Electronic fixed income trading network TradeWeb plans to launch an online corporate bond marketplace in the US in June.
Currently in beta testing, TradeWeb says the new platform now has more than 150 users from major buy-side firms, with seven of the leading dealers providing liquidity. Citigroup and Deutsche Bank recently joined Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, and Morgan Stanley as liquidity providers in the new marketplace.
The new platform will compete with rival multi-dealer network MarketAxess, which claims to have traded about $45 billion of US high-grade corporate bonds in the first quarter.
TradeWeb's corporate marketplace will offer the full range of US corporate bonds and will incorporate data from the Trade Reporting Compliance Engine, (Trace), the National Association of Securities Dealers' bond pricing service. The system will also feature TradeWeb's bid and offer list execution functionality, which allows buy-side investors to complete large multi-trade transactions online, and will eventually add research and analytics from Thomson.
TradeWeb was launched by a consortium of eight leading investment banks in 1998. Thomson announced last month it was acquiring TradeWeb for an initial $385 million in cash plus a three-year earn out of $150 million.