Distinguished stakeholders of our capital markets,
Borsa İstanbul stands out among the most modern and high-rated liquidity transaction platforms providing effective access to the developing Turkish capital market with its integrated structure with post-trade institutions, wide market, and product range.
24 years ago, my journey has started as an assistant specialist in this eminent institution, a key component of our financial system, that I take part in the development, technological and institutional transformation of the legislative infrastructure with great pleasure. Hereupon, I feel honored to serve the development of our financial markets as a CEO at Borsa İstanbul.
Due to the deep-scaled change and development it undergoes, our capital market has significant potential in terms of the supply and demand side. I firmly believe that by effectively fulfilling this potential, we will gain significant ground for our stock exchange and country. In order to realize this goal, I envision an area where more companies have the opportunity to procure resources and reach a larger investor base, develop products and services in line with the market needs, and carry out initiatives that create value in the financial ecosystem.
The improvement of the supply-side namely the issuer base will be ensured by raising funding of companies via capital market instruments. As such, we will thoroughly improve our function of mediating the long-term resource procurement of our companies, the locomotive of our country's sustainable development, and contribute to growth through investment, employment, production, and export. To this end, we actively take part in the promotion of public offerings and incentives with effective means. Alternatively, I strongly underline that public offerings not only enable resource procurement but also increase sustainability, institutionalization, credibility, and brand value of companies. In this respect, I invite companies to launch public offerings at Borsa İstanbul, one of the most liquid stock exchanges in the world.
On the demand side, we are intended to expand our domestic and foreign investor base. To attract more investors, we believe that financial literacy in our country should be improved. To this end, we aim to reach more investors specifically by using technological opportunities, to inform them about capital markets, and to help them diversify their investments with capital market instruments in the upcoming period.
Accordingly, we take measures within the framework of surveillance activities carried out with a proactive approach within our Exchange in order to ensure that our markets operate in a reliable, transparent, efficient, fair, and stable environment, and we further take steps to strengthen our market surveillance activities, including real-time monitoring and detection of market-distorting transactions.
Besides improvements in our surveillance system, we provide research assistance to brokerage firms, hold events and training, feature videos, make announcements about financial investments to inform and raise awareness. We expect our investors to strengthen their level of financial literacy and follow financial information and announcements from reliable sources such as KAP.
We contribute to both national and international academic research with Borsa İstanbul Review, which we publish to support academic research in our country and become the most prominent finance magazine in our country in recent years.
While we continue our efforts in all spheres to ensure that our investors have access to reliable information, my message to the investors is; to act by considering short-term trading earnings as well as long-term partnership culture and dividend income, and diversify their investments with the right tools following the recommendations of the professional staff of our investment institutions. Within this context, I invite our investors to be partners in the growth of our companies, the development of our capital market, and the economy of our country.
We have a range of tasks that we have accomplished so far and continue to accomplish for the development of financial architecture. Correspondingly, our focus on new products and services will be to take market-friendly steps to boost functionality by acting in line with the needs of the market. It is of utmost importance for market participants to capitalize on products traded in our Derivatives Market (VIOP) to manage their risks and to invest as well. Within this framework, we maintain our efforts to expand our product range of Derivatives Market in order to provide market participants with access to more underlying assets.
Assuming an important role in the development of precious metals markets as well as capital markets, our Exchange pioneers practices and developments that will ensure transparency and follow-up of all processes of the responsible supply chain of precious metals and arrival of precious metals from the source to consumer, in our country, which is one of the most important gold centers in the world.
Concisely, we seek to accomplish contributing to financial stability by enriching the product range in our markets and improve their functioning and boosting the interest of all our stakeholders, especially issuers and investors, in the capital market.
Along with improving our service capacity, we will seek to strengthen our cooperation with our stakeholders in terms of index and data services as well as our markets, and we will endeavor to launch new products.
We will primarily meet the product, service, and data demands that our market will need, and we will create thematic indices to which funds or financial products can be developed. We will continue to share our index calculation expertise and infrastructure with our stakeholders who wish to have indexes calculated on their behalf for their use in financial products. By increasing its compliance with international standards, we will ensure that our Indices, which we have complied with the IOSCO Principles, will also comply with the ESMA criteria.
We forge ahead making our investments in technology to ensure the robust and controlled continuity of algorithmic transactions, whose share is increasing in our markets as well as all over the world.
Within this framework, we have added and continue to add new features to our Pre-Trade Risk Management (PTRM) Application that will address the needs of the market. We will also launch new products we have developed for monitoring and testing algorithmic processes. With the colocation area, we have expanded in our Primary Data Center, we are boosting our service capacity. Along with that, we maintain our cooperation with global network and platform providers. Our collaborations with global networks and platform providers continue to increase the international accessibility of our markets. As we complete such integrations, we will be informing you, our stakeholders, through announcements.
Our aim is to develop Borsa İstanbul data and make it available to wider audiences. Along with that, we provide reference data, periodic reports, and end-of-day data to users who request it through the Datastore page. We will continue to work by keeping in touch with our stakeholders to create value-added data packages and data analytics that our investors need.
The development of our country's entrepreneurship ecosystem holds utmost importance. By improving our BIST Private Market platform, where investors and entrepreneurs meet, and the services we provide through this platform, we will keep contributing to the growth and development of the sector. In this sense, we hold meetings with sector representatives and pay attention to their needs. We will range the entrepreneurship ecosystem of our country up with the models we will form in line with the needs.
Drawing specifically on the environmental, social, and governance (ESG) focused investments that have increased on a global scale in recent years, we will concentrate on sustainability, which will not only support the sustainable development of society and the environment but also raise the long-term corporate value of listed companies. To this end, we will continue to make progress. We will enrich long-term investment alternatives of our investors with investable indices that involve companies that display high performance in ESG issues.
Along with developing the financial architecture, we carry out our international activities and keep abreast of the world as well. As a member of the World Federation of Stock Exchanges, we actively participate in working groups where comprehensive activities are carried out on financial technologies, sustainability, cybersecurity, and several important issues for our industry, we follow international trends and cooperate with the world's leading stock exchanges. In cooperation with the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) Exchanges Forum, whose secretariat we have been running since 2005, we manage significant projects and various capacity building and cooperation activities and support the OIC goals.
Throughout the world, the formation of financial technology increases rapidly. In order to secure our place in the global competition, we have renewed our infrastructure with the BISTECH system and we continue to develop it perpetually. We have facilitated all our markets and clearing system work in a single end-to-end system. Many financial products are traded at the same time without any problems. We are among the most liquid exchanges in the world. Thus, we provide high speed, increased transaction volume, and large data capacity.
Thanks to the BISTECH R&D Center, we conduct studies for the commercialization of products including the BISTECH system, and provide comprehensive solutions for capital markets by launching innovative and high-tech products in the areas of finance and software technologies. Moreover, we aim to expand our product range as well as our technological capacity with our investments in cloud and blockchain technologies.
In this vision for the future, our foundation will always be to promote Istanbul as an international financial center and to ensure the development of the entire financial ecosystem in cooperation with our stakeholders. By virtue of the Istanbul Finance Center project, the physical conditions to meet the infrastructure needs of financial institutions will be completed soon, and our country will gain momentum in terms of strengthening its position in global competition. As a key component of our project and one of the steps towards our goal of becoming an international depository center in our region, Borsa İstanbul Precious Metals and Precious Stones Warehouse hold great value.
The task incumbent on us is to work for and develop a financial sector that the weight of our capital market and those who benefit from the opportunities offered by the capital markets increase, and financial supply and demand meet. We offer an environment conducive to investment, which is a must for being a financial center, more effectively with each day; we develop the financial product range, provide the services and software that the industry needs with our R&D investments in the field of financial technology. In the upcoming period, as Borsa İstanbul, we will continue to be the leading provider of products and services that will be of interest to domestic and foreign investors, with our innovative and market-friendly approach, and we will continue to boost our national and international activities.
I sincerely believe that we will make significant progress on behalf of our Stock Exchange as well as our country's economy by using the growth potential of our capital market in an effective manner. We will continue to support Türkiye's development vision by deepening our capital market with all our stakeholders jointly, especially our companies and members. Together with all my colleagues, we will continue to fulfill the strategic goals of Borsa İstanbul and develop our capital market and Borsa İstanbul.
Sincerely,
Korkmaz ERGUN
CEO
Board Member
