It is no longer enough to see electronic services as simply a new channel for distributing the same old data. Banks now have to share the tools that they use internally with their clients.
UBS has set itself this task more explicitly, and is doing more to deliver such a service to its clients, than any other bank in fixed income. Its e-commerce team has a consistency of approach and direction in the development and deployment of new products that few banks can match.
UBS continues to improve its sites. In portfolio analytics, for example, its CreditDelta offering gets a Euromoney award for the third year running. It is already the most impressive tool of its kind, but UBS has added attribution analysis – a first for the credit market and a feature that puts CreditDelta even further ahead of the competition. In research, the bank is releasing a series of new products that will reflect how clients trade across credit markets. And its technical strategy sites are strong.
For issuers, UBS provides high-quality modelling for structured deals prior to issuing, and excellent connectivity in such markets as Eurocommercial paper. It is the top bank in trading connectivity with its KeyTrader platform.
As in foreign exchange, Deutsche Bank has excelled in electronic fixed income trading. And it has some excellent analytics tools, such as its Emerging Markets Trade Calculator. Through features such as Trade Scope, which gives a view of every possible trade combination with a colour-coded map of z-scores, correlations, carries, and convexities, this brings developed market-style analysis to emerging markets.
Goldman Sachs should be congratulated on successfully creating one clear, customizable website for all of the bank’s fixed-income clients to use. Unlike its old Financial Workbench offering, where products were divided into silos, its new portal is a truly integrated site of the kind that only a bank with a sensible, cross-product attitude to sharing development costs could create.
On the trading side, this time last year, the bank was in the process of combining WebET, its live trading system, with its research site. It has now done this, so research users get prices from WebET fed onto the relevant research sites, and can then click onto WebET itself if they want to act on those prices.
Mark Brown
