KBP will provide local marketing and support services that will help to promote Interactive Data's international bond evaluations services to KBP's clients in Korea.

Based in Seoul, KBP is the largest provider of valuation services in the Korean market, with over 480 institutional clients including banks, asset managers and insurance companies. Interactive Data offers evaluations for a wide range of asset classes globally. These international evaluations capabilities will now be more readily available to financial institutions in Korea through KBP's local language marketing and support services.

Interactive Data is a leading independent provider of daily evaluations for fixed income securities. With decades of experience, Interactive Data offers daily evaluations for approximately 2.8 million fixed income and international equity issues. Over 5,000 financial institutions worldwide, ranging from central banks to large investment banks, subscribe to Interactive Data's bond evaluations. Evaluations coverage includes corporate bonds, high yield bonds, government and agency securities, securitised debt issues, ABS, CMBS and CMOs, US municipal securities, hybrid securities and money market securities.

Lee Hak Kyoon, vice president, KBP, said: "Many financial institutions have been looking to replace broker pricing with independent evaluations, and it has become best practice in the Korean market to subscribe to valuations from third party providers for local currency bonds. The international bond evaluations from Interactive Data will be an important additional service to our existing range of regional valuations for our Korean customer base."

Magnus Cattan, business development director, Asia, Interactive Data, added: "We are very pleased to work with KBP to help provide our evaluated services to the Korean marketplace. We have been seeing a growing need from financial institutions for independent evaluations, especially for thinly-tradnly-traded fixed income securities, as firms are focused on getting a firm grasp on the value of their holdings. Our international teams of experienced evaluators incorporate the available transaction data, credit quality information and market movements into our evaluated pricing applications and models, and we have strong relationships with a broad range of market sources that can offer insight into market activity."