Bloomberg is to provide fixed income traders with direct screen access to the Transaction Flow Manager (TFM), the central matching utility for global straight-through processing developed by the GSTP industry collective and vendor coalition Axion4.
Under the agreement, Bloomberg will be acting as a fixed income and equity 'concentrator' - a term used by the GSTP to describe an organization that provides connectivity services between the TFM and its clients. This will enable users of the Bloomberg Professional service to use their desktop terminals to connect to the GSTP utility.
Bloomberg is the first alternative trading system (ATS) for fixed income to formally move to take advantage of the new industry utility. The company has also agreed to set up a vendor advisory council for liaison with the GSTP.
"This (fixed income) is a largely under represented sector of the market in current models and the addition of market leaders such as Bloomberg to serve as a concentrator to the TFM greatly helps in advancing fixed income trade processing," says Judy Donahue, manager of fixed income operations for the Capital Group Companies and board member of GSTP. "This really brings something to the asset managers that they have been crying out for over a number of years."
The GSTP solution plans to go live end 2001 and comprises of the TFM, access modules and services for the provision of automated post trade pre-settlement matching of securities both domestically and across borders.