MarketAxess and BlackRock's Open Trading Comes to Europe

Already in place in the US, the alliance between BlackRock's Aladdin Trading Network (ATN) and MarketAxess aims to improve liquidity sourcing, a recurrent issue in the fixed-income space, and reduce transaction costs for European market participants.

BlackRock's clients will benefit from streamlined access to MarketAxess's liquidity options and data products through the Aladdin platform.

Open Trading enables all buyers and sellers to source liquidity from all other MarketAxess system participants in a single, independent marketplace for credit trading.

"Our Open Trading alliance with BlackRock in the US has led to meaningful improvement in credit market liquidity and a promising path forward to deal with much larger global credit markets and significant regulatory changes," says Rick McVey, chairman and CEO of MarketAxess. "We are pleased to extend this alliance to Europe, where investors and dealers are facing many of the same liquidity challenges."

According to McVey, over 7 percent of US high-grade trades on MarketAxess now take place via Open Trading protocols, compared to just 2 percent a year ago.

"The fixed-income investment landscape has evolved more quickly than the market's underlying structure for transacting, challenging buyers' and sellers' abilities to connect and transact, requiring investors to explore new avenues of liquidity to meet their needs," says Richie Prager, global head of trading and liquidity strategies at BlackRock.

Clients in Europe will also have access to Trax's market data, with volume and pricing data from 40,000 daily regulatory reported transactions, and quoted and traded prices on over 50,000 unique bonds.

BlackRock is also working with Tradeweb to integrate Tradeweb's liquidity and pricing information for rates products directly onto the Aladdin Trading Network dashboard.