Impact on Originators

Mortgage Originators are some of the market participants facing the most strain on their traditional workflows. As production volumes have skyrocketed, so has their BWIC activity in specified pools. Not only are they dealing with more line items on lists, but also more frequent BWICs that are time consuming, onerous and error prone due to manual nature of existing transaction technology. Furthermore, lack of market penetration is dragging on optimization of Best Execution since the increased ADV has reduced dealer bandwidth. Bonds on BWICs often receive sub optimal bids or may be entirely missed impacting the originator’s ROI.

Impact on Dealers

The expansion in ADV has left dealers inundated with BWICs. Salespeople are left spending much of their time manually formatting and entering bids on lists received from various clients – each in their proprietary BWIC formats. Traders are unable to spend more than a few minutes pricing bonds, tracking client inventory for matchers, and liaising with customers on bids. All this leads to lower inventory churn for dealers that negatively impacts ROI, increases market risk, and increases human capital costs.

Impact on Buyside

The archaic market structure of the specified pool market has always been a burden to the buyside. There is no centralized source of market activity and standardization of data – leaving the buyside heavily dependent on external counterparties for actionable information. Despite increasing trading volumes in specified pools, buyside traders are often left on the side lines since they are inundated with BWIC and inventory spam from their counterparties. Filtering down information to find the right pools that match portfolio requirements is like searching for a needle in a haystack. Furthermore, the current BWIC trading process can take hours to complete and the feedback loop between buyers and sellers is inefficient. This can lead to unwarranted market risk as buyside participants wait on bid feedback and reduces their market participation.   

Existing Trading Workflows are Unsustainable

BWIC management through manual spreadsheet data entry makes the trading process cumbersome and unsustainable as production and trading volumes continue to grow. The MBS marketplace is at an inflexion point where the adoption of eTrading to support seamless communication & scalable workflows as well as smarter data driven decisions, will become a differentiating factor for market participants. As the market continues to become more electronic, having a digital platform when data is exchanged in a standardized format will help all market participants and open the door to technologies such as auto-bidding. BondXN allows MBS market participants to step into the future by integrating our technology with minimum disruptions.