Markit MSA collates information on cash and synthetic equity trades executed on traditional exchanges, MTFs and OTC markets. The data is then consolidated to provide users with an aggregated view of market activity. The service ranks brokers on each European trading venue, stock or index according to the volume and value of their trades.

Markit MSA has the support of 11 leading financial institutions, including Citi, Dresdner Kleinwort, Goldman Sachs, HSBC, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, Royal Bank of Scotland and UBS, who have committed to send trade information to the service.

Together, these institutions represent 60% of all cash equity trading in Europe. MSA will initially cover 44,000 European cash and synthetic equities and is available initially on a T+1 basis.

The vendor expects buy-side institutions to use the dataset to help identify pools of liquidity and inform their choice of broker when seeking to execute trades. Sell-side institutions will use the service to ascertain their market share for marketing and business development purposes. Regulators will also be able to use Markit MSA to monitor liquidity patterns and trading trends, says Markit.

David Tait, executive director and co-head of Morgan Stanley Electronic Trading in Europe says: "Markit MSA...provides us with independent and validated metrics for equity market activity and liquidity. Since the service combines both on and off order book data, it will provide the first consolidated European market share reporting service allowing us to promote our market share to clients."

Markit has not specified subscription costs for the service.

Trading technology firm Fidessa last month launched a similar free Web-based index which offers a daily take on the fragmentation of liquidity between different stocks, indices and venues. The vendor claims up to 4000 people have already subscribed to the service.