The Supervisory Board of the Financial & Banking Association of Euro-Asian Cooperation supported the proposal of the Presidium of Business Council of EAEU to establish a Eurasian electronic commodity exchange of the Silk Road, MIA Kazinform reports as referred to press-service of EEU.

According to Timur Zhaksylykov, Member of the Board – Minister in charge of Economy and Financial Policy of the Eurasian Economic Commission (EEC), the Association is ready to initiate the implementation of this project based on the Universal Commodity Exchange Eurasian Cooperation (UCEX, located in Astana). “The process of conjunction of the Silk Road initiative and the EAEU increasingly goes on the stage of accelerated development, creating new opportunities for synergies between these ambitious projects. Certainly, support of financial institutions and associations will contribute to moving forward on the path to economic development of all the EAEU countries,” Timur Zhaksylykov said, holding a session of the Supervisory Board as its Chairman for the first time. He reminded that in February this year in Bishkek, the International Chamber of Commerce of the Silk Road and the Business Council of the EAEU signed an agreement on establishment of the Eurasian electronic commodity exchange of the Silk Road.

According to the Head of the Representation Office of the Association in the Republic of Kazakhstan, the Advisor to the President of the FBA EAC, Aleksey Smolyakov, the feature of the UCEX is that in this case, the exchange mechanism and the mechanism of clearing mutual payments in a multi-currency mode are combined. Connecting the banks of Russia and Kazakhstan provided for regular service of exchange transactions. According to Aleksey Smolyakov, a wide branch network of the UCEX is being created with opening settlement accounts for trading participants. This allows them to make payments under contracts in their currency, and cross-border payments and conversion is performed by the exchange itself. In addition to the objectives for expanding the list of currencies and developing the branch network, the UCEX has the task to establish risk-hedging tools. Aleksey Smolyakov noted that all operators of the Eurasian market were interested in creating a single electronic exchange platform. More over the volumes of transactions at the UCEX lately have grown substantially.

According to the Head of the exchange branch network, Egor Ivankov, in 2016, the volume of transactions on the trading platform between business entities of the Member States of the Eurasian Economic Union amounted to 4 billion Rubles, while only in the last five months of this year, the turnover reached 6 billion Rubles. Today, deals are mainly conducted between business entities of Russia and Kazakhstan. Following the session, it was decided to continue the work on state registration of legal entities endowed with functions of a central counterparty, in Armenia, Belarus and Kyrgyzstan to facilitate access for small and medium-sized business entities of the republics to UCEX. This will result in an increase in the volume of trading and an expansion of the list of traded commodities. It was also decided to intensify the development of the project “High-Technology Transfer Center” for innovation development and introduction in the economies of the EAEU and organization of qualification assessment in the labor market.