OREANDA-NEWS. The Bank of Russia starts accepting requests for assessing the quality of operations from price centres.

The main criteria for which a centre will be assessed, terms of request consideration, its form, and the list of documents required for filing a request are determined in the Bank of Russia information letter published on the regulator's website today.

Price centres are organisations which collect and process information on prices for financial instruments, determine their value and provide this information to market participants. The latter, in their turn, use it for the purposes of taxing and evaluating securities portfolios and collateral. Therefore, the monitoring and assessment of the centres' operations are important for sustainable development and higher transparency of the financial market, and mitigating risks of manipulating prices for financial instruments. The activity of price centres is not licensed.

They can be assessed or certified on a voluntary basis. At the same time, a positive regulator's assessment of a centre's activity will be a kind of a 'quality mark' and will help financial market participants choose the centre whose services they are going to use. The information on the assessment outcome will be published in the special section on the Bank of Russia website within five days after the decision is taken. Besides, the regulator will revise it, i.e., re-assess the centre, at least annually. If it turns out to be lower than the previous one, the Bank of Russia will communicate it on its website the day after the decision is taken and send the corresponding information to the price centre.

In future, as the experience expands and approaches to assessing quality of price centres' operations are fine-tuned, the main requirements to the participants in this process can be codified.