Remembering Harley: Graveside memorial service honours homeless Hantsport man’s life | SaltWireHANOI - Vietnam is planning to relax its stock market settlement procedures for foreign investors, a critical measure to convince equity index managers to uprade the country to emerging market status and attract hundreds of millions of dollars of new investment, sources said.
FTSE experts visited the country last week and were presented with details of the new plan to break the years-long deadlock, the people familiar with the talks said. If upgraded, Vietnam would join the likes of Indonesia, Philippines, Qatar and China, moving up from the frontier index which it shares now with less advanced markets such as Sri Lanka and Kenya, and where it accounts for an unwieldy 38% of total capitalisation.Under the new plan, Vietnam would adopt a mechanism to settle payments on shares transactions that could meet the key requirement from FTSE for the upgrade.
They would take some risks, but they stand to benefit from the new inflows, which SSI estimates could be around $800 million from passive funds alone, assuming Vietnam's weighting in the emerging market index at 1%. In its latest update on Vietnam issued last month, FTSE said that while progress on planned market reforms had remained slow, a recommitment to the work required had been made by government.