The Reserve Bank of India hopes to create an ownership-neutral, institutional-neutral and technology-agnostic competitive ecosystem even as an array of new players, such as payments banks, small finance banks and possibly a postal bank, is expected to emerge over the next year.

“The state-of-the-art payment systems developed by the RBI will play a critical role here even as the central bank embarks on cyber-supervision and monitors cyber security,” said the Reserve Bank Governor Raghuram Rajan, in a message to the staff on the occasion of the apex bank’s 80th anniversary.

Global currency On the position of the rupee, Rajan said it was becoming ‘truly’ international. Though many governments in developing countries were forced to borrow only in foreign currency, the RBI had fostered a liquid rupee government bond market where the government is today able to contemplate issuing 40-year bonds.

“Foreign investors are eager to buy our government bonds and foreign institutions are queuing up to issue rupee denominated bonds,’’ he said.

Too much debt Stating that the country’s financial system was ‘too friendly to leverage,’ he said big corporate infrastructure players had taken on too much debt and that the RBI had not stood sufficiently against it.

“The nation has enormous financing needs in the infrastructure (sector) and far too many of our banks already have too much exposure. The required national push to finance infrastructure should not override financial stability which is key to national security,’’ the Governor said.

There was a need to develop new resources for infrastructure funding requirements with moderate leverage, he said.

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