BRICS New Development Bank not to compete with other international financial institutions - president

SHANGHAI, December 10. /TASS/. The New Development Bank (NDB, BRICS Bank) will not compete with other international financial institutions, its first ever president Kundapur Vaman Kamath told TASS on Thursday. "If there are any other multilateral development banks, I would think that the situation we are looking at is collaboration and cooperation, rather than competition," president said. According to Kamath, "if the founding of developing countries for just one element - infrastructure - is (1) trillion dollars (annually), and all the NDBs put together their lending is hundred billion dollars, there is still 900 billion dollars not done, so I would think there is only cooperation and collaboration that is left, not competition." President also said the new bank could adopt practices of old and experienced financial institutions. "The existing multilateral development banks have got very long experience going to 70-80 years, in some cases 60 years. And there is a lot to learn from this experience. At the same time if you look at the fact that a developing bank only does maybe 10 per cent of what needs to be done, the rest of the lending is coming from the marketplace: commercial banking world, capital market, etc.," he said. "For us we start at presumption that we are to learn from everyone, not only from multilateral development banks, we have to learn from commercial banks, we have to learn from investment banks, capital markets, because each one of these could be designing products differently, pricing differently, etc. I think being a young development bank and being giving the character of new we have to learn from all these entities to actually do what we want to do," Kamath said. Currently, the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), which is part of the World Bank Group, and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development are the world’s biggest multilateral development banks, with capital totaling $190 bln and 30 bln euro, respectively. Read more