LONDON – Google Cloud, Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, and Swiss bank UBS Group (NYSE: UBS) have joined forces to back a bid to run Britain’s real-time record of transactions in bond markets, the fixed-income technology firm leading the plan told Reuters.
Last year, British regulators unveiled proposals to build a “consolidated tape” that would collate market data across stock and bond markets, with a bond data feed launching first, to help investors spot the best deals and boost the appeal of UK capital markets.
Long a feature of Wall Street, the European Union has approved a law requiring trading platforms to hand over price data for bonds and stocks, for a fee, to an operator.
Bond trading is fragmented across multiple venues and often done bilaterally rather than via an exchange, limiting price transparency and arming some players with more information than others.
Last month, Britain’s Financial Conduct Authority said it expected to begin a tender to choose a firm to run a bond tape by end-2024, and the industry expects one to be running by late 2026.
In a statement on Wednesday, London-based Ediphy, a technology provider for fixed-income markets, said it was launching fairCT alongside several firms, also including Cboe Global Markets, FactSet, and TP ICAP, to be the UK tape operator.
After previous regulatory efforts to build one fizzled, “we are starting to get much more confidence that a [tape] is viable”, said Chris Murphy, CEO of Ediphy and UBS’ former head of Global FX, Rates and Credit business.
Murphy told Reuters that Ediphy decided to partner with players across the industry, including Alphabet (NASDAQ: GOOG) unit Google’s cloud subsidiary, where data could be stored.
“We need to make sure we are not optimizing something for a vested interest in the market,” he added.
He declined to say whether any of the firms had a financial stake in the initiative.
Regulators and investors generally support the concept of a tape but exchanges have opposed one to guard their lucrative data, while banks and asset managers say that without their trades there would be no data.
Murphy said British regulators, to avoid the bond tape becoming “a flop”, needed to ensure it was affordable and that some participants did not delay submitting their data.
“It’s about trying to make sure they get the right balance between carrot and stick,” he said.
(Source: ReutersReuters)
