The mission of the Asia Securities Industry & Financial Markets Association (ASIFMA) is to promote the development of liquid, deep and broad capital markets in Asia. This is essential to economic growth across the region – giving businesses better access to equity and bond financing and the ability to diversify funding.
If you want to learn more, listen to the conversation between ASIFMA’s technology and operations executive director Laurence Van Der Loo and King & Wood Mallesons partner Urszula McCormack here.
This backgrounder complements their insightful and interesting chat, giving a high-level snapshot of the institution and the work it does across the region. At its heart is collaboration and consensus building.
ASIFMA pulls together voices from across the industry to find a consensus view, and:
- advocates for policy changes and industry standards
- consults with regulators and exchanges.
Part of the Global Financial Markets Association (GFMA), which speaks for the industry on “the most important global market issues”, ASIFMA is joined by equivalents in the US & the EU:
- the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA)
- the Association for Financial Markets in Europe (AFME).
ASIFMA is increasingly advocating for shifts in the climate and ESG space, including:
- helping guide the region to scale climate finance
- monitoring developments in the space and sharing knowledge with members via its Sustainable Finance Committee
- influencing regional and national changes, such as the revised Circular on ESG Funds as well as climate-related risk disclosure rules released by Hong Kong’s Securities and Futures Commission (SFC) in 2021.
ASIFMA helps emerging economies to improve settings, including advising Vietnam on microstructure upgrades. It has undertaken extensive work on cross-border access in China and India.
Esteemed board members include Google’s Barbara Navarro, Blackrock’s Winnie Pun, Standard Chartered’s John Tan, and Société Générale’s Eric Rabin.
ASIFMA members have a strong appetite to expand operations in the region - particularly in ESG - as revealed by a survey of market participants by ASIFMA and EY released in 2022).
ESG & sustainable finance rank high among areas of increasing operations and investment
Capital markets provide a place to raise capital and connect buyers of financial assets (people, companies, governments) to sellers (pension funds, life insurance companies, others).
- They include stock markets, bond markets and currency / forex markets
- Primary markets relate to new issues
- Secondary markets relate to existing securities.
