Tradeweb is acquiring Trumid in a US$1.97 billion deal, further consolidating the fixed income e-trading landscape.
During a conference call, Tradeweb stated that the deal will increase its access to grey markets and new issue trading – areas that Trumid has been developing in for a number of years, most recently through its automated cross-protocol execution offering.
READ MORE: Trumid launches cross-protocol execution automation
The firm also aims to further its relationships with hedge funds and systematic market participants through the acquisition.
Brett Chappell, independent fixed income expert at TransFICC and senior advisor at Translution Capital, told The DESK, “This acquisition may be less about adding trading volume and more about controlling how liquidity is sourced, matched, and executed across the corporate bond lifecycle.
“While the immediate competitive threat is to MarketAxess in the US, the real strategic opportunity lies in bringing Trumid’s execution technology into Europe’s more fragmented credit markets.”
Tradeweb has long been an innovator in credit market trading, introducing new protocols to the market and leading the portfolio trading uprising.
When questioned during the conference call on the choice to buy rather than build, CEO Billy Hult said, “We’ve got here from being builders of marketplaces. That’s who we are. This is our fourth acquisition since I’ve been CEO – I strongly believe that you can and do need to do both.
“This Trumid deal showcases both skills. We will acquire two unique protocols, Swarm and Attributed Trading. We will acquire deep penetration into the hedge fund community. But we are very excited about what we get to build with our new partners: more insight and analytics, building the electronification framework of voice-centric flows.”
“It frees us up to lean harder into an area of the business that matters to us, which is EM credit. We see a lot of room to grow going forward, we’re going to compete there.”
The news follows ICE’s acquisition of Tradeweb competitor MarketAxess earlier this year, reducing the number of platforms in competition with one another.
READ MORE: ICE buys MarketAxess
Tradeweb denied that its decision to acquire Trumid was influenced by this news, with Hult stating, “I’d like to say it influenced us, but it didn’t.”
“We’ve grown up as a company competing with Bloomberg from day one. We embrace competition in the marketplace, we think it’s good for clients. We have shown time and again that we can win in tough environments against tough competition.”
The firm took a strong lead over the competition in September, reporting a record US$11 billion in average daily volumes.
READ MORE: Tradeweb’s crown stays solid in US credit e-trading battle
Expected to complete in H1 2026, the deal consists of US$1.75 billion for the business and US$220 million for tax assets. The total consideration of the transaction is US$1.89 billion in cash and US$82 million in equity.
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