By Adnan Rafique
ISLAMABAD: Chairman Securities and Exchange Commission of Pakistan (SECP), Aamir Khan has said that for boost to capital market by making it very attractive to investors through policy and structure reforms, three bills – Companies Bill, Corporate Restructuring Bill and Secure Transactions Bill -have been passed by the National Assembly which have been tabled in the Senate, the Upper House.
In an interactive session with visiting delegation of Council of Economic and Energy Journalists (CEEJ) Karachi, here at SECP on Thursday, he told that the new Companies Bill had some very significant changes relating to ease of doing business, protection of minority shareholders and to facilitate start-ups etc. Aamir Khan said that as part of the capital market reforms programme on July 12, 2021 the commission would also introduce new trading system at Pakistan Stock Exchange and a strong surveillance system by the end of this year. The CEEJ delegation was led by President Raja Kamran and Secretary Kashif Muneer.
The Chairman SECP said that with the launch of secure transactions system soon Pakistan would stand amongst 60 countries in the world having this modern trading system in practice. The commission had taken many steps for ensuring further ease of doing business and more improvement was expected in near future. So far 140,000 businesses had got registered which showed positive response to the SECP efforts.
He said, for making its procedures short and simple, SECP had reduced its forms to half from big number of 46. It had also planned to use the social media as an effective tool for educating the general public about the developments in capital market as the commission’s e-services’ performance was not satisfactory. SECP’s task was to strengthen the capital market and we have done very good progress in capital market promotion. There would be a lot of improvement in the capital market and corporate sector during financial year 2021-22, he added.
Aamir Khan said that the SECP had completed big job of digitalization of capital market that had compelled the listed companies to go for digitalization. “Now, 75 percent companies are digitalized,” he remarked. SECP Chairman said Pakistan Stock Exchange had successfully conducted ten IPOs in FY 21, which was a record in Pakistan’s capital market history. And, two exchange traded funds were introduced over this period and another 2 or 3 would come up soon. ETF provides opportunity to investors to invest in multiple shares.
SECP was also working on different projects to support agriculture products, he mentioned. SECP Chief said the Commission’s policies had been centered around five core objectives – enabling access to finance, improving ease of doing business, promoting market/product development through facilitative regulatory regime and digital transformation to improve organizational efficiency and improving transparency.
Amir Khan highlighted the future targets which included implementation of new surveillance system at Pakistan Stock Exchange (which is in testing phase); launch of new trading system at PSX; improving investor protection through operationalizing professional clearing member regime; simplification of regulatory regime through amalgamation of Securities Act and Futures Act; introduction of cash-settled futures and new products such as single stock options and index options etc.; launch of new modern corporate registry ; and digitalization of SECP’s internal regulatory processes.
