The front page of Friday's Australian Financial Review carried an article on the proposals from Treasury and ASIC to foster the retail corporate bond market. The plans reportedly centre around providing relief from the current requirement for a full prospectus to be prepared for each and every sale of bonds marketed to retail investors.For a listed entity it is usually easier to sell further shares than it is to sell bonds. ASIC and Treasury want to address this anomaly, perhaps through the introduction of a short-form prospectus that can be used by listed entities to undertake retail bond issuance.This action is to be commended as it should open up an asset class, fixed interest, to retail investors that has been practicably inaccessible. Effectively, there has not been a retail bond market in Australia since the 1980s.Recently this has started to change a little with Tabcorp and AMP both undertaking highly publicised and well received retail issues earlier this year. Heritage Building Society (an unlisted entity) is currently in the process of selling a minimum of A$30 million of bonds and the Brookfield Multiplex Group sold A$57 million of secured bonds in July and is now marketing another A$65 million issue.All of these issues are or will be listed on the ASX. However, there are only 23 vanilla bond or floating rate note issues listed on the ASX at the present time, providing a very limited selection, and many of these are not investment grade and some are perpetual. Both of these features present particular challenges for retail investors. Ideally, retail investors need to be able to access investment grade corporate bonds and have fixed interest securities as a core part of their investment portfolios. This is particularly critical for those managing their own superannuation funds.Of the A$1.15 trillion invested in superannuation as at the end of June 2009, self managed superannuation funds account for approximately one third of that amount and are the second largest sector by fund type, only just being exceeded by retail funds. Effectively A$330 million of superannuation funds do not have access to fixed interest as an asset class.It is true that some retail investors can access the wholesale corporate bond market but to do that it is necessary to qualify as a sophisticated investor and have the capacity to be able to buy bonds in minimum parcels of A$0.5 million at a time. Clearly, to build up any sort of diversified fixed interest portfolio would require considerable financial resources.