TP ICAP, the interdealer broker and market infrastructure provider, has launched MATCHBOOK ReBalance, a new electronic trading solution that aims to reduce residual risks in fixed income portfolios.
This will be separate from the broking side of TP ICAP and operates as a purely electronic and regulated venue.
MATCHBOOK ReBalance can be used across emerging market, investment grade, high yield, financial and sterling corporate bonds. The platform runs matching sessions allowing traders to clear up unwanted positions and mitigate secondary risks in their portfolios.
It forms part of TP ICAP’s growing portfolio of post-trade risk management and optimisation tools, including MATCHBOOK Rates, which helps traders to minimise fixing risks in forward rate agreements (FRAs), and MATCHBOOK NDF, which aims to reduce date mismatch risks in Asian and LatAm non-deliverable forward (NDF) markets. TP ICAPs bilateral compression service, ClearCompress, is also part of this suite of solutions.
MATCHBOOK ReBalance uses TP ICAP’s proprietary dark pool technology ensuring the details of orders and trades are closed and therefore no information is leaked into the market, pre-trade. Clients can upload their entire portfolio onto the platform and then choose what they want to trade, with price parameters, rather than search through hundreds of line items.
Mark Russell, chief commercial officer at TP ICAP Credit, said, “MATCHBOOK ReBalance gives our clients a simple, easy-to-use system that will allow them to reduce residual risk. This platform helps eliminate the time consuming task of trading residual risk, providing our clients with a fresh turnover and a cleaner balance sheet; allowing them to spend more time focusing on client flow and less time on admin-heavy stale positions.”
In its Q3 results, the firm saw global broking revenue fall 5% lower than the previous year on a constant currency basis which it said reflected weaker trading volumes in the third quarter compared with the strong prior year comparative and followed the strong H1 performance dominated by the unprecedented macroeconomic backdrop that was characterised by the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The firm’s buy-side focused agency trading business did well, helping its institutional services revenue grow 28% higher on the prior year on a constant currency basis, while its data and analytics business continued its trajectory of growth for the first nine months, with revenue 8% higher than the prior year on a constant currency basis.
In June the division, headed by Eric Sinclair, launched its Bond Evaluated Pricing (BEP) service which allows clients to determine a bond’s fair value at regular intervals throughout a trading day. This can be used for price verification, XVA calculations, stress testing, general pricing and valuations. The BEP service utilises the firm’s new data warehouse and data science capabilities and incorporates third-party data. Its TP ICAP WebStore has also gone live, which allows customers to purchase data directly from the division and thereby bypass intermediated distribution costs.
In The DESK’s Trading Intentions Survey 2020, 18% of buy-side traders reported using TP ICAP’s TrueQuote data source pre-trade.
TP ICAP is currently in the process of acquiring Liquidnet, the block-trading market operator and trading services provider.
©The DESK 2020
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