-bonds) to the Bangladesh Bank (BB) after their listing with the exchanges.
There had been a disagreement among them for a long time on the matter, which, according to many, was one of the hurdles for listing the 270 T-bonds with the exchanges.
They had agreed on the issue in a meeting, held at the central bank on April 05.
Representatives from the Ministry of Finance, the Bangladesh Securities and Exchange Commission (BSEC), the Central Depository Bangladesh Limited (CDBL), the Dhaka Stock Exchange (DSE) and the Chittagong Stock Exchange (CSE) attended the meeting.
General Manager of the BB Department of Debt Management presided over it.
A meeting source told the FE that the BB would get trading statistics of the T-bonds through application programming interface (API) files from the exchanges every day.
Currently, the exchanges share such data only with the CDBL on a daily basis.
He said the consensus would help quicken the listing process of the bonds that would in turn help deepen and diversify the market.
The stakeholders, who attended the meeting, opined that the process of listing the bonds with the bourses might be completed within the next six months.
However, people at the central bank told the FE that they might enlist the bonds within the deadline, and these would be listed free of cost.
They said they needed trading data on a daily basis to give coupons to investors.
Bangladesh now has 270 T-bonds, having multiple record dates, so they need trading data every day.
The DSE and the CSE share such data to the listed firms once a year after the record dates for disbursing dividends.
The BB also proposed that the bonds' transaction date would be T+0, which means the investor's ability to complete the bond transaction on the same day it was made.
The transaction date for the equity instrument in the market is now T+2.
The BB prepared minutes of the meeting, and it would be sent to all the stakeholders after the lockdown.
The central bank wants to list all 270 bonds with ranges of two years, five years, 10 years, 15 years and 20 years.
The par value or original value of all 270 bonds might stand at Tk 3.0 trillion. They have different types of yields ranging between 4.0-10 per cent (annualised).
In 2003, more than 200 bonds were listed with the DSE, but those were delisted in 2011.
The BB had started a secondary trading platform of the bonds through launching the MI module that did not reflect an effective sense of the secondary market. Commercial banks' trading was participatory there.
The T-bonds are the debt instruments of the government, which borrows through the instruments to meet its budget deficit.
The BB conducts auctions or primary market operations of the bonds with the primary dealers that include the banks and financial institutions.
