Crown Agents hosted a half-day debt management workshop "CS-DRMS - Helping Countries Better Manage their Debt Portfolios"in Slovenia last month, supported and funded by the Crown Agents Foundation.
The workshop, which was run in collaboration with the Centre of Excellence in Finance (CEF), was targeted at countries in South-East Europe. It was well attended with 13 delegates drawn from Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Israel, Kosovo, Latvia and Turkey. The event provided Crown Agents with the opportunity to introduce delegates to Crown Agents' sovereign debt software products and services.
Two software presentations/demonstrations were delivered - the first on CS-DRMS, the Commonwealth Secretariat's Debt Recording and Management System installed in 60 countries worldwide; and the second on a Public Debt Analytical Tool (CS-PDAT), software, scheduled for release in the first quarter of 2012. CS-PDAT is a fully menu-driven application to enable countries to both develop and operationalize debt strategy through production of an annual borrowing calendar. Given the continuing sovereign debt crisis in a number of countries, CS-PDAT will provide a very welcome and cost-effective addition to Debt Management Offices' software toolsets.
The first presentation by John Corkill, a debt consultant at Crown Agents, focused on the practical benefits of implementing CS-DRMS. He said: "Crown Agents is not only the official distributor of CS-DRMS to non-Commonwealth countries, our in-house team has the implementation know-how to ensure countries are able to successfully adopt the system as part of Government-wide integrated financial management information system solutions."
Arindam Roy, the Commonwealth Secretariat's Advisor and Head of Debt Management underscored the importance of CS-PDAT in "serving as a planning tool for debt strategy formulation and implementation of debt operations". He further commented that "a tool to promote strategic debt management with a risk focus was missing in many countries" and there was a "lack of generic software tools available in the market". "Loans were not included in off-the shelf systems and domestic debt market issuance was taken for granted," he said.
Our event followed a two and a half day CEF workshop entitled "Developments in Debt Management since the Crisis" run under the faculty of the resident IMF Regional Public Financial Management Advisor for South East Europe, Brian Olden.