NZ'S Largest Credit Bureau Signs Deal With Cambodia

Source: Guide2.co.nz

AUCKLAND, 10 May 2011 - World-leading data-matching technology developed in Auckland has won credit bureau Veda Advantage a contract to build Cambodia's first credit bureau.

The company secured the contract in a global tender and negotiations have seen it become a 49 percent shareholder in the credit bureau, which is due for delivery this year.

Managing Director John Roberts says Veda competed with the world's top 10 credit bureaus to win the contract which he says was won on the quality of its intellectual property and technology platform especially its matching routines.

Hun Sen reports economic, financial achievements at ADB seminar ... but failed to mention social consequence costs

June 07, 2007

Roundup: Cambodian PM reports economic, financial achievements at ADB seminar

Cambodia will establish a limited stock market in 2009, Prime Minister Hun Sen said Thursday when reporting the kingdom's economic and financial achievements to a symposium on the partnership between the government and the Asian Development Bank (ADB).

"In the capital market sector, laws relating to the government bond have been recently prepared and approved by the legislative institutions. At the same time, the government is finalizing the drafted law on the publication and transaction of corporation bonds with the objective of introducing the capital market in Cambodia by 2009," he said.

In the financial sector, Cambodia has many important achievements, the premier said, citing the law reinforcement and commercial banks supervision through licensing renewal, strengthening the ability of the central bank to monitor and control commercial banks and other financial institutions, and making laws and regulations to increase public confidence in the banking sector.

"In our effort to reduce poverty, the government has considered the adequate delivery of micro-finance services as an important means for supporting rural development. The government has been actively putting its effort in placing all the micro-finance institutions under the scope of the law aiming at effectively promoting the development of micro-finance sector to have a broader coverage," he added.

In addition, said Hun Sen, the government has implemented its cautious monetary policy in which the main goal is to join the process of creating a very stable and favorable macro-economic condition for economic growth and transactions, especially by ensuring a stable exchange rate and limiting inflation rate with the use of monetary instruments.

"The government's money supply policy has been prepared to address the necessary market demand but not to fund the government 's budget deficit," he added.

With respect to the insurance sector, he said, the government has prepared and implemented some standard regulatory frameworks to strengthen the supervision of insurance companies through licensing renewals, the implementation of permanent controlling procedures, and the application of accounting principles.

"Banking and financial system must play an important role in mobilizing resources and distributing those resources to the users as much as possible in order to act as an important linkage with economic growth. For instance, the reform in this sector has contributed successfully to the growth of the Cambodian economy which is reflected by a highly sustainable economic growth and remarkable poverty reduction in the last decade," he said.

According to the premier's report, between 1994 and 2006, the average annual economic growth rate of Cambodia was 9.8 percent higher than other developing countries. In 2005, the growth rate jumped to 13.4 percent. In 2006, the growth rate was 10.4 percent.

Meanwhile, income per capita doubled from 249 U.S. dollars in 1994 to 500 U.S. dollars in 2005. Inflation rate has been kept low. Foreign currencies exchange rate have been generally stable. The Cambodian foreign currency reserves increased markedly from 100 million U.S. dollars in 1994 to one billion U.S. dollars in 2006.

In April, Cambodia was assigned its first-ever sovereign debt rating by the credit rating agency Standard and Poor's, which said the country's outlook was stable.

The B+ rating is below investment grade status, restricting many institutional investors, but it is the first step in Cambodia 's bid for economic respectability.

Source: Xinhua

Asian countries to pool Foreign Exchange (forex) reserves

2007/5/6
KYOTO, Japan, Reuters & AFP

Asian finance ministers agreed Saturday to pool their foreign reserves to help avoid a repeat of the financial crisis that devastated the region a decade ago.

The idea of pooling reserves comes as Asian countries such as China are looking for ways to more effectively manage their holdings of foreign currencies.

Ministers from ASEAN member nations along with China, Japan and South Korea (ASEAN+3) have been seeking ways to strengthen the region's seven-year-old web of bilateral currency swaps, called the Chiang Mai Initiative (CMI), and transform them into a more powerful multilateral scheme.

"Risks factors we face today are not any less than 10 years ago," said Thai Finance Minister Chalongphob Sussangkarn, who chaired the ASEAN+3 talks held in Kyoto, western Japan, on the sidelines of the Asian Development Bank's annual meeting. "The volatility of capital flows and the size of capital flows are even bigger than 10 years ago. That is why we feel that we need a regional project to deal with the problem," he told a news conference after the meeting.

Meanwhile, the Asian Development Bank came under pressure Saturday not to abandon the region's poorest as it considers a major overhaul in response to warnings that it risks becoming irrelevant.

With Asia's rapid economic growth expected to wipe out widespread absolute poverty in much of the region by 2020, the ADB wants to carve out a new role to ensure it does not fall into obscurity.

ADB governors gathering for the public lender's annual meeting in Kyoto, Japan agreed that an overhaul was needed, but there were divisions on how to reform.

"The ADB must adjust the current model or else at the extreme it will become obsolete in the new Asia," said Indonesia's ADB governor, Finance Minister Sri Mulyani Indrawati.

"It is necessary for the ADB to be reborn as a new ADB," added Japanese Finance Minister Koji Omi.

But some member nations fear the region's poorest could be overlooked if the ADB shifts too far toward other areas such as road development and telecommunications.

Afghanistan and India led calls for the Asian Development Bank not to forget its original objective.

"The ADB needs to continues, or enhance, its engagement with its poorest members, the so-called fragile states," said Afghanistan's ADB governor, Finance Minister Anwar Ul-haq Ahadi.

"Asia's growth has largely bypassed countries such as Afghanistan. It is these countries, the fragile states, where the ADB has the greatest impact," he said.

The ministers said the growth outlook for 2007 remained favorable but there could be challenges from a possible global economic slowdown, large global imbalances and greater market volatility.

"Proceeding with a step-by-step approach, we unanimously agreed in principle that a self-managed reserve pooling arrangement governed by a single contractual agreement is an appropriate form of multilateralisation," they said in a statement.

The ministers said the group would carry out further studies on how much foreign reserves would be pooled, who would manage them, and how funds would be provided from the reserves if a country faced a liquidity shortfall.

But having a "self-managed" reserve pooling arrangement would mean any existing international bodies such as the Asian Development Bank would not manage their reserves, officials said.

South Korean Finance Minister Kwon O-kyu told Reuters earlier on Saturday that member countries would still manage their funds at their central banks.

With its foreign exchange reserves surging to US$1.2 trillion, China has said is setting up a new state-run agency to help manage part of its foreign reserves.

"Setting up such a company could not be successfully finished within one or two days," Chinese Finance Minister Jin Renqing ?aid, adding that it has not yet made any investments.

Foreign reserves have more than doubled in many Asian countries since the financial turmoil that hit the region a decade ago.

Now, Asian countries including China and Japan have foreign reserves totalling around US$3.1 trillion, accounting for about two-thirds of the world's total.

Currently the CMI is a network of 16 bilateral currency swap agreements that total US$80 billion.

The idea of the CMI is that a country with a short term liquidity shortfall can borrow reserves from partners in the network to absorb any heavy selling pressure on its currency without having to resort, as in 1997, to a damaging devaluation.

None of the CMI credit lines has yet been tapped.

Placing reserves in a common pool would make the process even faster and easier for potential borrowers to obtain funds once they meet pre-agreed conditions.

Pooling foreign exchange reserves under the CMI would also reduce the level of reserves each country needs to maintain to ward off any future crisis, and developing countries within ASEAN could use those funds to help develop their economies.

Ministers also agreed to widen studies to develop local bond markets, including exploring new debt instruments for infrastructure financing and steamlining procedures so bonds can be issued in several countries with common documents and licenses.

Illiquid bond markets and heavy reliance on short-term bank loans were held partly to blame for escalating the Asian crisis. Stronger local bond markets can raise more funds in their own currencies and keep Asia's savings within the region.

The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) groups Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.