BondDesk Ventures into Market Data Business with Excel Interface

BondDesk Group entered the market data business last month when it began offering a live U.S. Treasury data feed for Microsoft Excel.

The financial technology company is tapping the Bond Desk Alternative Trading System (ATS), a centralized marketplace for odd-lot fixed-income securities trading, which aggregates the live prices.

Capitalizing on existing technology, BondDesk ATS already has the ability to receive prices from its participants and it has a data feed capability through an Excel API (application programming interface).

Initially, Bond Desk is bringing living Treasury prices into Excel to leverage BondDesk's existing technology but it plans to expand that capability to the other asset classes, according to Ben Fortunato, managing director at BondDesk Group and COO of TIPS LLC, in an interview with Wall Street & Technology.

"We picked a data offering that was readily available at BondDesk in that we have very good Treasury prices, corporate prices and municipal bond prices," said Fortunato. BondDesk ATS provides about 2,000 broker dealers with access to over 35,000 live and executable offerings from 175 dealers and executes more than 30,000 transactions per day.

One of the key reasons that BondDesk is entering the market data business is to integrate that data feed with Microsoft Excel. BondDesk is focusing on this "core competency" because its sister company TechHackers has an existing library of add-ins for Excel called @nalyst which can leverage the market data, explained Fortunato. He joined BondDesk last August to create a market data business by leveraging the proprietary analytics within TechHackers and TIPS.

"The idea is that financial data in itself while interesting is more useful when you apply it to financial calculations," said Fortunato. The add-in library of calculations covers all parts of the marketplace including derivatives and interest-rate rates, said Fortunato. All of the bond math and derivatives math is built into the @nalyst product, he said.

Given Excel's ubiquitous use in finance, Fortunato maintains there's strong demand for affordable, accurate and unbundled live data. BondDesk is currently offering a 60-day beta period of the feed, after which, users will receive a free 30-day trial. Once the trial period ends, BondDesk will sell the feed for $95 per month without any long-term subscription commitment. 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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