SunGard Adds Connectivity to Fixed Income Venue MTS BondVision

By connecting to BondVision, SunGard is adding cross-asset trading capabilities for its clients by bringing the European bond-trading platform to its pool of electronic equity, fixed income and derivatives markets worldwide.

"As one of Europe's leading electronic fixed income trading markets with more than 500 unique counterparties and average daily volumes exceeding €100billion ($125 billion), selecting the right technology providers is critical," says Fabrizio Testa, CEO of MTS.

Equitisation or Standardization

For Philippe Carré, the global head of connectivity for SunGard’s capital markets business, customers are increasingly looking to combine previously-siloed operations into multi-channel venues.

“We are witnessing a sort of 'equitization' of the fixed-income model in the sense that firms now want to be able to access fixed income markets in the same way that they do for other asset classes,” he says. “Firms are trying to insert those new asset classes into their existing trading infrastructure. They are therefore trying to de-silo some of their activities while leveraging their technical knowledge and expertise of managing electronic trading.” 

Changes in fixed income market structure are pushing for new models to arise and for more electronic trading. Some argue that this is in the direct evolution line of the fixed income market, one of the last bastions of Wall Street to resist electronic trading.

“What we refer to when we talked about 'equitization' is the use of technology to allow people to use some of the features of the equity markets, such as the central limit order book, to better serve their needs But it does not mean this is the only way the market can grow,” Carre says. “But there is an increasing appetite from both platform and clients to facilitate electronic trading, or to give access to vendors for clients to be able to trade these instruments, so it would only be logical for us to carry on adding new market connectivity in that space.”