DPC Data and BondDesk Group have forged a strategic alliance under which BondDesk, provider of a retail fixed income trading platform, will distribute DPC’s data service MuniPOINTS. The service summarises all the key facts on any US municipal bond deal in a one page sheet. MuniPOINTS has been implemented during the past year by a major broker/dealer, DPC says. New Jersey-based DPC was founded in 1992 and provides securities related data products and services to more than 600 financial institutions and information intermediaries .
Michael Ruvo, president of DPC Data, says the vendor is differentiated by the timeliness and accuracy of its data. “We make the filings available sooner, and provide a robust index to enable highly sophisticated searches,” he says. The deal sheets are indexed by Cusip. “Everything is in a standardized PDF format and our technology infrastructure enables very fast downloads,” he continues.
DPC’s data production is done at its offshore subsidiary in Manila, from where the vendor also provides customised outsourcing services. “We are not just producing static reference data: we are extracting different narrative portions of the official statement. To do this effectively, there must be a manual process performed by a trained data analyst,” Ruvo says.
DPC approached a number of its existing documents clients with the MuniPOINTS service, and gained consistent feedback: “They loved the product, and thought it would be a good selling tool, but they needed the information in the context of their workflow. For many of them, that is the BondDesk trading platform.”
BondDesk will integrate MuniPOINTS as an optional data service into its ATS trading platform. Available on a subscription basis, the service is scheduled to be in production with customers by the first quarter of next year.
Tony Miscimarra, president of BondDesk Trading, says: “MuniPOINTS is an important decision support tool, the use of which becomes more effective when access to it is tied to BondDesk’s live and executable offerings. There are other online sources for official statements, but we question who would actually bother to read them. The one page abstract is far more accessible, and therefore useful when it comes to disclosure at the point of sale.”
Subscribe to our newsletter
