In its latest occasional paper titled "Mumbai as an International Financial Centre: A Roadmap", the study says, it is important for a centre like Mumbai to accelerate to a level of sophistication required to retain a more than proportionate share of the resulting high value business transactions.

Mumbai has significant first mover advantage vis-a-vis other centres in India. It has a high density of both formal and informal financial firms which creates positive externalities. The city also has the best social infrastructure in terms of education, health and work culture, in addition to the availability of high standards of professional services in the areas of finance. Time-zone wise, Mumbai's geographical location is almost a mid-point between the important international financial centres in Tokyo and Singapore on the one hand, and London, Frankfurt and Paris on the other.

This makes Mumbai an ideal city to develop as an active international financial centre which could serve as an effective financial bridge for the south Asian region as a whole, the report said.

The study was conducted by Bombay First - an initiative of corporates in Mumbai, with the help of the Credit Rating Information Services of India Ltd (Crisil), and was co-sponsored by the EXIM bank and HDFC Ltd.

The study report said, "An International financial centre provides specialised financial services on a global scale, brings about international prominence, attracts high volumes of foreign direct investment (FDI), creates employment opportunities, improves financial sector sophistication and enhances transformation to a high value, services based economy. Having already established itself as the financial capital of India, Mumbai would need to build upon the advantages it already has and work on a strategy to emerge as a regional financial centre. Increasing deregulation of more markets and technology-enabled solutions will lead to higher volume of global financial business. The study opines that Mumbai can develop as an international financial centre only if it can provide necessary, cost effective and high quality physical and regulatory infrastructure. Mumbai today lacks good telecom infrastructure. Besides their poor quality, telecom services are relatively more expensive in comparison to those availablein cities like Singapore or Hong Kong. Major changes will also have to be brought about in the urban land use regulations and tenancy laws so as to improve quality and availability of housing and office accommodation in Mumbai.

In charting a road map for Mumbai, the study elucidates the developments in select centres in the Asian region such as Hong Kong, Singapore and Shanghai ,and delineates the various measures which would be required to be affected for Mumbai to emerge as an important international financial centre.