China's asset-backed securities market has been among the largest in Asia since 2015 and has attracted significant foreign capital in some specific areas. How to interest more international investors? Let's hear from some experts on the issue.

The issuance of China's asset-backed securities totalled over 2 trillion yuan in 2018. That was the fourth straight year that ABS remained among the largest in Asia, second largest globally. Foreign investors previously showed particular interests in Chinese auto ABS products. Now they want more communications with domestic regulators to help more brokers provide sufficient liquidity and attract additional investors.

WANG HONGBIN, CEO OF CHINA EUROMONEY INSTITUTIONAL INVESTOR "As the regulator opened up the financial sector even more, foreign investors gradually changed their attitude from 'wait and see' to 'have a try'. Foreign investors might have felt strapped before because it's hard to fully understand the fundamentals of issuers and regulators' roadmap to implement the opening. We need more opportunities for top regulators and the market's leading participants to exchange views with players from multiple sectors."

TRACY CHEN, HEAD OF STRUCTURED CREDIT BRANDYWINE GLOBAL "Currently China's ABS market is dominated by banking investors, but in order to diversity the investor group, you need to attract (more players) like mutual fund, hedge fund and pension fund as well as insurance company. First is to set very good liquidity, then to build very simple transparent, straightforward deal structure, and then to provide data transparency.That's the way to make foreign investors feel comfortable about the market."

Until now, there are three major approaches for foreign investors to access China's ABS market: Bond Connect, the China Interbank Bond Market, and QFII.

ERIC JAN, HEAD OF CHINA INVESTMENT BARINGS ASSET MANAGEMENT "The performance track record has been short in China. There haven't been many defaults compared to an international rating agency whose model has been updated constantly. For example in 2008 and 2009, during the great financial crisis, all the models and data were reflected that particular event. So in China, nothing like this has happened yet. So from our perspective, who have similar concerns with other investors, we're wondering do we feel comfortable about investing in this market instead of how easy it is to access to this market? So a scheme like Bond Connect is great but there are more factors we take into consideration."

European financial expert Richard Hopkin suggests that information disclosure is a key element that China could borrow from more mature markets.

RICHARD HOPKIN, MANAGING DIRECTOR ASSOC. FOR FINANCIAL MARKETS IN EUROPE "One of the big debates during the financial crisis was wheather the fact that not enough disclosure had been made helped contribute to, perhaps not the triggering of the financial crisis but perhaps the losses we suffered afterwards. There's been a very strong push in Europe to disclose information. We find there are a lot of areas where we do need a lot more clarification from the regulators."