The simplest ideas for websites are usually the best. Bond.Hub is a perfect example of this. It is not a fancy complicated new way of reaching investors with credit research – it just takes the research sites that banks already maintain and makes it easy for clients to access them.
The idea behind the site is that banks have accepted the fact that they share clients. Any big fund manager looking into a sector or company will not look at just one bank’s research on one site. Rather, clients generally want to get a range of views from a range of banks. That used to mean that they had to remember a range of passwords to a range of bank websites, which was annoying and inefficient.
Bond.Hub therefore created one point of entry to the research sites of eight banks: CSFB, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, SSSB and UBS Warburg – an impressive line-up of firms that offer most of the best global credit research.
If a client is recognized by at least two of the participating dealer firms, it has direct access to the Bond.Hub platform to get to the relevant research sites. The banks maintain control over which clients see what information, and they don’t need to make special arrangements to get their material on this third-party site, so the extra work involved for them is minimal. They also maintain the ability to track usage of their sites. And the clients see the same websites as they would have seen had they gone directly to the banks’ sites. The only difference is a grey strap across the top of the screen with lists of other bank websites that clients can click on to jump neatly from one site to another, with no need to remember extra passwords.
The platform also offers mingled pages, all of which are customizable. Search results also display results from all of the participating deal that have granted the client permissions. This is done using the tagging that the banks already use for posting material on their own sites and into their own search functionality.
