A New Dawn for Municipal Bond Reference Data

The U.S. municipal bond market is extremely large with over one million individual bonds from over 50 thousand issuers. While there are some big issuers, such as state or city metropolitan authorities, most of these bonds are issued by smaller entities such as local school districts or hospitals.

Accurate and Timely Reference Data

Availability of accurate and timely reference data on this fragmented universe of bonds is essential to investors and dealers since it is required to identify issues and their characteristics, allow for analysis and risk management, settlement of trades and valuation and management of portfolios. Electronic trading platforms – a growing force in bond liquidity – are especially reliant on this.

Reference Data Transparency

Historically, the marketplace has struggled with reference data transparency and consistency in the municipal bond segment. Although primary information is publicly available from the Municipal Securities Rule Making Board, comprehensive packaged data required to feed downstream applications was until recently only available from a handful of large vendors who charged a premium price for access.

This high commercial barrier to entry is compounded by the application of onerous restrictions on how this data can be used by a client. Since these vendors also own many other businesses, such as pricing and valuation, portfolio analytics and index services, it is not in their interests to allow their muni bond reference data customers to deploy the data for purposes that might create a competitive product.

Why sell reference data to a client who intends to create municipal bond evaluated prices, if this firm might eat into your own profitable business in this field?

BondView’s Municipal Bond Reference Data Service breaks this mould. Accurate and timely data with breadth (1.5m bonds from over 50k issuers) and depth (130 attributes) is available to customers in a cost effective package without oppressive use considerations. Easy access to mission critical data fuel facilitates innovation and growth in application areas such as:

• Portfolio analytics
• Pricing and valuation
• Credit analysis
• Index construction

A once sleepy, traditional market is beginning to see development and change on the back of financial technology trends, and BondView’s new product is actively contributing to this new dawn.

To find out how Bondview RDS can help you, visit this page or contact us at data@bondview.com.