HK hails expansion of RQFII scheme

The Hong Kong government on Thursday hailed an expanded program that allows more institutions to invest offshore yuan in domestic capital markets, as part of the country's efforts to internationalize its currency.

The China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC) promulgated revised rules for the Renminbi Qualified Foreign Institutional Investor (RQFII) pilot scheme Wednesday, and Hong Kong Financial Secretary John Tsang spoke highly of the expanded program.

"This will further deepen the offshore yuan business in Hong Kong, and enhance the cross-border use and circulation of yuan funds between the mainland and Hong Kong, thus promoting the internationalization process of the yuan," Tsang said in a statement released Thursday on the official website of the special administrative region government.

The revised RQFII rules announced late Wednesday in a statement by the CSRC now cover all the Hong Kong units of mainland commercial banks and insurance firms.

Hitherto, only the Hong Kong subsidiaries of Chinese asset management firms and securities houses have been allowed to participate in the RQFII program.

In addition, the CSRC will loosen restrictions on the composition of investors' portfolios, offering more leeway for investors to choose their preferred portfolios. At present, foreign institutional investors involved in the program are required to put at least 80 percent of their assets into fixed-income securities, with the remainder invested in stocks.

"The revised rules basically meet previous market expectations," Becky Liu, a senior strategist at Standard Chartered Bank in Hong Kong, told the Global Times Thursday.

The existing number of eligible investors for the program can not take enough of the available RQFII quota, Liu noted.

The RQFII program, initially approved at the end of 2011, has already seen its available quota boosted to 270 billion yuan ($41.15 billion), according to the CSRC statement, but only 70 billion yuan of that total has so far been awarded to 27 offshore units. This translates into an untapped quota of 200 billion yuan.

"More offshore investors are expected to benefit from the RQFII scheme with the new revisions, which show that the Chinese government has become more liberalized in its stance toward overseas investors' access to the domestic market," said Standard Chartered's Liu.

"This would help broaden investment channels in Hong Kong's offshore yuan market, as the revisions could serve as an incentive to pull yuan out of the domestic market," Frances Cheung, a Hong Kong-based senior strategist with Credit Agricole CIB, told the Global Times Thursday.

"With the enlarged quota for bond investments, overseas investors are likely to be inspired to pour into the domestic bond market, especially for bonds issued in the interbank market," Cheung said, noting that the domestic bond market currently accounts for only a small part of inward offshore yuan investment.