LedgerEdge, a new emerging ecosystem for the exchange of data and assets in the corporate bond market, has said Tim Cook, head of business development, will lead a series of market-wide working groups in the coming months to validate and refine the technology and business approach.
“We have the foundations and building blocks for the solution and the eco-system design; what we are looking for is correction or validation on that fundamental value proposition; how firms will use it and on how it needs to be integrated,” says David Nicol, CEO of LedgerEdge.
Tim Cook was formerly Head of EMEA and APAC Sales at LiquidityEdge, which was also founded by LedgerEdge founder and R3 CEO David E. Rutter. LiquidityEdge was sold to MarketAxess in 2019 for US$150 million. Cook also has extensive experience in fixed income from his tenures at EBS BrokerTec and Thomson Reuters.
He believes the success LiquidityEdge had in winning market share in US Treasury trading will be useful in supporting the development of LedgerEdge.
“When you plot it back, our success at LiquidityEdge was achieved through speaking to all the dealers and end customers that we were bringing on,” he says. “It was an education process. Ultimately the success of our company will be longevity, getting the arguments across and people seeing for their own eyes that this is beneficial for the market.”
The firm will use working groups to adopt an industry-led and collaborative approach to address what it sees as some of the biggest structural challenges in the corporate bond market. By involving all sides of the market from the outside, LedgerEdge hopes to ensure its platform is fit for purpose.
Nicol says, “If traders try to get a complex or large trade done today they have are to go to one or more brokers to find the price, use a platform in a different eco-system to assess liquidity at that price and all of those interactions leak data to the market. What we are providing is a more reactive and detailed way to construct orders and display access, so the trade gets done with minimal data leakage.”
Led by Cook, the working groups will investigate, test and refine product design, including the value proposition of using blockchain technology, artificial intelligence and secure enclave computing to improve market function. Based on this close collaboration with the market, LedgerEdge will build a prototype platform that lets participants share data and orders with more nuance and intelligence, and execute trades with minimal data leakage. It will also create an entirely new market for data in which users benefit from the value their own trade data generates.
The working group sessions, which will run from late September to late November, will also address technology integration, with the aim of making onboading as fast and easy as possible.
LedgerEdge’s working groups will commence in September. It is calling all fixed income industry participants interested in shaping the future of electronic corporate bond trading to email contact-us@ledgeredge.com
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