Foreign firms weigh in on China's financial opening-up

Bloomberg bet big on the Chinese bond market, whose foreign ownership was at around 3 percent compared with two-thirds of Australian bonds and about 30 percent of US bonds. It estimated in a report that Chinese bonds held by foreign investors could increase by up to a factor of 16 by 2025.

China's government and policy bank bonds will be added to the Bloomberg Global Aggregate Index over a 20-month period starting in April, which will change China's zero-weight status in major global bond indexes. However issues such as information disclosure and credit rating, as the report mentions, need to be addressed.

Jan Svejnar, director of Columbia University's Center on Global Economic Governance, said on the sidelines of the forum that "China has been careful, cautious about opening up the financial market; that I think is appropriate at early stages of development." Since China's economy is strong and diversified enough now, he said, it's beneficial for it to have a financial sector that's more open.

However, HSBC also noted China's financial industry still has significant room to improve with regards to efficiency, as well as effectiveness in deploying financial resources to serve the real economy.

China should improve the infrastructure of the domestic financial market and promote the development of China's credit derivative market while continuing to expand RMB cross-border investment channels and promote RMB internationalization and capital account convertibility, HSBC said.

The company added further opening-up of the financial services industry does not necessarily jeopardize supervision and risk prevention.