The Capital Market Development Council (CMDC) has capped its array of accomplishments under the Duterte administration with the successful issuance of the Philippines’ first-ever digital corporate bond using block chain technology, along with several initiatives to digitalize transactions and make them easier and more convenient for small investors to further expand their participation in the domestic capital market.
Online accounts comprising 71.5 percent of the total investor accounts in the local bourse in 2021 demonstrate the impact of the digital acceleration in the domestic capital market on the Duterte watch.
The number of online accounts has grown steadily by an average of 30.8 percent over the years up to 2021 from 302,516 online accounts in 2016.
Last year, 1.16 million of the total 1.62 million stock market accounts were online accounts, according to a Philippine Stock Exchange (PSE) report to the CMDC.
Digital acceleration in the capital market was also showcased with the listing in the Philippine Dealing & Exchange Corp. (PDEx) last June 2, of the country’s first digital bond by Union Bank of the Philippines led by bankero Edwin Bautista.
This landmark event made the Philippine Dealing System Holdings Corp. (PDS Group) the first Asian national market infrastructure to launch a Distributed Ledger (DL) or block chain technology-powered Digital Registry and Digital Depository that underpinned the digital bond issuance.
The meeting was the last one under the Duterte administration.
The digital processes involved in the issuance were completely seamless for the underwriters, issuers, and bondholders with a paperless submission of issuing documents for listing and registry via the e-Securities Issue Portal (e-SIP).
The digital market infrastructure for settlement was also made interoperable with the traditional market infrastructure for trading and clearing while being fully compliant with existing securities laws and regulations.
A coordinating public-private sector body tasked to facilitate the development of the Philippine capital market, the CMDC is co-chaired by Finance Secretary Carlos Dominguez III; lawyer Benedicta Du-Baladad, who is the former President of the Financial Executives Institute of the Philippines (FINEX); and Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Chairman Emilio Aquino.
Dominguez thanked the members of the CMDC for their six years of “highly productive” work under the Duterte administration.
