Moody’s Corporation has acquired BQuotes, global provider of price discovery tools and end-of-day pricing services for fixed income securities. Terms of the transaction will not be disclosed, and the financial impact to Moody’s is not expected to be material.
This follows Moody’s recent acquisition of the assets of Mergent Pricing and Evaluation Service from Xinhua Finance subsidiary Mergent, as part of its bid to offer a complete range of fixed income valuation services.
Moody’s says the BQuotes acquisition enhances its product offering in the fixed income valuations and pricing arena, supporting its efforts to deliver tools that facilitate price transparency in global fixed income markets, especially for complex structured securities and derivative instruments.
BQuotes’ product line will be integrated into Moody’s Analytics’ new suite of pricing and valuation products, which include model-based fair value estimates, evaluated pricing and observed pricing.
“There is growing market demand for tools that enable credit market participants to better value debt securities,” says Gus Harris, senior managing director of Moody’s new products group. “BQuotes will provide both our evaluators and our customers with critical information on a wide range of fixed income securities, and we believe this will be an important source of competitive differentiation for Moody’s.”
Yiannis Tsiounis, CEO of BQuotes, adds: “We are impressed with the valuation business that Moody’s is assembling and are excited with Moody’s commitment to support and enhance BQuotes price discovery, end-of-day pricing and UIN Security Master database services. We look forward to increasing the value proposition for our customers by combining Moody’s databases and analytic models with BQuotes’ leading technology.”
Late last year, Moody’s introduced model-based valuations for structured securities through Credit Values DCV, a discounted cashflow valuation service that provides an independent assessment of the intrinsic value of such securities. While its acquisition of Mergent’s corporate and municipal bond pricing services expanded its pricing initiative to evaluated pricing, BQuotes broadens Moody’s offering to price discovery tools and observed pricing services, the vendor says.
