Markit.com – London and New York – Markit^® (Nasdaq: MRKT), a leading global provider of financial information services, today announced the launch of live pricing for bonds, a streaming pricing service for investment grade and high yield corporate, sovereign and agency bonds. This dynamic new offering broadly expands Markit’s reach in the intraday bond pricing market.

Markit’s new live bond pricing service covers over 35,000 bonds across 40 currencies and delivers more than 250,000 pricing updates per minute. Customers will benefit from improved pre-trade price transparency, timely intraday asset valuation calculations and superior best execution analysis.

Kiet Tran, global head of Fixed Income Pricing at Markit, said: “We are extremely excited to introduce a true real-time pricing solution for the bond market. The traditional evaluator only approach is insufficient for real-time bond pricing as markets move much faster than human evaluators. With Markit’s live bond pricing, we’ve applied an innovative, hybrid approach to pricing bonds using a combination of market data, evaluator expertise and a machine driven algorithm. This is truly the next generation of fixed income pricing — providing evaluator expertise without the associated latency.”

Markit’s new live pricing is generated through a combination of intraday prices extracted from real-time pricing contributions from major market makers, trade colour and data captured by our real-time parsing technology. Evaluator audits safeguard accuracy and reliability while avoiding the characteristic delays.

Markit’s fixed income pricing service provides independent pricing, transparency and liquidity data for fixed income instruments to support risk management, price verification, compliance and trading workflows. The service combines a team of over 100 fixed income experts with Markit’s robust market quotes and transaction data aggregation capabilities to generate a best in class pricing solution. Markit’s daily coverage of 2.5 million instruments spans municipal bonds, corporate and sovereign bonds, securitised products, bank loans and CDS.