MTS Adds Depth, Inventory Views to BondsPro

In May, the company rolled out an HTML5 version of BondsPro, which delivers load times that are 10 times as fast as MTS' previous Citrix-driven platform, and which also provides compatibility with all modern browsers (such as Internet Explorer 10 and above) and mobile devices.

Now, MTS is looking to leverage this new technology to provide trading members with alternative views of market data, says Amanda Meatto, head of US buy-side and sell-side sales at MTS. The first functionality to be rolled will be "inventory" views, which allow users to copy and paste data from the platform into spreadsheet programs for historical analysis.

"Many users use our API to consume our market data, so they don't even see the GUI. But for those that do, they couldn't extract the data before. With the inventory views, we are providing them with a way to import and export the data," she adds.

Earlier this year, MTS added depth of book functionality to cater to institutional clients looking to execute high-volume trades that require the ability to see the full amount of securities available at all levels of the order book, Meatto says. In the past, the company displayed top-of-book market data for the universe of 13,000 bonds traded on the platform, but the platform now also displays the top 10 bids and offers.

"MTS Markets' client base is a mix of institutional and retail traders, so we are always trying to provide a market where they can coexist. Retail traders might be focused on buying and selling just five bonds, but institutional clients might be looking to trade a million bonds, so they need to see the sizes of bids and offers," Meatto says, adding that the firms will still be meeting their best execution requirements by taking trade size into account. "You can't sweep the stack in fixed income like you can in equities, as credit is illiquid, so this is the best way to execute larger trades," she adds.

Monetizing Data
Last month, MTS' BondVision European bond trading platform expanded the delivery mechanisms for pre-trade information on banks' bond inventories on its platform, in response to ongoing electronification of the fixed income market (IMD, Sept. 18), meaning that the platform now leverages a range of delivery mechanisms, including APIs, third-party vendors, FTP file downloads, and its own front-end interface to cater to different levels of technological sophistication among user firms.

In comparison, MTS' international business provides a range of delivery mechanisms, including its GUI and an API leveraging the FIX 4.4 format, but Meatto says clients and broker-dealers are now asking for new ways to consume data from the platform, and as a result, MTS is now in talks with unnamed data distribution partners to carry its data.

"In Europe, BondVision has 95 percent of the market, so the data is super-relevant. The US is slightly different as we are building our market here, so we are treading lightly and trying to explore how best to monetize our data," she adds.