Tradeweb’s Bruner Discusses New All-to-All Corporate Bond Trading Platform

After a six-week beta period that included over 140 active trading firms—nearly 50 of which were traditional buy-side institutions—resulting in more than $2.8 billion in inquiry volume, the offering, dubbed Blast A2A, is now live in the US.

The platform is linked with Tradeweb’s various protocols, included the Tradeweb Direct liquidity pool, which includes more than 130 regional dealers. In addition to the nearly 50 traditional buy-side firms mentioned before, about 125 additional firms are currently in the process of onboarding.

Tradeweb will next turn its sights on Europe for its all-to-all offering, with a beta period about to begin “in the coming months,” Chris Bruner, head of US credit products for Tradeweb, tells WatersTechnology.

It’s one thing to say you have participants connected; it’s another to do it such that their workflow is as easy as possible.

Chris Bruner

Broad Liquidity

Tradeweb is following the likes of Trumid, which recently acquired Electronifie; Liquidnet; and MarketAxess’ Open Trading offering down the all-to-all path, which is becoming increasingly popular with investors.

Bruner says the company’s main aim is to offer “the broadest pool of liquidity.” For smaller odd-lot trades, users can immediately go out and connect to a wide network to find matches. For larger round-lot trades, users can connect to a selected audience through flexible execution protocols, he says.

“There are other initiatives that might only focus on the contents of the data, but we feel we’re a very strong offering for clients linking the contents and the data to flexible execution protocols,” Bruner says. “Providing the broadest pool of liquidity on someone’s request for quote (RFQ) is the first priority, especially in that electronic RFQ space. … It’s one thing to say you have participants connected; it’s another to do it such that their workflow is as easy as possible.”

With this release, Tradeweb has included functionality to fill multiple partials in one inquiry and independent trade spotting times, which helps to increase the match rate on the all-to-all platform because it provides greater flexibility as to when an order is executed.

Tradeweb will eventually be able to automate the intermediation of trades with multiple broker-dealers for clients, though that will take some time because they have to work with their intermediaries to create that pipeline, but “the technology is already available on our side,” Bruner says.