The Stock Exchange of Thailand (SET) announces that its board has agreed to improve financial literacy plan for capital market professionals and investors, develop back-up trading terminal, and amend cash-account rule to reduce risk to the clearing system.
SET President’s Charamporn Jotikasthira, said that the board of governors approved the four core plans on March 20, as follows:
1. Developing financial literacy of securities professionals, including investment consultants, analysts, and wealth management’s advisors, by offering training to boost their expertise and provide concrete method to evaluate the effectiveness.
2. Increasing plans and allocating additional budget to operate activities for knowledge enhancement and proactively encourage a long-term saving culture through mutual funds and provident funds, and direct stock investment by focusing on distributing knowledge via media to the public nationwide, aiming at expanding quality investor base of the Thai capital market in the future.
3. Improving back-up trading terminal to enable broker members to continually transmit trading orders in case that the main terminal of any broker crashes. This will help reduce risks and boost opportunities to smoothly trade securities for broker members and investors.
4. Amending cash-account rule on securities trading for broker members by requiring collateral from their customers amounting to at least 20 percent of the customer‘s credit line, up from 15 percent previously, in order to lessen risk to the clearing system, and to cope with rising levels of investors and trading. This move will also help lower market volatility as a whole and increase stability of the Thai stock market. However, the increase of collateral requirement is subject to the result of broker member’s hearing.
SET will hold the extraordinary meeting of broker members on Tuesday, March 26 to hear opinions from the meeting regarding to the proposed amendment in the cash-account rule. Any additional opinion will propose to SET’s board of governors for further consideration. However, if the meeting agrees with the amendment and no further issues raised, SET will continue the process of rule amendment by informing the members ahead of the date of enforcement.
