There were 316,812 buy trades placed in the retail-municipal-bond market last month, according to data from BondDesk Trading LLC.
The company would like to see that grow, and to expedite things, it has replaced its legacy bond-trading and wealth management system. The firm is in the process of rolling out the new software,
BondWorks (click here for a slideshow of the interface), to the 100,000 financial advisers who use BondDesk Advisor Workstation.
BondWorks already is in production and being used by 20,000 advisers.
Despite the significance of bonds to the advisory community, the technology side of the business remains something of a backwater, with just a handful of companies offering software and applications meant for use by financial advisers. BondDesk's only significant competition is Tradeweb Markets LLC, owned by Thomson Reuters and 10 major dealers.
The mission for BondWorks, according to its creators, is to solidify BondDesk's leadership position. It plans to do so by offering an easy-to-use interface for trading and managing bond research.
I received a lengthy personal demonstration of BondWorks last week and found the software attractive, easy to understand and intuitive to navigate. More than a mere cosmetic facelift, the platform has been designed to streamline adviser work flow when conducting bond-related research and shopping.
Functions on the platform make doing research easier. For example, advisers no longer will have to adorn their computers with sticky notes to remind themselves of particular bonds they come across that need further research.
“Hunting around for information really annoys advisers,” BondWorks product manager Kamaryn Tanner said.
She said that there were many such “aha” moments during the months that developers spent following the work of advisers to get a better sense of their daily routine.
It was these sorts of observations that led to development of seemingly simple tools like a “check order status” pop-up that opens on the screen, rather than requiring the adviser to navigate away from whatever they are working on — and potentially lose their place.
There are a variety of built-in monitoring tools that allow users to track and receive real-time alerts, including the status of open orders and price changes for particular CUSIPs, which are identification codes for securities.
There also has been a lot of work done in the area of search. BondWorks, for example, displays a list of hyperlinks in a column on the left of the interface screen that shows an adviser's most recent searches.
According to Ms. Tanner, this feature came directly out of firm research that tracked advisers' searches, which proved to be quite repetitive over time. The feature likely will save advisers significant time by letting them avoid initiating the same search again and again.
“It is a simple idea, but it has proved to be a home run and has been the most complimented feature among the thousands of advisers during testing,” Ms. Tanner said.
Advisers also can launch searches based on multiple criteria, including keywords or tickers, as well as CUSIPs.
There is also a new bond comparison tool and easy-to-generate graphs that have live links leading to additional information that can provide a simplified understanding of, say, outliers that appear too good to be true (as proved to be the case with one example I checked out).
The system is built to be somewhat future-proof and provide a rich client look and feel (standard tech jargon for feeling like a program that runs on your PC rather than over the web). It uses JavaScript and is fully supported on both Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox but also runs on the Safari and Chrome browsers.
FASTER SEARCHING
“There are a million ways to search for bonds, and one of the things [advisers] needed was a faster approach,” said Chris Shayne, senior market strategist for BondDesk.
All the data suggested that the bulk of searches were really of two types: A client with a particular type of need who requires a bond to match it, and an adviser who tends to start with a specific type of bond in mind but needs the specifics in order to target it to the right client.
That is where a lot of additional information pop-ups came into play. Rather than drilling down and leaving a page or opening more windows through hyperlinks, the new interface provides a pop-up “market check” link for particular bonds. Click that, and a small window opens, displaying some of that bond's most recent trading data — basically a gauge to answer the question: Is this a good price or not?
If the new interface streamlines research for advisers to the extent that the folks at BondDesk claim, perhaps it will spawn imitators — wait, who am I kidding? We're talking about bonds.
Related information:
Visit the
BondWorks slideshow to get a better sense of the interface.
E-mail Davis D. Janowski at [email protected].
