B2Scan, the pre-trade liquidity data platform for bond markets, has shut down after eight years. The CEO and founder of B2Scan, Frédéric Semour, was not contactable for comment. The firm’s website has been removed.
The platform launched in the first wave of bond market liquidity tools (2011-2012), and at one point collected inventories from 17 banks, along with one-sided positions, bids and offers on bonds, and provided a search engine for buy-side users. Searching by geography and instrument type, along with credit rating and minimum size of order, asset managers could identify all the offers and all the bids that corresponded to that criteria. It launched a partnership with trading platform MTS in 2015.
In The DESK’s annual Trading Intentions Survey, which analyses buy-side use of liquidity aggregation tools, B2Scan had increased the proportion of users over the last five years from 17% in 2015 to 28% in 2019, however, no traders had ever classified themselves as ‘major users’ of the tool, and rumours persisted that it was struggling commercially.
Many firms have struggled to make money through increasing liquidity in the bond markets either by connecting traders or giving them pre-trade information support. B2Scan’s rival Algomi, which launched as part of the second wave of platforms in 2014, has seen continued investment rounds and has launched several different offerings, settling on the Algomi ALFA platform acquired from AllianceBernstein in 2017.
Bond platform closures over time:
• Morgan Stanley Bond Pool closed in 2013.
• Goldman Sachs’ GSessions closed in 2013.
• Citi Credit Cross closed in 2013.
• Bondcube shut down in 2015 shortly after launching.
• State Street FI Cross shut in 2016 leading to closure of Bloomberg’s associated BBX crossing product.
• Electronifie was bought by Trumid in March 2017.
• Euronext’s BondMatch was shut down on 21 July 2017 with Euronext Synapse, the new multilateral trading facility (MTF) powered by Algomi being mooted as its replacement.
• KCG sold its Bondpoint platform to ICE in October 2017.
• ITG shut POSIT FI officially in November 2017.
• B2Scan shut in October 2019.
©TheDESK 2019
