Following Purchase of Hilliard Farber, Tradeweb Gears up to Launch E-Trading IDB Platform for Mortgages in '09
On the heels of completing its acquisition of interdealer voice brokerage Hilliard Farber, Tradeweb is launching an electronic interdealer broker platform for pass through mortgage-backed securities in early 2009.
Billy Hult,
President, Tradeweb
The new electronic platform will complement Hilliard Farber’s interdealer voice brokerage business for mortgage-related and other U.S. securities. The move is a switch for Tradeweb, which has pioneered the development of an electronic institutional customer-to-dealer trading platform for debt securities and derivatives since 1998.
“We had a very clear mandate to build an electronic mortgage platform initially,” says Billy Hult, president of Tradeweb in an interview yesterday. However, after speaking to its clients and investors—Tradeweb is owned by Thomson Reuters and nine of the largest investment banks which are dealers in fixed income securities—Tradeweb realized that the voice business was still a meaningful part of the equation from the bank standpoint.
Tradeweb identified the opportunity to enter the IDB space in March of 2008, notes Hult and made the decision to buy the asset realizing that it could help the firm build a broader IDB business.
“Fundamentally we came to the conclusion that the voice business is still very meaningful in the space, and therefore if we want to get into the space holistically, it made sense to make this acquisition with Hill (Hilliard Farber),” explains Hult. Banks want to be able to do business two ways, says Hult. “They want to do business the e-way when it makes sense and they want to do voice when it makes sense,” says Hult, who previously ran Tradeweb’s mortgage business, which the dealer-to-customer-e-marketplace considers its number one client franchise.
Ivy is Editor-at-Large for Advanced Trading and Wall Street & Technology. Ivy is responsible for writing in-depth feature articles, daily blogs and news articles with a focus on automated trading in the capital markets. As an industry expert, Ivy has reported on a myriad ... View Full Bio
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