Jul. 13--The Thai Bond Market Association plans to begin charging institutional investors a fee for using bond quotes from Oct 1.

Institutional investors, such as fixed-income fund managers, will be charged the equivalent of 0.0001 percent of a fund's net asset value to access bond quotes.

Nattapol Chavalitcheevin, president of the Thai Bond Market Association, said fund managers may alternatively choose to pay a fixed fee, possibly 500,000 baht per year, for real-time quotes for more than 1,000 securities to calculate their fund positions.

Funds or insurers who do not need full access to the ThaiBMA database and only need quotes for selected issues may arrange for cheaper packages.

He said the fee was negligible, equivalent to only 15 baht per bond per day.

Investors are unlikely to notice any real impact on fund holdings, Dr Nattapol said, adding that stamp taxes in contrast totalled 0.5 percent of a fund's NAV.

"We don't expect to see any fund manager demand higher management fees from investors as a result of our charge," he said.

The decision to impose a charge comes after the Securities and Exchange Commission asked the association to sharply cut registration fees for new debt issues in order to reduce issuers' costs.

Dr Nattapol said the association had seen its revenues fall by 10 million baht per year due to the lower bond registration fees, and hoped to reclaim some portion of the revenues from the new access charges for quotes.

"The SEC asked us to cut expenses for issuers and instead collect fees from end-users. We have set fees charged to users based on the amount of revenues lost from the issuers," he said, adding that the association notified members of the planned fees last year.

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