IMD & IRD Awards 2022: Best evaluated pricing service provider—Bloomberg

OVERVIEW

In today’s complex and volatile financial markets, accurate and independent pricing is essential. Bloomberg’s evaluated pricing service (BVAL) utilizes over 100 million pieces of data every day to generate evaluated pricing for over 2.7 million securities across all asset classes, including thinly traded and hard-to-price fixed-income securities.

THE SOLUTION

BVAL stands out for its high-quality data, sophisticated methodology, and the transparency of its valuation process and data inputs. These insights allow clients to clearly understand how pricing valuations are derived. BVAL is available on the Bloomberg Terminal or as an enterprise data feed. It is integrated with many of Bloomberg’s buy-side platforms to facilitate seamless workflows, providing a single offering where customers can obtain pricing, transparency and regulatory implications on a position.

BVAL continued to evolve and expand in 2021, with efficiency improvements, new functionality, new data sources and data quality enhancements. Examples include BVAL Direct Observations (BVDO)—which provides pricing solely based on direct observations—and the creation of a dedicated product and engineering team that implemented workflow enhancements, reduced manual processes, and improved the user interface for reviewing and responding to client requests. 

WHAT’S TO COME

New products and enhancements for BVAL will include: 

• A data solution to help clients assess whether a market quotation is “readily available” under SEC Rule 2a-5 
• A pricing residual function that will allow for additional pricing adjustments to be applied to the specified pools population 
• Further incorporation of commercial mortgage-backed securities loan information through its partnership with the Kroll Bond Rating Agency
• Investment in data science capabilities will drive meaningful cross-sector analysis for related instruments in difficult-to-price sectors, while data science and evaluator tooling upgrades will continue to increase quality control insights and check points.

WHY THEY WON

Producing accurate and transparent prices for complex and thinly traded securities has always been―and will continue to be―one of the most acute challenges facing capital markets practitioners, especially when it comes to level 2 and level 3 instruments. Bloomberg’s BVAL offering continues to be the benchmark against which all other services are measured, especially when it comes to the often complex and opaque fixed-income market.