SEC Secretary-General Ruenvadee Suwanmongkol has announced that the SEC Board, at its monthly meeting held on 11th December, approved the granting of securities depository center regulatory sandbox license to ThaiBMA, which aims to allow innovation testing in a closed environment . The adoption of technology will shorten the issuance of bonds process and increase efficiency of overall market. Under the sandbox regime, ThaiBMA has set up a DLT-based bondholder data storage system, which will allow entities related to issuance and offering of bonds – i.e., investors, issuers, underwriters, registrars, depositories and regulators – to examine bond information more conveniently and rapidly while benefiting from less redundancy and shorter timeframe for book closing process.    

ThaiBMA’s participation in this regulatory sandbox is expected to solve issues in  corporate bond market. This includes the issue of time-consuming process for verification of bondholders’ ownership and the lack of interconnected data center due to unconnected data systems of individual bond registrars. Such issues have caused delay and inefficiency in the bond issuance process. The real-time, live testing under the regulatory sandbox can be a protocol for further bond market development and other work processes in the capital market in the future. 

This regulatory sandbox is a major step forward and an important part of the implementation of DLT to support the Thai Capital Market Digital Infrastructure initiative . The initiative, spearheaded by the SEC, was officially launched on 3rd September 2019 to increase efficiency, reduce costs, enhance transparency and strengthen competitiveness of business operators. In addition, investors and issuers will benefit from cost reduction and convenient access to capital market.

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