Macrobond Adds Fitch CDS Prices to Workstation, Datafeeds

Fitch is providing Macrobond with its entire universe of CDS Index Benchmark Prices─which incorporate daily consensus CDS pricing for global entities and individual CDS Pricing─as well as Fitch's proprietary Liquidity Scores and 10 years of historical data. Fitch will deliver the prices at the end of each day via FTP download, which Macrobond will make available to clients via its data workstation and feeds, allowing them to use the CDS data in its time-series charting and analysis tools.

"Users will be able to see the raw data that Fitch provides─which we gather from market makers─as tabled data on the screen, and then they will be able to chart it and see the full CDS curve for that entity. We are also providing Macrobond with liquidity scores so users can see how liquid the price is," says Mark McNerney, head of strategic partnerships at Fitch Solutions.

Macrobond is different from most data vendors to which Fitch provides data, McNerney says, since in this case the data will be used by end users such as economists and strategists who use the Macrobond platform for research purposes, whereas other vendors such as Interactive Data or SuperDerivatives, which use its data as an input to derive evaluations that they provide to clients.

"The initial interest came from a large Nordic client who got us involved with Macrobond... but now we are making our data available to Macrobond's client base of economists and strategists who can use our CDS data in this charting [and] time-series research tool," he adds.

Macrobond chief executive Tomas Liljeborg says adding Fitch's data will equip users with greater transparency into the global credit markets. "Credit markets are constantly moving, so being able to offer our users access to Fitch's latest CDS pricing and liquidity data will help to make them more agile and informed when taking credit risk decisions," he says.

Fitch and Macrobond have no current plans to expand the deal to cover other datasets, though officials say Fitch Solutions is currently engaged in exploratory work to determine how to leverage other datasets for charting and analysis, including its ratings.