Google, Norway’s wealth fund back real-time UK bond auction By Reuters

By Tommy Reggiori Wilkes

LONDON (Reuters) – Google Cloud, Norway’s sovereign wealth fund and Swiss bank UBS have joined forces to back a bid to manage real-time recording of UK bond market trades, the tech firm told Reuters fixed that leads the plan.

British regulators last year unveiled proposals to build a “consolidated tape” to collect market data on the equity and bond markets, with the launch of a bond data feed in the first place to help investors identify the better deals and enhance the attractiveness of UK capital markets.

A longtime feature of Wall Street, the European Union approved a law requiring trading platforms to hand over price data for bonds and stocks to an operator for a fee.

Bond trading is fragmented across multiple venues and often done bilaterally rather than through an exchange, limiting price transparency and arming some players with more information than others.

Britain’s Financial Conduct Authority said last month it expected to launch a tender to choose a firm to run a bond strip by the end of 2024, and the industry expects to have one running by the end of 2026.

London-based Ediphy, a technology provider for fixed income markets, said in a statement on Wednesday that it is launching fairCT alongside several firms, including Cboe Global Markets (NYSE: ), FactSet and TP ICAP (LON: ), which is to be Great Britain. tape operator.

After previous regulatory efforts to build one failed, “we’re starting to get a lot more confidence that a (band) is viable,” said Chris Murphy, CEO of Ediphy and former head of UBS’s Global FX, Rates and Credit business. .

Ediphy has decided to partner with industry players, including Alphabet’s (NASDAQ: ) cloud unit, where the data could be stored, Murphy told Reuters.

“We have to make sure we’re not optimizing something for a vested interest in the market,” he added.

He declined to say whether any of the firms have a financial stake in the initiative.

Regulators and investors generally support the tape concept, but exchanges have opposed one to protect their lucrative data, while banks and asset managers say without their transactions there would be no data.

Murphy said British regulators, to avoid the bond tape becoming “a failure”, needed to ensure it was accessible and that some participants did not delay in submitting data.

“It’s about trying to make sure they have the right balance of carrot and stick,” he said.