Pioneering solution to enable liquidity sourcing, link market participants and facilitate secure, compliant all-to-all trading

IPC Systems, Inc., a leading global provider of specialised communications and managed network-as-a-service solutions for the financial trading community, today announced that it has launched Fixed Income Marketplace, a premier holistic connectivity solution for market participants to trade fixed income instruments electronically or via voice. The announcement was made at the Fixed Income Leaders Summit in Boston, an annual gathering of senior fixed income traders and portfolio managers.

As the financial industry continues to see changes in market structure, regulatory impact on bank balance sheets, liquidity shifts to the buy-side, and fragmentation of trading venues and protocols, there is an emerging and pressing need for secure and reliable connectivity to source liquidity, link market participants and enable all-to-all trading for the fixed income asset class.

“A push towards greater transparency, stricter risk management practices and a stronger regulatory regime have dramatically altered the landscape of the global fixed income markets,” said Anthony Perrotta, Partner and Global Head of Research and Consulting at Tabb Group, a leading financial markets research and strategic advisory firm. “We are witnessing an unprecedented need for specialised technology and managed network services as market participants now require increased connectivity to diverse counterparties in order to drive the search for assets and conduct transactions.”

Perrotta continued, “Profitably trading fixed income is governed by connectivity throughout the trade lifecycle and access to a ready-made ecosystem of market participants. This applies not only to trading government bonds, corporate bonds, interest rate swaps and credit default swaps but also for executing various fixed income arbitrage strategies. Arbitraging the yield curve, mortgage-backed securities, volatility, swap spreads, capital structure and convertibles all depend on being able to access counterparties on demand.”

“The shifting of fixed income liquidity to the buy-side has generated substantial demand for all-to-all trading,” said Joseph Pickel, Global Head of Sales and Marketing, Financial Markets Network, IPC. “The IPC Fixed Income Marketplace consisting of diverse buy-side firms are leveraging voice, RFQ, CLOB and dark pools to connect to their counterparties and source liquidity.”

Pickel continued, “Fixed income markets are a vital source of financing and are consequently critical for economic growth. Today’s announcement emphasises IPC’s steadfast commitment to enabling market participants trade, hedge and arbitrage successfully in the global secondary debt markets with innovative solutions.”

The IPC Financial Markets Network service portfolio includes the Connexus Financial Extranet, Direct Connect and MPLS WAN data services, as well as Trader and Enhanced Voice connectivity services. IPC’s Financial Markets Network interconnects global financial centres and allows access to more than 6,000 market participant locations across 700 cities in more than 60 countries.