Bloomberg has launched a new bond liquidity service, utilising State Street as a counterparty.
The Bloomberg Bond Cross function is accessible via the Bloomberg Professional Service and will enable European buy- and sell-side traders to access European corporate bond liquidity via State Street.
State Street will act as an impartial counterparty to every trade, minimizing information leakage and retaining anonymity.
The service will use Bloomberg’s Trading System Order Execution (TSOX) blotter. State Street will take orders entered into TSOX to find the opposite side of a trade, with participants then able to enter into negotiations and execution with State Street.
“Despite constraints on dealers’ ability to make-markets in corporate credit, large orders still need to be executed each day,” said George Harrington, global head of FICC trading at Bloomberg.
“Bloomberg Bond Cross brings together our existing large network of Bloomberg Professional service subscribers, providing the ability for order staging, negotiation and transacting in one place, attracting volume and building liquidity to help investors identify trade opportunities with State Street.”
Bloomberg said 50 firms are already using Bond Cross with several trades already executed, while a further 370 are currently on-boarding. All firms wishing to use the service must be a customer of and be on-boarded by State Street.
Currently, Bond Cross supports trading in approximately 160,000 fixed income securities, and Bloomberg plans to expand the service’s geographic coverage in the future.