India, UK may sign finance agreements during Modi's visit

India and UK are expected to sign agreements in the financial sector during Prime Minister Narendra Modi's first official visit to Britain next week. This move will improve the business climate in India. Recommendations from India-UK Financial Partnership (IUKFP) led by Sir Gerry Grimstone, chairman of Standard Life, and Uday Kotak, founder of Kotak Mahindra bank are likely to form basis for agreements. 

Last year, the partnership was set up by finance ministers Arun Jaitley and George Osborne in both countries. The main logic behind it is to get a group of practitioners from both countries and use them as a resource for Indian policymakers.

Further, IUKFP suggested to focus on changing India's insolvency regime to improve the ease of doing business and increasing the country's national pension savings rate from 4 per cent of the population. Besides, India's growing corporate bond market is also the source of particular focus, with attention paid to limits on foreign ownership of bonds and the importance of developing an alternative finance stream at a time when Indian banks are constrained by ballooning non-performing loans, according to the partnership.