BCM’s Working group Chair and vice-chairs:

Chair: Enhtsetseg ORCHLON, Founder & CEO, URECA Ltd
Vice-Chair: Randolph KOPPA, Chairman of Trade Development Bank
Vice-Chair: Magvan BOLD, CEO, Mongolian Green Finance Corporation

BCM’s Vision:

To deliver value for the public, the members, and the employees by advocating economic freedom and property rights provided by the Constitution of Mongolia and protecting and promoting the common lawful interests of members for a fair, stable, and internationally competitive business environment.

BCM’s Mission for realizing the Vision:

• To equip members with an information platform that provides up-to-date policy and business research, training and knowledge sharing.
• To develop and promote economic and sector policy recommendations through engagement with the BCM members, the government and the wider public.
• To provide networking and other services that support doing business in Mongolia.

MISSION STATEMENT

The mission of the Working Group is to identify and address issues critical to the development and improvement of the financial sector in Mongolia. Timely issues will be brought to stakeholder’s attention through position papers to assist in strong advocacy. Public education will also be used to increase awareness and improve public opinion.

Overview of primary objective and responsibilities

The goal of the working group will be to identify the financial sector issues affecting the BCM membership and develop strategies to address them to the benefit of the members as well as the business community in general.

The output of the working group will be action plans and position papers prepared and reviewed with BCM EC.

The WG will provide inputs to the BCM Exco and BCM secretariat to assist with: 

  • formal advocacy
  • political engagement
  • partnership engagement
  • public education and media engagement

The WG Chair is specifically responsible for:

  1. Highlighting “target areas” to improve sector competitiveness and attractiveness to investors.
  2. Prepare an annual “work program”.
  3. Execute “work program” tasks + present recommendations to BoD for “advocacy action”.
  4. Respond to critical but unplanned developments impacting sector.
  5. Deliver monthly progress report.
  6. Support Exco advocacy actions.
  7. Grow sector membership and WG credibility/professionalism.

Broadly speaking, this sector covers the domestic bank and non-bank financial institutions as well as the local stock exchanges. In addition, law firms and accounting firms focused on the financial sector activities, such as audit, tax, corporate finance and capital markets activities, are part of the sector. Finally, the foreign banks, institutional investors, and the public debt and equity markets are to be included. Accordingly, about ten percent of BCM’s membership could be considered financial services providers. Of course, all BCM members interact with the financial sector.

There are two types of issues facing the financial sector. One type would be pending or proposed changes in laws and regulations, or the lack of policies which affect the sector. The other relates to public misconceptions of how the sector operates.
  1. Examples of the first type of issue would be proposals to require export proceeds to be remitted directly to Mongolian banks, or the lack of pension reform policies which currently proscribe the size of an institutional investor base in Mongolia.
  2. Public perceptions and populist rhetoric also affect the financial sector. One of the demands and expectations of the public is the availability of low cost, limited collateral loans for small businesses, as well as low or no down payment mortgage loans. Banks tend to be targeted as being non-cooperative in helping meet these demands and thus not supportive of the public good. The result can be pressure on lending standards, profitability, or market distorting subsidy programs.
Concurrently the WG will produce 2 outputs:
  1. An “initial report” which will give a snapshot of the industry and provide the context needed for the “case for change”.
  2. A list of “target areas” defined by members requiring urgent action.
    1. These target areas will be categorized along a number of criteria.
  3. The output of the working group will be action plans and “position papers” prepared and reviewed with BCM EC.
It is important to “systematically build” the BCM library of critical documents as part of the actions of the WG’s and advocacy team. This should involve:
  • Establishment of a WG area for documents “in progress”
  • A formal library area for
    • BCM finished documents
      • Working group specific
      • Broader BCM
        • Advocacy documents
        • other
      • Member and partner documents of significance
  • Linkages to key documents and critical websites of our partners and key players
    • eg - IFI reports
      • Mongolian economy and politics
      • Resource sector globally
      • Mongolian sector specific
    • eg - Competitiveness reports
    • Eg – GoM
    • Eg – NGO’s
    • Eg – key media documents

The working group would expect to show leadership in addressing key issues and proposing solutions or actions. However, it will also want to cooperate with other associations so as not to duplicate efforts as well as to gain larger and broader support on certain key issues.

Nine Mongolian commercial banks are BCM members. These banks are also members of the Mongolian Bankers Association (MBA), which is organized to do a lot of lobbying on behalf of its members on key issues affecting the member banks.

AmCham has had a financial services committee which has tackled a number of issues. During 2017 a lot of attention was paid to addressing the US dollar clearing activities and Mongolia’s supervision, and control of international payments in adherence with best international practice. More recently, the committee prepared a position paper regarding the proposed control on export revenues.