Bloomberg Launches Front Office Pricing Solution, Providing Greater Visibility into Fixed Income Trading

Bloomberg announced that Intraday BVAL (IBVAL) Front Office is now available to Bloomberg Terminal customers, as well as users of Bloomberg’s real-time streaming market data feed, B-PIPE. IBVAL Front Office is a new offering, distinct from but complementary to Bloomberg’s leading evaluated pricing service, BVAL, that uses a machine learning model designed to handle the intricacies of consuming billions of ticks of market data to produce frequent pricing for real-time trading decisions.

“Credit markets have evolved dramatically in the last few decades through the introduction of electronic trading and the consequent introduction of portfolio trading, fixed income ETFs, and credit algos. To support these trading strategies, firms require more high-quality pricing data, and they need it faster than ever,” said Tony McManus, Global Head of Enterprise Data at Bloomberg. “We launched IBVAL Front Office to provide customers with timely pricing data that easily integrates into their trading and pricing execution workflows, so they can operate faster in increasingly automated fixed income markets.”

Intraday pricing in fixed income is particularly challenging as information is fragmented, requiring investors and traders to review multiple market observations from disparate sources. To streamline this process, IBVAL Front Office consumes billions of market data points from a variety of sources, including TRACE, contributed quotes and trades, and more. The data is then fed through a proprietary machine learning model to provide intraday pricing across the liquidity spectrum.

IBVAL Front Office delivers prices as fast as every 15 seconds and can capture a new bond issue moments after the security is available for secondary trading. Pricing is systematically streamed throughout the day to address outliers, spikes, drifts, and jumps in price, ensuring high-quality results that support real-time trading needs like pre-trade analytics, assessing the intraday performance of indices, automated trading and more.

Today, Bloomberg provides intraday pricing on approximately 30,000 TRACE eligible USD, high yield and investment grade corporate securities and will continue to expand coverage to include EMEA, APAC and emerging markets. IBVAL Front Office is the pricing engine behind Bloomberg’s Tradable Trackers, a suite of rules-based indices that consists of 200 liquid bonds measuring the performance of the Bloomberg US Corporate Bond Index and related spreads.

IBVAL Front Office pricing is available on the Bloomberg Terminal by loading a security then selecting IBVL PCS as the preferred pricing source. IBVAL Front Office is also available via Bloomberg’s real-time market data feed, BPIPE, so clients can readily integrate intraday pricing data across their enterprise. To learn more, click here.

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