ability of the exchange fund to repay this debt. at this time, the exchange fund notes also attract a yield higher than that for us dollar treasury securities of corresponding maturity. interest income from holding the exchange fund notes will be exempt from profits tax and trading in the paper will be exempt from stamp duty. the stock exchange has also offered to lower the brokerage commission on these products. for a community that has always had a keen and very wide participation in the stock market, the convenience of being able to buy and sell the notes on these terms, through the brokers on the exchange, speaks for itself. so much for the advertisement. may i conclude by extending my warmest congratulations to all of those involved in taking forward this important project. i hope that this project will prove to be a success and i look forward to further cooperation in the future with all who have an interest in developing the debt market in hong kong and in the region as a whole.

: an efficient information system should ensure that the cics are able to provide reliable, accurate and unbiased information at the least possible cost. ( d ) sufficiency : the credit information system can be considered sufficient if it contains all required credit and payment related information about the borrower and no other cic can give any additional material information on the credit history of that particular borrower. bis central bankers ’ speeches completeness of information 6. while i agree that at this stage we may not be close to meeting the four essential constituents of a robust information system, i would like to emphasize that unless we strive to meet them, we would not be able to transform information into action. a very important consideration for meaningful transformation of credit information into action is the completeness of data. around 90 % of our population has never borrowed from the formal financial system and hence does not have any credit history. under the circumstances, they are quite likely to be denied credit by the lending institutions. how the completeness of data can be achieved in such cases? i will return to this aspect in a little while. quality of data 7. a central strand of completeness of information is the quality of data. the efficiency and effectiveness of a credit bureau is largely dependent on the quality of data collected in its database. rbi has issued guidelines for submission of timely, accurate and error free data to the bureau. however, our observation is that the data furnished by banks to cics in many instances continue to be incomplete / inaccurate. as we all know, the quality of the product can only be as good or as bad as the inputs. the data containing junk values, incorrect information and incomplete identifier fields fed by the lenders to the cics would only lead to half - baked outputs and eventually contribute to creating information asymmetries between borrowers and lenders. while, i understand that the quality of data held by microfinance institutions about their borrowers is comparatively better, the quality and consistency of data of the banking system is not very reliable and hence, poses significant challenges to the effectiveness of credit information system. the cics in india are trying to address the issue by taking recourse to proven best practices and supporting technology to ensure that the credit information rendered by them are accurate, complete and updated. they have also started undertaking quality checks while receiving and uploading of members ’ data while returning the records rejected during the validation process back to the members along with reasons thereof, for correction and