Surge In Fixed Income Trading Drives Need For A Single Data Management Platform

The surge in trading volume in fixed-income products — particularly in mortgage-backed issues as well as municipal and corporate bonds — in the U.S. over the past few years has spurred a need among financial services firms for a single platform that can manage data across asset classes, instruments and region, according to a recent Aite Group report. Along with the growth in fixed-income trading, firms have aggressively adopted electronic trading in fixed-income instruments, adds the Boston-based research firm, which predicts that more than 50 percent of fixed-income trading will take place electronically by the end of 2008.

According to the report, which was commissioned by Vhayu, a provider of streaming tick processing and persistence software, the expansion of electronic trading in fixed income and the diversification of fixed-income products is now driving the need for financial services firms to embrace a single global, multi-asset-class trading platform — a crucial first step in enabling firms to quickly identify trading opportunities. Users need a solution that can "map data from disparate sources, capture the data in real time and provide access to historical data," Aite asserts. "This data can then be used to strategically uncover event-based fixed-income opportunities and create new strategy models," according to Sang Lee, managing partner, Aite Group.