The board of the Bucharest Stock Exchange (BVB) decided to grant Polish brokerage firm Ipopema Securities membership to the local capital market, according to a BVB announcement. This means that Ipopema will be able to connect directly to the trading system of the BVB and to trade Romanian stocks for its clients.

This comes as the Polish pension funds are more and more interested to invest in Romanian companies. Polish Ludwik Sobolewski, the CEO of Bucharest Stock Exchange, told Romania-Insider.com that he will go to Poland to talk to pension funds managers there. “They are really interested in Romanian dividend stocks,” Sobolewski mentioned.

Ipopema is one of the largest independent brokerage firms in Poland and in the last five year made between 6 percent and 11 percent of the trading value on the Warsaw Stock Exchange. Ipopema is also active on the Budapest Stock Exchange.

Ipopema is the first large international broker that enters the local capital market in recent years, as the number of intermediaries on the Bucharest Stock Exchange almost halved since 2008. This included important exists from the market, such as those of ING Bank and UniCredit CA IB Securities, in 2012.

However, starting 2013, the Bucharest Stock Exchange saw some improvement in trading volumes, as private placements and especially public listings of state owned companies such as Nuclearelectrica, Romgaz and Electrica brought new investors to the market.

In the first half of 2014, stock trading value on the Bucharest Stock Exchange was almost EUR 1.6 billion, which is EUR 12.9 million per day, but this includes the EUR 444 million Electrica IPO out of which some EUR 355 million was done on the local market.

Raiffeisen Bank and Swiss Capital were the most active intermediaries on the market in the first six months, each making about a quarter of the share trading value. Czech firm Wood and local bank BCR came next, with about 10 percent each, according to BVB data.

Andrei Chirileasa, andrei@romania-insider.com