19 Singapore already offers an excellent ecosystem of financial institutions, professional services like legal and accounting, credit rating agencies, and market infrastructure for Asian companies to issue, market, list and trade their bonds. To make it more attractive for Asian issuers to raise international capital in Singapore and benefit from the ecosystem here, we will introduce an Asian Bond Grant scheme next year. The scheme aims to broaden the base of issuers in our bond market, which will add to the breadth and diversity of debt instruments for the 4/7  BIS central bankers' speeches  investing community. Qualifying Asian issuances will be able to offset up to 50% of one-time issuance costs such as international legal fees, arranger fees and credit rating fees. We have consulted with local market participants on various aspects of the scheme to ensure a smooth implementation. I am glad to say that the industry has been supportive of this initiative, and together we are confident that this will enhance Singapore’s value proposition. Encouraging rated issuances 20 Even as we draw Asian issuers to Singapore, we want to encourage these issuers to be rated. Credit ratings improve general market transparency by providing independent and comparable assessments of the credit worthiness of issuers. Together with business and financial information provided in the offering documents or company announcements, credit ratings can assist investors to better understand the issuer’s business and financial health.
Currently, we have a semi-automated real-time delivery versus payment (DVP) system in place. It is a stop-gap measure but it serves as an important infrastructure in the settlement of the scripless government bonds. The system, when fully developed, will be supplemented by the intraday liquidity facilities and queuing mechanism, employing the latest digital signature technology to ensure secured and smooth real-time delivery and payment transactions. We are entering an era when capital flow across borders can only become more volatile than in the past. And we still have fresh memories of how disruptive it was before the crisis. In fact, it was a major cause of the crisis. How do we go forward? How do we guard against this? The work on the new International Financial Architecture seems to be very much lacking in the area of the behavior of key players, especially the highly leveraged institutions. In the eyes of the large  3  BIS Review 30/2000  Western countries, such issues have somewhat lost their urgency since the event surrounding the Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM) left the headlines. In the absence of such rules, it appeared that emerging markets can only look to our own selves for protection. We have to help ourselves. A well functioning bond market is an important tool in this respect. It will act as a reservoir that absorbs capital inflow, and channel it to good use.