(Yicai) Oct. 27 -- The Shanghai Insurance Exchange has launched its international reinsurance business trading platform along with the first batch of market rules, the city’s latest step in developing into a global reinsurance hub.

The platform is the key digital infrastructure of the Shanghai International Reinsurance Trading Center, an institute under the SIE responsible for handling the reinsurance transactions, the bourse announced at the Shanghai International Reinsurance Conference yesterday.

The platform can provide digital trading services, including business inquiry and quotation, contract deposit, account clearing, and cross-border settlement, while ensuring that the information of parties to a transaction is secure, encrypted and tamper-proof, the SIE added. It also provides traders with an intelligent online trading tools and gives regulators a more effective tool for monitoring the entire process.

The four new trading rules, the first rolled out by the SIE for the global reinsurance board, mainly focus on cross-border business. They aim to create a window for opening the Chinese reinsurance market to outside investors, providing them with a platform that is lower in trading risks, higher in information transparency, and converging all the necessary elements needed in making a successful trade.

SIE Chairman Ren Chunsheng said the global reinsurance board will be divided into three sectors: a domestic market sector, a cross-border market sector that supplies overseas reinsurance products, and another cross-border market sector that offers domestic reinsurance products. Foreign organizations are welcome to participate in the latter two as sellers or buyers, Ren added.

The launch marks the entry of China’s reinsurance industry into a new stage of two-way opening, noted He Chunlei, chairman of China Reinsurance Group.

In June, the National Administration of Financial Regulation and the Shanghai government announced the construction of a global reinsurance trading market in the city. The Lingang New Area of the Shanghai Free Trade Zone then set up a special zone for international reinsurance business, with the first eight insurers settling in September and a second group of seven to move in soon.

More than 30 domestic and overseas reinsurers have applied to settle in the area, the person overseeing development of the special business zone in Lingang said in late July.

Editors: Tang Shihua, Martin Kadiev