the competitive edge of a financial centre depends largely on the availability of a large pool of highly professional market practitioners. a priority area for the tmf is therefore to work with the industry to enhance the professionalism of practitioners in the treasury markets. as you may be aware, with the support of the tmf, the financial markets association of hong kong ( acihk ) has recently launched a new membership regime, together with a revamped professional training and accreditation programme. under the new membership drive, acihk, traditionally consisted of practitioners drawn from the foreign exchange and money markets, has recruited new members from other treasury markets. in particular, with the support of the hkcma, many of you working in the debt origination as well as trading sides have now joined the acihk. the number of acihk members has by now grown to over 1, 800. as part of the training and accreditation programme for acihk members, two new courses, one on dealing and the other one on debt securities, have been developed together with the chinese university of hong kong and the university of science and technology respectively. the hkcma has provided very useful contributions in designing the debt securities course, which commenced last november. secondly, “ product ”. here i ’ m not referring to the wide array of financial products that are offered to the investors, which should best be left to individual financial firms to develop. what the tmf and the hkcma can help is to seek to develop the necessary infrastructure so that new products can be launched in hong kong. for example, the tmf, together with the hkcma and the hkma, have been seeking to develop the hk dollar repo market in hong kong. for the repo market to kick off, we will need the necessary repo settlement facility operated by the central moneymarkets unit. as a result of this effort, an efficient and highly automated platform for repo settlement has been made available since december 2004. this is an example of how the tmf can help promote product development in hong kong. the tmf has also worked on other issues to facilitate market development. examples include the ndf documentation for asian currencies, promotion of overnight index swaps and constant maturity swaps, review of electronic prime broking system, and work on standard documentation in chinese for use by mainland and other customers who prefer to use their mother tongue as the working language in financial transactions. last

on asian bond fund ii, which aims at channelling a small portion of the very sizeable official reserves held by the asian economies back into the region. mr president, the bank is uniquely placed to lend support to the region in these efforts, in three ways. first, the bank can enlarge its technical assistance programme on capital market projects. in this connection, we are pleased to note the assistance the bank is already providing to the bond market initiatives that i have mentioned. secondly, the bank can structure its own debt issuance programme with this objective in mind, as exemplified by bank ’ s current efforts to issue local currency bonds in china and thailand. thirdly, the bank can encourage borrowers to issue bonds in conjunction with adb - financed projects through the provision of partial credit guarantees. thank you, mr president.