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How technology is transforming fixed income

January 19, 2022
clock 3 MIN READ

The fixed income market and its investing practice haven’t kept up with the rapid pace of technological innovation taking place in the rest of the financial services industry. The number of fintechs addressing the space has recently exploded, and they’re transforming the market with emerging technologies, differentiated data services, and disruptive business models. Today, we’re seeing fintechs with platforms and tools that can:

  • Generate curated lists of attractive bonds from a research and liquidity perspective or that can narrow down potential ideas for analysts and portfolio managers 
  • Offer some elements of AI-powered credit rating and spread predictions, along with recommendations and monitoring
  • Provide some form of portfolio construction, rebalancing, and optimization, including strategy development, testing, and monitoring
  • Facilitate trade execution, enabling aggregate competitive quotes from brokers and advanced insights on liquidity

What's driving innovation in fixed income?

  • Continued margin compression, placing greater emphasis on process efficiencies and predictive analytics
  • Increased demands for transparency 
  • Increasing pressures to create differentiation

BondCliQ: Transforming the corporate bond market with greater transparency and data as a service

BondCliQ is the creator and operator of the first central market system for the corporate bond market, organizing institutional pre-trade quotes to allow market-makers to become more active liquidity providers for buy-side clients. From pricing, transparency, efficiency, and data-as-a-service delivery, CEO Chris White and the BondCliQ team have taken a tech-forward, multi-faceted solution approach to addressing challenges and redefining fixed income. 

We’re excited about our strategic investment in BondCliQ’s Series A Round, reflecting our continued commitment to the future of financial technology. And we join existing investors Impact Venture Capital, Segal Ventures, and ValueStream Ventures, as well as new investors/strategic partners London Stock Exchange, Aflac Ventures, and Vanguard. 

We believe it’s not a matter of “if” pricing transparency will occur, but “when,” and we believe BondCliQ is well-positioned to deliver successfully.

Legal Notice

This article contains forward-looking statements within the meaning or the rules and regulations of the Securities and Exchange Commission.  In some cases you can identify forward-looking statements by terminology, such as "may," "will," "expect," "believe" and "continue" or "appear." Our forward-looking statements include our current expectations as to:

- revenue that we believe will be generated by sales events that occurred during the quarter and the timing of such realization,
- whether we will have sales momentum,
- whether we will invest in our business, solutions, or workforce,
- our strategic priorities and commitments and the degree to which we will execute on them, and
- the degree to which we are able to capitalize on market opportunities and deliver long-term value to our shareholders, employees, clients and communities.

You should not place undue reliance on our forward-looking statements, as they are based on the current beliefs and expectations of our management and subject to significant risks and uncertainties, many of which are beyond our control or are subject to change. Although we believe the assumptions upon which we base our forward-looking statements are reasonable, they could be inaccurate. Some of the risks and important factors that could cause actual results to differ from those described in our forward-looking statements can be found in the “Risk Factors” section of our Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended Dec. 31, 2020, filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

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