Bond market operator MarketAxess has agreed to buy MuniBrokers, a central electronic venue serving municipal bond inter-dealer brokers and dealers.
MuniBrokers connects 14 municipal securities broker’s and hundreds of institutional traders and broker dealers through a central electronic marketplace to trade over US$400 million of taxable and tax-exempt municipal bonds per day.
MuniBrokers is an aggregator of content distribution, trade processing, client connectivity and liquidity provision for the municipal inter-dealer broker market.
This acquisition is designed to expand MarketAxess’ existing municipal bond trading solution for global institutional investor and dealer clients. MarketAxess recently announced the expansion of liquidity provision for taxable municipal bond securities beyond the United States through its regulated trading venues in the United Kingdom, the European Union and Singapore, creating a more global marketplace.
In addition to the acquisition of MuniBrokers, MarketAxess and Hartfield, Titus & Donnelly, the inter-dealer municipal bond brokerage firm and the owner of MuniBrokers, have agreed that HTD will continue to use the MuniBrokers platform to ensure an uninterrupted level of liquidity is provided through the MuniBrokers platform.
Chris Concannon, president and chief operating officer of MarketAxess, said, “Connecting our leading trading technology with the liquidity of one of the industry’s largest electronic inter-dealer marketplace creates a compelling and diverse liquidity solution that will ultimately deliver an improved execution experience.”
The transaction is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2020, subject to the satisfaction of customary closing conditions.
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