New standards for Asian bonds can lower costs

A project to introduce standardised documentation across multiple Asian jurisdictions may help to reduce trading costs in the region’s fixed-income markets, says Jason Lee Seung-jae, adviser to the office of regional economic integration at the Asian Development Bank. Lee, a former official at the Korean finance ministry, works on behalf of the Asean+3 Bond Markets Forum (ABMF), a group of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations plus China, Korea and Japan. The ABMF focuses on …