(Yicai) Oct. 28 -- China's securities watchdog has optimized the Qualified Foreign Institutional Investor and Renminbi Qualified Foreign Institutional Investor programs in access, trading, investment scope, and other core areas.

The move aims to provide qualified overseas institutional investors with a more transparent, convenient, and efficient institutional environment, according to a policy document issued by the China Securities Regulatory Commission yesterday.

The new measures directly address the concerns and demands of foreign investors in China, industry experts told Yicai. They optimize, simplify, and integrate the handling methods for various matters in the qualification approval and account opening processes of qualified foreign institutional investors, while also improving trading and settlement procedures to facilitate investment operations in the country's securities market, the experts added.

For example, the statutory approval time limit for QFII qualifications will be 10 working days after the implementation of the new policy, with a committed approval time limit of five working days. For applicants, including international organizations, sovereign funds, pension funds, and university endowments, the committed approval time limit is only three working days.

In addition, regulators will steadily allow QFIIs to participate in exchange-traded fund option investments and continuously roll out more commodity futures options for trading to meet their needs for hedging and mitigating spot price risks.

The new measures are expected to reduce the operational costs of foreign investors and encourage various overseas professional institutions, including medium and long-term funds, to increase their allocation to Chinese assets, the experts noted.

The CSRC will also accelerate the implementation of other facilitating measures to further enhance the attractiveness of the QFII and RQFII programs to overseas medium and long-term funds, and gradually form a new opening-up pattern featuring coordinated development between onshore and offshore markets, balanced growth of allocation-oriented and trading-oriented funds, and positive interaction between domestic and foreign securities, fund, and futures institutions, Yicai learned.

The continuous improvement of the QFII and RQFII programs will effectively enhance the internationalization and marketization of China's financial market, increasing the enthusiasm of overseas investors to participate in the Chinese market, Tommie Fang, head of China Global Markets at UBS, said to Yicai.

There are 913 QFIIs in China, whose assets under management have exceeded CNY1 trillion (USD1.4 trillion), according to the latest data from the CSRC. They include overseas fund managers, commercial banks, insurers, securities firms, government investment institutions, sovereign funds, and pension funds.

Editors: Tang Shihua, Martin Kadiev