OREANDA-NEWS. Moscow Exchange hosted a forum at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in New York on 23 October, with nearly 200 representatives of the investor, brokerage and custodian communities in attendance.

The forum began with a plenary session moderated by Moscow Exchange CEO Alexander Afanasiev, with guest speakers including First Deputy CBR Chairman and head of Russia's newly created financial mega-regulator Sergey Shvetsov, National Settlement Depository (NSD) chief Eddie Astanin and Sberbank CIB (USA) CEO Chris Osborne. They covered topics like upgrades to the Russian market infrastructure in the last year, the mega-regulator's plans to support growth of a dedicated long-term domestic investor base, and the corporate governance challenges that Russia still faces.

This was followed by two roundtables running in parallel. The first was hosted by the heads of Moscow Exchange's equities & bonds, derivatives, FX, and money markets. The respective business heads spoke about access to their markets for international participants, product offerings, and innovations that the Exchange plans to roll out in the near future. The head of IT also spoke about recent and planned developments in information technologies at Moscow Exchange. The second, hosted by the NSD, featured an in-depth discussion about the services that it offers as the main entity for settlement of Russian equities and bonds, as well as the central depository across all markets.

The New York Session of the Moscow Exchange Forum capped a series of events that kicked off earlier this year in Moscow and London. Additional events are planned for 2014.