Three banks have excelled this year in the areas of online fixed income that count: research and analytics. Lehman Brothers, JPMorgan and UBS Warburg all have well-designed offerings that combine those two areas well, and then meld that with streaming market data.
Lehman Brothers wins the award this year because it has a clear and simple strategy. Those products that can be traded on multibank platforms are left to do just that – the bank does not create its own trading systems for them. As Dexter Senft, managing director of fixed income e-commerce, says: “We do have a strong presence in the consortia – we feel that is where our clients want to go for trading.” Like any big firm, it backs up its distribution to core clients with fixed-line connectivity.
Lehman Brothers puts its resources into making sure that its clients have the most comprehensive data, research and analytics available to support their investment decisions. And it is doing a good job of making sure that those sites are of the highest possible quality, winning more of the fixed-income research and analytics awards than any other bank.
The key, perhaps, to LehmanLive’s success is integration of different areas. Robert Campbell, co-head of European fixed-income research, says: “A lot of firms have separate fiefdoms. Lehman Brothers has made an effort to be very globally integrated, with all products linked in.” Its market monitor pages and indices are good examples of this, and you can read more about these in the relevant awards articles online.
The bank’s indices are one of the most popular feature of the site with investors. Thanks to the its POINTWeb system, investors can customize the indices, check their portfolios against it, and analyze the tracking error of their portfolio.
In its wide analytics offering, Lehman uses the strength of its indices to offer an array of relative value analysis, such as time series information and charts, heatmaps and spread matrices. It also has CurveLab tools, forward tools, spread analyzers, and a host of other analytical offerings. These analytics are constantly integrated with the credit and rates research – for example, Ciaran O’Hagan, director of Lehman’s rates research team, can send out a link within his research that takes investors directly to an analytical model with the factors he is discussing already inputted.
In the debt categories, Lehman Brothers also won the following awards: best site for credit research, best site for rates research, best online bond indices, best fixed income analytics tools, and best site for fixed-income prime brokerage. It also won best site for repo. For more details, go to www.euromoney.com.
