Bond-trading platform operator MTS Markets International and market-data provider BondCliq have inked a deal that will mingle MTS BondsPro streaming live bond prices with BondCliq’s pre- and post-trade data on a single screen.
The vendors have been in negotiations since the start of the year and plan to flip the switch enabling the delivery sometime in early July, according to David Parker, head of US sales at MTS Markets.
"It's a relatively simple procedure from an infrastructure perspective," he told Markets Media.
In the meantime, both parties continue to work on the offering's eventual licensing details.
The primary driver for the licensing agreement is to help buy-side traders to put corporate bond liquidity into greater context, according to Parker.
“We're in an environment where your average desk is concerned with their revenues as well as their cost management,” he said.
"I think it helps when market participants can access information or access a broader swath of the market easier and better understand the market that they are trading."
Most corporate bond traders typically do not see the pre-trade, trade, and post-trade data aggregated on one front-end, according to Chris White, CEO of BondCliq.
"That is very helpful because those markets almost exist as two separate markets," he said. "You can see it on the TRACE tape constantly. You'll see bonds trading in sizes usually associated with electronic trading with market levels that are very different from where they are being quoted in institutional sizes."
White viewed the announcement as a gradual, incremental move towards a holistic view of the corporate bond market with centralized pricing, which will aid participants in making coherent decisions where to direct their order flow.
“The MTS data itself is already centralized in the fact that they have what we would call a central system where all the pricing in uniform," he explained. "When a price is put upon MTS, it is the price that everyone gets to see at the same time, that is why this particular marriage works."
By organizing all of the dealer markets into one place and then presenting them in a price-time priority is one way to get a sense of where the market is when the buy side wants to trade it, he added.