Fixed-income electronic trading platform MarketAxess has expanded its municipal bond integration with the Investortools’ platform, the latest phase of its Financial Information eXchange (FIX) integration.
The partnership, which will see MarketAxess display its offerings within the Investortools Dealer Network (IDN), will combine MarketAxess’ trading capabilities and Committee on Uniform Securities Identification Procedures (CUSIP) offerings with the portfolio management firm’s suite of analytics and trading tools. Clients can now incorporate muni offerings on MarketAxess into their IDN toolkit, allowing them to automate searching the secondary market, pre-allocation, optimisation, and then stage those candidate bonds for review and execution.
Daniel Kelly, head of municipal securities at MarketAxess, says: “The evolution of the municipal bond marketplace, especially in the past seven years, exemplifies the need for digitalisation and automation.” The latest move represents the “logical next step” in the firms’ relationship, ongoing since 2016, “as we move towards integrating our muni capabilities within the IDN”, Kelly adds. The IDN gives asset managers direct click-to-bid and click-to-trade access to liquidity throughout Investortools’ Perform software, providing straight-through-processing functionality, allowing users the ability to lift, bid and negotiate trades without needing to pivot away from the system.
James Morris, senior vice president at Investortools, says building out the order routing integrations with MarketAxess and bringing MarketAxess’ offerings into the IDN “is a major step forward in shaping the future of electronic fixed income trading”. “This gives our clients the ability to measure SMA portfolio construction in days instead of months while adding alpha through an STP user experience,” Morris adds. In Q1 2023, MarketAxess claims to have accounted for a 6.4% market share of muni bonds — up from 4.3% the year prior — representing $447 million in average daily volumes.
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