recent years have put a premium on appropriate manpower planning and personnel development, indeed the human resource function generally. ensuring that the banks can recruit and retain appropriately qualified and experienced staff is at the heart of this challenge. this is made increasingly difficult by developments outside the financial sector and competition for key personnel even from international agencies. in india too, banks and banking have changed substantially over the years. as we view matters in retrospect, one of the major landmark events which constituted strategic inflexion points in the history of indian financial sector has been the reforms process that gained momentum in the early 1990s. these reforms have heralded a dramatic shift in the way banks functioned and operated in india. the changed overall environment and the internal compulsions to generate and sustain faster policy responses have given rise to the quest for greater efficiency and the need to reorient the banking practices. this unmistakable urgency of realigning our organizational resources has indeed altered the way we view the whole gamut of key issues relating to our human resources. in such an environment, sometimes somewhat stylistically termed as “ war for talent ”, even public sector banks can perhaps no longer take a life time employment for granted. issues relating to how to attract talented people, how to nurture them, how to develop them and give them the necessary space have now, therefore, moved to the centre stage and today constitute the major concerns that we may need to address adequately in the near and medium term. while these issues have always been important, it is just that the imperatives to address them squarely in substance were never so compelling. there have been broadly three catalytic forces that have brought about this changed perception of human resources : first, as the widespread use of the personal computer and the advent of the internet in the 1990s attained a critical mass, it marked a specific game - changing point which ushered in the information age. in this age, the intangible assets such as intellectual capital and talent have in a sense supplanted hard assets of the industrial age such as capital, factories and inventories. the new reality is that people are increasingly the principal assets of any organization and institutions are dependent not just on the sum total of their individual human capital, but also on how effectively they are able to draw out the best from their talent bank. secondly, in india as elsewhere, a host of new industries, some sector - specific like new generation indian private sector banks and foreign banks and other sector - neutral like companies in the fields of

the main issuers of so - called eurobonds or international securities. today, over 250, 000 outstanding isins ( 20 % of these isins are euro - denominated ) are issued through the two icsds, with a value of roughly €9. 2 trillion. from a european capital 2 / 4 bis central bankers'speeches market perspective, these assets are important. they account for about 25 % of all outstanding marketable assets eligible as collateral with the eurosystem. i would like to see the announced strategy of the two groups to bring eurobonds to be settled in t2s starting to take effect by 2018. issuance as we see t2s roll out, it has become apparent that despite the progress towards a more integrated market, issuance has remained a largely national business across the eu, often as a result of legacy structures and national rules. indeed, the issue was first identified in the t2s harmonisation agenda in 2011 and remains relevant today. recently adopted legislation, namely the csdr level ii, addresses certain aspects of the location of issuance. in particular, it covers the rights of issuers, allowing them to have their securities recorded in the csd of their choice. however, despite both t2s and the csdr, fragmentation endures and a domestic issuance process at european level does not exist at the moment. there are several possible reasons why the market has failed to generate a more integrated and efficient securities issuance industry. these include legal constraints and, specifically, uncertainties arising from issuing in foreign jurisdictions, where some or all aspects of the issuer ’ s domestic law no longer apply. in addition, regulatory restrictions or domestic market practices may prevent issuers from reaching out to the whole eu investor base. take, for example, restrictions on the location of primary dealers in sovereign debt or national registration procedures. the result is that – regardless of the launch of a single securities settlement engine ( t2s ) and the single legal framework ( csdr ) – the market has remained national, from the perspective of securities issuance. debt instruments, even supranational ones, are issued nationally and issuers and investors often fail to reach each other across europe. although icsds issue eurobonds in a global environment, they remain in the context of specific market infrastructures ( under the rules of the market where the icsd is located ). this status quo restricts the investor base, in particular the pan