MarketAxess Holdings, the operator of a leading electronic trading platform for fixed-income securities, today announced that it has enhanced its award-winning Emerging Markets (EM) trading product with the launch of Open Trading for local currency bonds. The first tranche of local currency markets to be supported are Poland (PLN), Czech Republic (CZK), Hungary (HUF) and South Africa (ZAR).

The launch of Open Trading for EM local currency bonds represents a key addition to MarketAxess’ end-to-end global EM offering. It connects local onshore dealers with a network of international buyside clients, significantly deepening the available liquidity pool. Clients and dealers are able to trade on an all-to-all basis. In the first half of 2023, EM local currency bonds constituted over 40% of MarketAxess global EM volumes of $360B.

“As a global leader in Emerging Markets debt trading, expanding Open Trading across our 28 local markets is something our clients around the world have been asking us for,” said Christophe Roupie, Head of EMEA and APAC at MarketAxess. “Expanding Open Trading in these four new local markets is only the first step, and we hope to expand the model further to more local currencies in the first half of next year.”

Launched in 2012, MarketAxess’ Open Trading is the leading all-to-all trading environment for corporate bonds. Open Trading drives meaningful and measurable price improvement for clients by creating a global, diversified pool of liquidity where institutional investor clients, dealer clients and alternative liquidity providers can all interact on either on a disclosed or an anonymous basis.

Source: MarketAxess