GFI Readies Global Bond Data Service

"There is a lot of interest in the bond prices themselves-how [mostly corporate and sovereign] bonds are moving on an intra-day basis," Winstone says. "Customers have become very interested in how to price illiquid bonds."

The product will commercialize existing data from its broking business, and may be provided as a real-time feed on a delayed basis, or as an end-of-day file. "The data will be available either directly from GFI via the GFI Market Data FTP servers and its data download product-primarily for those clients who wish to download data into enterprise applications for independent pricing, valuation and risk management-or distributed through our vendor partners for view-only desktop use," though GFI hopes to eventually make the data available for download into applications via vendors, he says.

Winstone says the product was driven by demand from the broker's bank and vendor clients, who want to use the data internally in valuation services they provide to customers, or who need good-quality bond prices in desktop displays. But separately, GFI will this month examine what other market data products it could create and launch over the next 18 months, using data generated by its trading platforms and voice brokerage operations.

"There is a lot of valuable data within GFI that has not been commercialized before, and we are embarking on a path of building out that product base, primarily based upon feedback from existing clients and their needs. As volatility has shifted, the demand for our data has gone up," Winstone says.

The efforts are part of a move by GFI to expand its data products beyond its traditional areas of credit derivatives, energy and currency options. For example, the broker last year expanded its datasets to include implied volatility for equity index options, which covers four of the major European market indexes.

Also last year, GFI launched an interest-rate options data product primarily focused on regional currencies in Asia in response to demand from clients. "There is deeper interest in regional data. We have an emerging markets product for Eastern Europe which covers interest-rate swaps and market data feeds, which has attracted a significant increase in interest over the past 12 months," Winstone says.

As a result of this growing interest in regional markets and data, GFI is also looking at longer-term opportunities to expand its data offering to include instruments traded in Latin America, including Brazil, Chile and Mexico. "Naturally building out region-specific data services will [also] enable us to build a larger client base in those regions," he says.