Interactive Data has completed an extensive upgrade to its North American fixed-income reference data content available on its Apex platform. The upgrade is intended to standardize, align and link data within the platform to help clients meet regulatory reporting requirements and enhance the efficiency of their operational processes

“We’ve significantly improved the coverage capabilities for fixed-income reference data,” Marty Williams, vice president for reference data product development at Interactive Data, told Markets Media. “We are also offering several different delivery options for clients which we think will be significant. So depending on how the client wants to receive their reference data, we can accommodate them.”

Interactive Data has moved its fixed income asset class coverage onto Apex, including municipal bonds, collaterized mortgage obligations, mortgage-backed securities, corporates, governments, and commercial paper.

Since 2012, when Interactive Data launched Apex, the platform has employed industry standard interfaces and formats to simplify integration and help firms increase efficiency and reduce operational costs. It provides multiple data access options include Managed Data Services with data hosted by Interactive Data, a Web Services API for on-demand access to data on a per security basis, and file delivery options which now include an intra-day message queue access for near time, event-driven analysis, the company said.

“We’re very excited about the additions that we’ve made here,” Williams said. “It allows us to get world-class fixed-income reference data content onto a delivery technology that we think is going to offer the client a host of different options, and ultimately will help them process reference data content in a way that will address their overall cost of owning and managing the data going forward.”

Transparency is a significant driver in fixed income, as are liquidity and the move to electronic trading. Interactive Data provides evaluated pricing services for fixed income, and is moving toward continuous evaluated pricing. “This is a very nice complement to our continuous evaluated pricing in that the reference data that is used to drive our evaluated pricing services is the same reference data we have offered it to the marketplace for many years,” said Williams. “We consider it to be one of the best content offerings in the market.”

He added, “It’s all designed to help customers meet their needs, whether those needs be driven by regulations, risk management, or internal requirements for greater transparency around fixed-income.”

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