TransFICC Enters FI Tape Race
Posted by Colin Lambert. Last updated: November 25, 2024
Connectivity provider TransFICC has announced plans to bid to become a consolidated tape provider (CTP) in fixed income for both the EU and UK.
The UK’s FCA is expected to begin its tender process and criteria for the UK CTP in the next few weeks, and ESMA for the EU CTP in January 2025. Confirmation and authorisation of the new CTPs is expected to be in Q4 2025, with go live dates in 2026.
The tapes are expected to deliver greater transparency for all subscribers, with valuable insights provided to fixed income participants (including investors, liquidity providers and issuers) across multiple use cases. Both ESMA and the FCA have stressed that CTPs should provide a low-cost, resilient and high-quality service which can be implemented quickly, connecting to all trading venues and APAs across the UK and EU, and distributing data to users.
Confirming the company’s intention to bid to be a CTP, Steve Toland, co-founder of TransFICC, says, “TransFICC has been running a CTP pilot for nearly two years and during that time clients have tested it for performance, resilience, and ease of integration. The buy-side, sell-side, market data firms and venues have successfully tested data contribution and data output, the results of which have given us significant insight into how to develop and support a CTP in production.
“By using key components from our existing technology we are able to deliver a low-cost tape in terms of initial build and ongoing running costs,” he adds. “In addition, quality and latency will not be compromised, which includes the tape being able to support the real time publication of trades and potentially price streaming and pre-trade market data in the future. Finally, using our existing technology allows us to roll out a CTP quickly and efficiently.”