The UK’s consolidated tape for bonds is live, with 98% contributor coverage by notional trade value.
Etrading Software CEO Sassan Danesh told The DESK, “It’s basically everyone apart from TP ICAP, and they’ve told us they’ll be there from 31 August. We spoke to the FCA, our own board and the consultative committee to agree what the threshold needed to be for launch, and the figure we got back was between 75% and 80%.”
Explaining how the 98% coverage has been achieved, Danesh continued, “We had a lot of bilateral conversations with data providers. Our scale allowed us to access that nuance.”
“A key issue has been that the consolidated tape is simply a cost to contributors with no commercial benefit. In fact, the tape may even compete with the contributors’ own data sales, which can result in a double whammy. We took on board any concerns they had as much as possible.”
One such concern was that individual providers would have their data contribution quality publicly shared, through a potential ‘name-and-shame’ model. This has now been adjusted to aggregated KPIs, bundled by contributor type,
ETS Connect UK’s tape uses a single standards-based API, which aligns with recommended practices from the FIX Trading Community. It is built on Amazon Web Services cloud-native infrastructure.
Considering the next steps for the tape, “Once we have baselined the initial data then we can back test algorithms. We’ll be going through and increasing our algorithms and data sets for the first few months,” Danesh said.
“ I think this will continue all the way through the five years, because there’s always opportunities to improve. We’re also very keen to get proper research and systematic data analysis, and how we can improve it. Over time, we’ll look at increasing our links to academia.”
As ETS Connect has been preparing to launch, service providers have been rolling out their own CT-adjacent products.
READ MORE: Propellant, TransFICC launch consolidated data service
READ MORE: MarketAxess launches enhanced consolidated tape
The exact launch date for the accompanying EU bond tape, provided by Ediphy’s FairCT, has not yet been confirmed. Earlier this year, the company announced that it was being backed by Barclays, Citadel Securities, Deutsche Bank, TP ICAP and UBS Investment Bank
READ MORE: Citadel Securities, Deutsche Bank and more back FairCT
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