The Beijing Stock Exchange will step up efforts to increase the number of listed companies and enrich its bond and fund products, enhancing its attractiveness to both innovative companies and investors, the exchange said on Wednesday.

Zhou Guihua, chairman of the Beijing Stock Exchange, said the BSE will continuously optimize relevant rules and services to help quality firms get listed at a faster pace and nurture a group of enterprises that take the lead in innovative development and corporate governance.

Institutional arrangements of the bourse regarding getting listed, refinancing, mergers and acquisitions, and equity incentives will be improved, Zhou said on Wednesday while addressing the Annual Conference of Financial Street Forum 2022 in Beijing.

The exchange will also work to enrich the variety of investment products available, Zhou said. It will launch publicly offered convertible bonds as soon as possible, study the introduction of credit bonds and asset securitization products and improve the market index system while exploring the unveiling of related fund products, such as listed open-ended funds and exchange-traded funds.

To attract more investors to the bourse and make it an important channel for wealth management, the BSE will continuously improve arrangements regarding trading and information disclosure and put the mechanism of margin trading and short selling into place, he said.

Zhou added the exchange will strengthen cooperation with overseas exchanges and study potential connectivity mechanisms to support innovative small and medium-sized enterprises in tapping both the domestic and overseas markets for development.

China announced in September last year that it would set up the BSE as the third stock exchange on the Chinese mainland, following the Shanghai and Shenzhen bourses, and build it into a major base serving innovative SMEs.

Beginning trading on Nov 15,2021, the one-year-old Beijing bourse now has 126 listed companies and a total market value of more than 200 billion yuan ($27.96 billion), according to the exchange.

Over 27 billion yuan was raised via public offerings on the exchange and the number of investors qualified for BSE trading has exceeded 5.2 million, marking a good beginning of the bourse's mission of becoming a key cradle for innovative SMEs.

Shang Qingjun, an official of the public company department of the China Securities Regulatory Commission, said at the forum that the bourse has achieved steady and healthy development in its first year of operation, featuring a growing appeal to SMEs and a fast listing process.

Looking ahead, expanding market size and introducing more high-quality listed companies will be a "prominent task" for the exchange, Shang said.

"The market size and brand influence of the exchange need to be improved as soon as possible," Shang said. "Market liquidity and valuation levels are generally in line with the characteristics of SMEs, but there remains a certain gap between them and high market expectations."

The Beijing bourse has recently ramped up efforts to improve market functions. Notably, the bourse launched its first market index — the BSE 50 — on Monday. The index tracks 50 Beijing-listed companies with large market capitalizations and good liquidity conditions to reflect the overall market performance.

The BSE 50 rose 0.64 percent on Wednesday to close at 1019.37 points, after jumping by 2.55 percent on Monday and shedding 1.53 percent on Tuesday.

On Friday, the BSE unveiled draft rules on introducing market makers onto the bourse to reduce transaction costs. The bourse also will halve the commissions it charges for stock trading to 0.025 percent of the transaction value from Dec 1 and is scheduled to launch technical tests of margin trading and short selling next month.