More than 1,600,000 licence subscriptions have been secured for the UK bond consolidated tape, just a week after its launch on 22 June.
This uptake also spans in excess of 50 licences for users and redistributors who have directly onboarded with ETS Connect UK – the consolidated tape provider (CTP) – as well as licences enabled via redistributors, mainly for individual users.
The report indicates strong widespread demand for the tape across the UK fixed income landscape, and ETS Connect UK has also confirmed its intentions to bolster transparency by producing a monthly data quality summary report.
Approximately 47,009 inbound records were processed per day on average in the first week of the tape being operational, representing around £177.69 billion, spanning 23,922 unique ISINs.
Moreover, the firm will also open-source the full suite of data quality validation logic underpinning the tape, to allow redistributors and market participants to build additional analytics and reproduce underlying checks.
Sassan Danesh, chief executive at ETS Connect UK, commented: “Where a trade looks potentially erroneous, the tape will have a flag to highlight this. By publishing the validation logic openly, we want to enable third parties to enrich that signal – identifying which validation rule was triggered and the scale of the deviation that caused it.”
Read more – A closer look at the UK fixed income consolidated tape: Concept becoming reality
On the day of launch, the tape spanned 98% of contributor coverage, by notional trade value.
The post-launch period for the tape has been segmented into two phases, including an initial three-month period for service stabilisation, followed by a nine-month optimisation phase.
The initial stage will make space for assessment, and addressing potential erroneous trade records, to determine appropriate thresholds, while the latter period will allow for additional data quality checks and refining existing algorithms against the growing historical dataset.
“We committed from day one to full transparency on data quality,” added James Haskell, chief operating officer at ETS Connect UK.
“We are publishing data quality metrics on an aggregated and anonymised basis, broken down by contributor type, so that the market has a clear and consistent view of how the tape is performing and how it is improving over time.”