"The Iraq Stock Exchange's Year Book for 2020 traces the notable highlights of activities undertaken by the ISX and other elements of the national capital market, alongside the decisions made by the Iraqi Securities Commission and ISX Board of Governors.
Since 2008, the Exchange has been the first among elements of Iraqi capital market to adopt financial inclusion and digital transformation in carrying out its duties, through the following actions:
1.Issuing an International Securities Identification Number (ISIN) code for each ISX-listed shareholding company on an annual basis, among prerequisites of the Exchange's Electronic Trading and Central Deposit Systems.
2.Issuing a unified electronic identification code (Investor Number) for each current and future shareholder of securities that belong to ISX-listed companies.
3.Converting physical paper- and cardboard-form investor certificates into electronic format (Dematerialization), and thereby they can be conveniently processed by electronic systems for the purposes of share trading, depositing, maintaining the Register of Shareholders, effecting pledge and reservation orders issued by official bodies, and distributing dividends on shareholders of any ISX-listed company.
4.Avoiding cash transactions and opted for banking-based services that meet customer due diligence and anti-money laundering regulations, with the adoption of same-day funds settlement (T+0).
5.Adopting a T+0 settlement cycle for securities transactions (same-day trade settlement), consequently there were no share capital-related problems, implying that the Exchange has assumed the role of a custodian.
6.Launching a shareholder account inquiry system that enables investors to check their trading balances. The service was provided by the ISX free of charge for 2020, due to the circumstances of Covid-19 pandemic.
7.Launching an online share trading system to enable youth and other computer-literate age groups to deal in securities of Iraqi listed companies according to the relevant prevailing instructions, as being the next step on the way of the ISX to financial inclusion.
8.Utilizing communications media, most notably Zoom, to organize workshops for shareholders, to disclose financial indicators of ISX-listed companies, and to hold training programs for students of universities and institutes. In the course of 2020, the Iraq Stock Exchange succeeded in hosting:
A. Nine workshops for financial and data disclosure, where managing and financial directors presented 2019 financial statements of their listed companies to those interested in trading activities of faculty members and researchers.
B. Three workshops to train students of universities and institutes.
C. A workshop to introduce the public to share trading.
9. Participating in nine virtual Zoom-mediated workshops which were held by the Federation of Euro-Asian Stock Exchanges (FEAS) and Arab Federation of Exchanges (AFE), and five physical others organized by Iraqi institutions.
Here, it is pertinent to set out the success of the Central Bank of Iraq (CBI) and its commercial counterparts to build relevant databases necessary for financial inclusion, to adopt digitizing transactions in their payment systems, and to implement the Real Time Gross Settlement system (RTGS) in their activities.