“It has been one year since we had the vision of taking our data and putting a new front end on it,” says Lance Uggla, CEO of Markit.
Markit is already a key industry source for accurate consensus pricing and essential for independent price verification, risk modelling and valuations. It provides CDS pricing on more than 2,700 credits and its prices are the global benchmark. On top of this it has an extensive database on bonds, which is sourced from more than 30 banks on 10,000 asset-swapped instruments from a universe of 40,000 cash securities. It also has RED (Referenced Entity Database), the industry standard for reference entity names, reference obligations and codes used throughout the CDS market.
Now teaming up with Dow Jones, Moreover, Interactive Data, Credit Sights KDP and S&P LCD, Markit Portal is offering Markit’s proprietary pricing across CDS, bonds, loans and indices and combining it with news and independent research.
“We wanted to leverage our data set. This is aimed at the usual cast of actors in the market,” says Uggla. Asset managers, hedge funds, corporate financiers, private bankers, salesmen, traders and researchers are the target. Uggla argues that Markit Portal is not a replacement for Bloomberg, Reuters and Thomson but a low-cost web-delivered tool that transforms the delivery and organization of all data, news and research.
Unlike many systems, the Portal is indeed intuitive. Users simply point and click to obtain cross-referenced data and/or news and research. In a world of increasing volatility, being able to quickly spot unusual price action or market-moving news is highly important. This software enables users to filter by region, sector or credit indices. Consequently, the user is able to obtain a view of market activity and corporate performance displayed by one of the set filters or a self-customized portfolio. There are also heat maps that signal unusual news flow or price moves. There is even talk that dealers are planning to enable their clients to view research via the platform.
To suggest that Markit Portal is a cheap Bloomberg could be taken as an insult to the upstart online information provider, but that is not the intention. For years the likes of Thomson Financial and, before it, Bridge Information Systems and others have attempted to lure business away from Bloomberg by providing cheaper imitations. Such a flawed strategy was never going to work; the only way to succeed is by creating a new product that provides a service that simply cannot be found elsewhere. The information vendor market is about to face a serious shake-up.
