Markit's new service covers more than 5,000 investment grade tranches of US and European CLOs and was launched in response to demand from customers for a high quality, independent data source for CLO pricing. The data provided by Markit will be used for price discovery, price verification, valuation and risk management.

The service uses observable market data and best-in-class models to value CLOs. Markit will provide customers with detailed information on data inputs and the assumptions used in the evaluation process, ensuring transparent valuations. Customers will also gain access to Markit's expert team of CLO evaluators in addition to a price challenge process.

Nathan Kirk, Director and Head of US Securitised Products at Markit, said: "Markit's transparent methodologies and expertise in gathering and using observable market data enables us to offer a cutting-edge approach to CLO pricing. We are pleased to extend our capabilities in providing high quality evaluated pricing services to the CLO market in order to support customer needs."

The new service is an expansion of Markit's evaluated pricing business for securitised products (residential mortgage-backed securities, commercial mortgage-backed securities and consumer asset-backed securities) and corporate, sovereign and municipal bonds. Later this year, Markit's new CLO pricing service will be expanded to cover mezzanine and equity tranches of CLOs.