A new era of efficiency and speed for Private Banking

Private banks today face an increasingly complex trading landscape; navigating tight regulations, cost constraints, and the need to generate alpha in a complex market environment for an increasingly demanding client base has become a challenge that many private banks face. Axess IQ®, a groundbreaking solution from MarketAxess, was designed to revolutionize how private banks approach trading. By bringing together liquidity, data, and efficiency features into an intuitive tailormade Execution Management Solution (EMS), Axess IQ has become a one-stop shop for many Private Banks. For trading US High Grade products, Axess IQ supports our US HG ASAP protocol, which makes spread-to-price conversions or spotting redundant and allows traders to handle their clients’ cash price limits with unseen precision, while simultaneously enabling execution at a much faster pace.

Axess IQ: Smarter execution

Axess IQ is an intelligent, data-driven platform that serves as a comprehensive trading solution for wealth managers and Private Banks. This isn't just another trading tool—it's a complete trading ecosystem that addresses the most pressing challenges like working with a large number of individual, time-critical client orders across a diverse mix of products and sizes.

Some of the key Features of Axess IQ include Intelligent Order Management which allows users to seamlessly monitor, aggregate and prioritize incoming orders; Data aggregation so you can consolidate pricing and liquidity data into a single, intuitive view; Intelligent Automation to seamlessly combine high-touch, low-touch and zero-touch workflows; and it leverages the CP+™ Pricing Engine for predictive pricing technology.

Axess IQ empowers traders to focus on high-value, critical transactions while automating routine processes. It's designed to make complex trading workflows simple, efficient, and data-driven.

US HG ASAP Protocol: Revolutionizing the velocity of Bond Trading for Private Banks

Axess IQ has taken bond trading to a new level of speed and efficiency with its ASAP protocol, creating what closely emulates the "click-to-trade" experience that’s commonplace across equity trading. ASAP is a different way of trading credit. In the traditional Bin model, clients set a timer for an RFQ, ranging from 1 to 5 minutes, allowing dealers to provide prices. Once the timer expires, the trader is presented with the prices from their dealers. With ASAP, prices come as soon as the dealer responds. ASAP is the default way that Eurobonds are traded and we’re bringing it to the US HG market. Additionally, ASAP trades on cash price negating the need for spotting and further speeding up the protocol.

This protocol addresses several market challenges, including liquidity access and pricing efficiency. The ASAP protocol revolutionizes retail trading by unlocking institutional liquidity, enabling more competitive pricing without the traditional constraints of retail market limitations. By providing direct access to deeper liquidity pools, the protocol offers traders more attractive rates and enhanced market opportunities.

In our recently published AxessPoint on bond trading for corporate investors, we see 49% of responses arrive within two seconds, and orders below 150K achieve favourable TCA outcomes, higher hit rates, and receive more responses.

The ASAP Protocol breaks away from traditional bin trading models and enables rapid trade execution that dramatically reduces waiting times from minutes to mere seconds, allowing clients to interact in near real-time. This is an efficiency game changer for Private Banks, which can supercharge every desk that is looking for something like a “click-to-trade" experience.

The best of both worlds: Institutional and retail seamlessly combined

Recently added connectivity to specialized retail liquidity networks like ICE Bonds, operator of a client limit order book (CLOB), is further strengthening our efforts to offer a best-in-class solution for FI trading in odd-lot and retail order sizes—augmenting our own institutional liquidity pool and RFQ protocols with such retail pools creates a growing liquidity ecosystem that allows Private Banks to seamlessly access the best of both worlds, combining institutional and retail liquidity through MarketAxess’ RFQ trading protocols and Axess IQ as specialized EMS interface for Private Banks.

As noted in the AxessPoint, we observe strong liquidity and favorable execution outcomes for odd-lot and retail-sized orders within the US HG ASAP Price protocol. This has been a longstanding request from Private Banks and now we’re seeing its success. This innovative method allows traders to tap directly into institutional liquidity pools, opening a new world of retail trading executed via RFQ and without being constrained to retail liquidity.