Google: Google, Norway’s wealth fund back UK real-time bond tape bid

Google Cloud, Norway’s sovereign wealth fund and Swiss bank UBS have joined forces to back a bid to run Britain’s real-time record of transactions in bond markets, the fixed income technology firm leading the plan told Reuters.

British regulators last year unveiled proposals to build a “consolidated tape” that would collate market data across stock and bond markets, with a bond data feed launching first, to help investors spot the best deals and boost the appeal of UK capital markets.

Long a feature of Wall Street, the European Union has approved a law requiring trading platforms hand over price data for bonds and stocks, for a fee, to an operator.

Bond trading is fragmented across multiple venues and often done bilaterally rather than via an exchange, limiting price transparency and arming some players with more information than others.

Britain’s Financial Conduct Authority said last month it expected to begin a tender to choose a firm to run a bond tape by end-2024, and the industry expects one to be running by late 2026.

London-based Ediphy, a technology provider for fixed income markets, said in a statement on Wednesday it was launching fairCT alongside several firms, also including Cboe Global Markets, FactSet and TP ICAP, to be the UK tape operator.

After previous regulatory efforts to build one fizzled, “we are starting to get much more confidence that a is viable”, said Chris Murphy, CEO of Ediphy and UBS’ former head of Global FX, Rates and Credit business. Ediphy decided to partner with players across the industry, including Alphabet unit Google’s cloud subsidiary, where data could be stored, Murphy told Reuters.

“We need to make sure we are not optimising something for a vested interest in the market,” he added.

He declined to say whether any of the firms had a financial stake in the initiative.

Regulators and investors generally support the concept of a tape but exchanges have opposed one in order to guard their lucrative data, while banks and asset managers say that without their trades there would be no data.

Murphy said British regulators, to avoid the bond tape becoming “a flop”, needed to ensure it was affordable and that some participants did not delay submitting their data.

“It’s about trying to make sure they get the right balance between carrot and stick,” he said.