BondWave, the fintech specialising in fixed income analytics and workflow tools, has rolled out a new release of its Effi platform that significantly expands the scope and depth of its Transaction Quality Analysis (TQA) capabilities, reflecting a broader industry push to bring greater rigour, context, and comparability to fixed income execution analytics.
The latest enhancements build on BondWave’s recently launched TQA solution, which is designed to help firms measure total trade costs and benchmark execution performance against relevant market peers. With this release, the company is extending coverage and introducing richer statistical insights, asset-type breakouts, and additional market context around trade cost data – aiming to move TQA beyond static post-trade reporting towards more actionable execution intelligence.“We built our PMP Trade Benchmarking Engine to be configurable based on our clients’ assumptions, while also defining default parameters that allowed us to demonstrate the service,” Michael Ruvo, CEO of BondWave, tells TradingTech Insight. “Early on, we made a deliberate decision to run every reported trade through our benchmarking engine, resulting in billions of observations. We then applied AI and machine learning techniques to cluster relevant peer groups, allowing us to develop meaningful quality benchmarks. We felt that traditional fixed income TCA was ripe for innovation, which led us to develop proprietary peer benchmarks. These benchmarks form the basis of our Transaction Quality Analysis (TQA) solution, allowing us to measure not only transaction cost but, more importantly, transaction quality. In effect, we’ve expanded BondWave’s transaction analytics capability from a defensive, regulatory-driven function to something more offensive: a tool the buy side can use to drive alpha.”
A key focus of the update is enabling users to better understand how execution outcomes vary across counterparties, market conditions, and instrument types. New reports highlight which counterparties are consistently delivering value, helping firms identify patterns in execution quality and potential opportunities to improve returns. By embedding market context directly into trade cost analysis, the platform is intended to support more informed assessments of execution performance in less transparent fixed income markets.
“The foundation of our approach is the regulatory framework put in place by the SEC, FINRA, and MSRB that precisely defined the ‘waterfall’ methodology used to determine prevailing market price (PMP)” explains Ruvo. “Once you add quality metrics on top of that, and then layer in factors such as counterparty/venue, trader, or trading desk, you can start to develop meaningful counterparty analytics. At that point, firms can see, for example, that they’re consistently getting better execution on short-dated corporate bonds from one dealer versus another or, conversely, that execution quality from a particular dealer is consistently better than another. That insight allows them to reallocate flow towards counterparties that deliver better outcomes.”
Alongside the TQA enhancements, the release also introduces a range of updates across Effi’s Portfolio Analytics suite. Users can now group positions more flexibly and view expanded account, broker, and FDIC identifying information across accounts and positions, providing clearer visibility into aggregated exposure. Cash flow and redemption reporting has also been extended, with greater customisation options and the ability to include account-level identifiers.Additional improvements include expanded geographic coverage within fixed income analysis reports, notably through the extension of municipal state-of-issue distribution charts to include all US states. Interactive filtering has also been enhanced, allowing users to refine views directly from grid headers and more quickly isolate relevant portfolio data.
More broadly, the release includes a set of platform-level usability improvements aimed at streamlining workflows. These include customisable context menus, saved page layouts that retain user preferences, more flexible filtering capabilities, and expanded scheduler entitlements to give firms greater control over automated report distribution.
Taken together, the latest Effi release underscores BondWave’s focus on combining deeper execution analytics with practical workflow enhancements, as fixed income firms seek more transparent, data-driven ways to assess performance, manage portfolios, and navigate increasingly complex trading environments.
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