Need to find the complete profile for 100, 1000 or even 1m municipal bonds?

Historically it has been a difficult and expensive process to capture and store municipal bond data and ensure that it remains current with regular updates. Multiple data sources were frequently required, often in incompatible formats.

Using BondView’s Municipal Bond Reference Data Service (RDS) means you no longer need to maintain and update expensive databases. Muni data can be incorporated into user and corporate applications easily and quickly. 

BondView RDS includes all the descriptive data, from basic to extensive security, that the majority of user applications require. High quality reference data on over 1.5 million U.S. Municipal Bond issues from over 50,000 different issuers, searchable using a variety of industry standard identifiers and supplied in a number of different formats.

Sources for such municipal bond reference data of sufficient coverage, quality and granularity are limited, and options are shrinking due to vendor consolidation. Furthermore, the traditional sources are very expensive and user rights are typically onerous and restrictive.

Use Case Example

Our client, a leading financial advisory firm, was looking for a high quality and comprehensive source of highly liquid municipal bonds to provide a virtual inventory. The value proposition was that their own brokers could offer this “virtual” inventory for sale without needing to own the bonds. This meant that on an any given day these very liquid bonds were likely to be available to trade in small and large sizes.

The bonds in the BondView 500 Index – the 500 most traded and widely held in the muni market – were exactly the kind of inventory that our client wished to present to their users.

 

fig.1 Example Bondview 500 Index

Bondview was easily able to offer a reference data solution in the customized form of the Bondview 500 Municipal Bond Liquid Index which provides a regularly updated list of the 500 most liquid bonds.

Using this approach, our client enabled their own customers to rapidly filter the highly liquid component of the municipal bond universe using specified criteria to find investments that met their precise specifications. Our client wanted to further filter these liquid issues according to various descriptions to add value for their customers. They requested, and we easily provided, these static and dynamic filters:

Static Data: Issuer Name, Bond Type, Sector, Maturity, Coupon, State, Tax Status etc.

Dynamic Data: Estimated Price, Last 90 Days Trading Volume, Amount Offered For Sale in Last 90 days, Amount Held By Bond Funds, Number Of Funds Holding this Bond, Liquidity Index Ranking.

Having screened the available bonds for suitable investment possibilities, the selection could be further analyzed in a portfolio context, knowing that they were easily tradeable.

BondView’s RDS was able to provide exactly what the customer needed, delivered in an API format, in a cost effective fashion. Our customized approach meant that our client was able to use only the data that they required in just the way that they wanted, without any unnecessary conditions and constraints.

To find out how Bondview RDS can help you, see: https://join.bondview.com/bondviews-municipal-bond-reference-data-service  or contact us at data@bondview.com.