MarketAxess selects Ancoa’s Market Surveillance Capabilities for its European Fixed-Income Trading Platform

As a leading electronic fixed-income trading platform and provider of market data and post-trade services, MarketAxess operates an electronic trading platform enabling more than 1,100 institutional fixed-income trading firms to efficiently trade corporate bonds and other types of fixed-income instruments globally.

In recent years, regulators have expanded the scope of surveillance of fixed-income trading. The Market Abuse Regulation (MAR), which came into effect in July 2016 across the European Union, will require all market participants and EU regulated trading venues to comply with more stringent market surveillance criteria. Market surveillance will, for the first time, need to capture market manipulation intent, as the existing obligation to report suspicious transactions (STRs) extends to include suspicious orders (STORs).

MarketAxess deployed Ancoa’s platform to monitor instances of potential market abuse on its MTF, and meet the scenarios set out under MAR. As an asset class, bonds are typically less liquid than cash equities which makes assessing a trade’s price normality a challenge. To address this, Ancoa, in conjunction with MarketAxess, designed and deployed new specialised RFQ-based trading alerts. Ancoa also provides functionality to ensure that MarketAxess receive alerts for sanctioned instruments across its bond universe. Ancoa’s visualisation tool aggregates all trading and contextual data onto a single screen and MarketAxess’ analysts now have access to the insights Ancoa generates, considerably improving their analytics and compliance-oversight capabilities.

Miranda Morad, General Counsel, MarketAxess Europe and Trax commented, “We carried out extensive due diligence before choosing Ancoa’s surveillance platform and found Ancoa to be a genuine partner in fixed-income trade surveillance. We needed a surveillance platform that offers the potential to gather actionable business intelligence from the MTF and ensures we are compliant with MAR.”

Kurt Vandebroek, Chief Executive Officer, Ancoa, added, “We are delighted that MarketAxess has deployed Ancoa’s market surveillance capabilities for their EU fixed-income trading operations. Our growing focus on the FICC markets and expertise in market surveillance for RFQ based trading, has enabled us to deploy our monitoring platform within a short timeframe, helping MarketAxess detect and deal with potential market abuse and, meet their regulatory obligations with confidence and ahead of deadline.”