S&P Capital IQ has upgraded its fixed income transparency solution by reconfiguring and adding content and functionality to the platform behind its Valuation and Data portal. The upgraded service is intended to help users improve risk management while meeting accounting and regulatory requirements for independent and transparent valuations.
The enhanced service was rolled out to several hundred existing users of the portal this week and includes fixed income terms and conditions data, additional valuation and pricing content, more valuation and pricing approaches and market commentary for over 3 million fixed income securities including municipal, corporate and structured assets.
Additional functionality covers comparison of multiple pricing approaches, extensive charting and reporting options, and newly developed model valuation for longer-term pricing analysis.
The browser-based solution has a new look and feel in line with S&P Capital IQ’s overall branding and is part of an ongoing investment in valuation and pricing that could ultimately deliver a single platform offering valuation and pricing across asset classes. Such a project could take a couple of years, but in the short term the upgraded fixed income platform is expected to be augmented further with portfolio and enterprise risk analytics acquired by S&P Capital IQ when it bought R2 Financial Technologies in February. A deal with CME Group to acquire Credit Market Analysis is also close to conclusion and could add additional derivates pricing and valuation capabilities to the platform.
In terms of the fixed income transparency solution, Peter Jones, senior director at S&P Capital IQ, explains: “By adding transparency and context to the valuation process, this offering helps risk managers and pricing, accounting and investment professionals to distinguish better between price and valuation risk, and market and credit risk while gaining more insight into the underlying drivers of the security or issuer risk.
Combining multiple valuation and pricing approaches with market and reference data is an important step towards gaining a better understanding of portfolio risk from a valuation perspective.”
Jones acknowledges that a more rigorous and robust approach to valuation processes is being driven by accounting and regulatory requirements, but also notes S&P Capital IQ’s ongoing investment in valuation and pricing to sustain and improve its position among top vendors including Interactive Data, Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters.
“Going forward we will continue to meet clients’ requirements to integrate Level 1, 2 and 3 pricing and we will continue to add value to the fixed income offering as we work towards building a multi-asset platform for valuation and pricing,” he says.
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