Buy-Side Technology Awards: Best Buy-Side Pricing/Valuations Service─Markit

In addition to the launch of its Liquidity 2.0 enhanced liquidity measures in the first quarter of 2012, Markit has bolstered its Portfolio Valuations service, and broadened its cash bonds and structured finance coverage. In late 2011, Markit also launched Fair Value, a valuations service for bonds, which it extended to equities in September this year. Also on the Portfolio Valuations front, Markit has expanded its complex instrument coverage, designed a new web interface that allows clients to view their valuations and underlying market curves, enhanced its overnight indexed swaps (OISs) discounting methodology, and now supports bespoke shock scenarios on portfolios of vanilla credit and interest-rate derivatives.

On the cash bonds front, Markit launched a municipal bonds pricing service at the end of 2011. Its corporate bonds service, which features 17 daily price runs, including four new batch times for globally traded assets, now covers an average of 95 percent of client bond holdings. Its CDS service has been tweaked to include new Liquidity 2.0 metrics and an enhanced cleaning algorithm for its Markit Quotes CDS intraday service, and its CDS Sameday service is set to be distributed via the internet and Markit Desktop at the end of this year.

Finally, on the structured finance front, Markit has increased its coverage of US securities from 40,000 non-agency residential mortgage-backed securities (RMBSs) to 1.2 million securities across asset classes; it has expanded its transparency metrics; and also features Markit European asset-backed securities (ABSs), the largest fully independent contributed pricing service for European ABS, covering approximately 5,000 securities daily.