BLOG — Jun 17, 2021
Clients of IHS Markit’s thinkFolio get access to pre-trade liquidity insights with Lucera’s LumeALFA Analytics and Neptune Axes
To respond to evolving fixed income market structure themes and associated navigation challenges, IHS Markit is focused on continually enhancing its front-office suite of capabilities to provide richer pre-trade insights and price discovery toolkits for users. In a significant step forward, we have established connectivity with Lucera and Neptune Networks ("Neptune") to deliver to mutual clients of our thinkFolio investment management platform, Lucera and Neptune access to high-quality pre-trade data and liquidity signals.
Lucera's LumeALFA Analytics is a new lighter version of its LumeALFA service, a leading fixed income data aggregation and market surveillance tool that provides its clients with a consolidated view of client -selected pre-trade liquidity data from major electronic venues and dealer inventory feeds, as well as connectivity to client-selected execution venues, including single dealer executions. LumeALFA Analytics is designed to provide a real-time view of the entire bond market, including government bonds, investment-grade and high-yield corporates, emerging markets, municipal debt and structured credit.
Lucera's connectivity to IHS Markit's thinkFolio will enable mutual clients of Lucera and IHS Markit to interact with and utilize pre-trade liquidity data and message parsing provided by IHS Markit to help them streamline trading decisions and facilitate best execution analyses. Portfolio managers and traders using thinkFolio can now leverage LumeALFA Analytics to target, search for and sync specific liquidity profiles that support portfolio construction, relative value analyses and rebalancing while also providing dynamic watch lists that alert users to particular market activity.
As part of its enhanced liquidity data delivery model, thinkFolio clients can now also access Neptune's aggregated, real-time axes and inventory directly in the context of other market data. Neptune employs an innovative approach to standardizing large volumes of unstructured data and aggregating liquidity across a vast community of sell-side dealers reducing the "noise" and enabling better informed trading decisions. Neptune now carries $450bn+ in daily gross notional across 70,000 axes and inventory items from well over +38,500 individual bonds. They cover 28 denominations across credit (IG/HY), emerging markets, rates and newer additions in ABS/MBS and municipals.
"As we evolve the thinkFolio platform and deliver the next-generation version of the application, openness and flexibility are foundational principals to support seamless integration with third-party and IHS Markit content and services," said Brett Schechterman, Global Head of thinkFolio at IHS Markit. "Optimal desktop real-estate utility and direct access to actionable liquidity will remain paramount for our portfolio manager and trader personas. Our exciting collaboration with both Lucera and Neptune delivers high-quality pre-trade data and liquidity signals allowing our clients to drive alpha generation and workflow efficiency."
"For the buyside community, the interoperable toolset of thinkFolio and LumeALFA Analytics can increase the likelihood of a successful trade and has the potential to continuously deliver improvements to price discovery and best execution analysis," said Paul Mutter, Head of Global Fenics Sales at BGC Partners. "We're thrilled to expand our relationship with IHS Markit and to connect to thinkFolio to deliver a streamlined experience for mutual clients. The efficiency and scale achieved from thinkFolio capabilities and LumeALFA Analytics' comprehensive and time-stamped pre-trade information will be conducive to cost savings and greater alpha generation."
"Neptune has seen tremendous support from dealers and buy-side clients who have collaborated closely with us and each other, to create an open, standard and technology-based utility," said Byron Cooper-Fogarty, Interim CEO at Neptune Networks Ltd. "thinkFolio clients will now have the ability to consume an aggregated feed of the highest quality bond axes, which in turn allows them to be more targeted in their enquiries for large size bond execution."
About thinkFolio
thinkFolio from IHS Markit is a leading multi-asset investment management platform delivering sophisticated capabilities across portfolio modelling, order management and trading, compliance and cash and FX management. The platform is delivered as a managed service, supporting investment firms that want to reduce costs, maximize flexibility, enhance scale and achieve time-to-market objectives.
About Lucera®
Lucera Financial Infrastructures, LLC is a wholly owned indirect subsidiary of BGC Partners, Inc. (NASDAQ: BGCP), a leading global financial services firm. Lucera Financial Infrastructures, LLC and its group of companies provide on-demand co-located infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), connectivity-as-a-service (CaaS) and software-as-a-service (SaaS). Offered on a subscription basis, these services provide a compelling solution to businesses looking to lower expenses and reduce operational overhead and complexity. Lucera's SaaS offerings support high-performance cross-asset matching, aggregation and price distribution platforms covering FX, Rates and Credit with co-location available globally, including in NY4, SG1, LD4, FR2 and TY3. For more information, please visit www.lucera.com. For information on LumeALFA Analytics, please visit www.lucera.com or contact our sales team at jennifer.james@lucera.com.
About Neptune
Neptune Networks Ltd. ("Neptune") is a data connectivity network, supplying the highest quality bond pre-trade data (axes and inventory) from the sell-side to the buy-side via FIX workflows. Neptune supplies data that is standardised, real-time and direct from sell-side risk systems, rather than periodic, manual spreadsheets with their high probability of errors and poor timeliness. Neptune is a technology utility that is uniquely governed by a collaboration of banks and investors, with the aim to enhance the buy-side and sell-side relationship dynamic for the benefit of the overall market.
Neptune has 29 participating Dealers contributing real-time axe and inventory data to institutional buy-side clients in multiple asset classes ranging from Credit (investment grade and high yield) to Rates and Emerging Markets. This sees 70,000-line items daily, on over 38,500+ individual bonds and over $450 billion in gross notional. For more information, please visit www.neptuneFI.com.
Media Contacts:
IHS Markit
Timothy Barello
1 646-679-3463
Lucera
Karen Laureano-Rikardsen
212-829-4975
Neptune
Byron Cooper-Fogarty
S&P Global provides industry-leading data, software and technology platforms and managed services to tackle some of the most difficult challenges in financial markets. We help our customers better understand complicated markets, reduce risk, operate more efficiently and comply with financial regulation.
This article was published by S&P Global Market Intelligence and not by S&P Global Ratings, which is a separately managed division of S&P Global.