National Stock Exchange of India Ltd (NSE), India’s leading stock exchange had launched the Request for Quote (RFQ) platform for debt securities on February 4, 2020. NSE is happy to announce the release of a new version of the RFQ platform with several new features. RFQ is a specialized platform offered by NSE to cater to the unique needs of the Indian bond market. The platform supplants voice-based negotiations with state-of-the-art electronic negotiation tools to bring auditability and transparency to bond trading.
Corporate funding over recent years is gradually shifting towards capital markets. Given the increasing reliance on the bond markets, it is imperative that information about bonds, term sheets, price information, market quotes, etc. are made available to all market players on an integrated platform to significantly reduce information asymmetry. The NSE RFQ platform supports all these features in a unified marketplace to trade corporate bonds, securitized debt, municipal bonds, CP, CD, G-Sec, SDL, and T-bills. This covers practically all major fixed income instruments available in India. An ISIN level market watch is provided to the participants to view the summary of market activity in a given ISIN. It also provides market depth in the security along with information of best bid and best ask for the quotes initiated. All these features are packaged into a user-friendly and customizable dashboard for a seamless navigation experience.
The platform offers high flexibility with features such as the ability to initiate quotes anonymously / with identity, sending quotes to select participants / entire market, choosing deal parameters, quantity conditions, etc. If a bond has complex terms that require some time to confirm the price, then participants can choose to close the deal on yield and later confirm the price. Alternatively, participants can choose to close deals on yield and price in one go. These features have been especially offered to replicate the flexibility of the voice market. From the risk management perspective, participants can set trading limits for counter-parties which are then monitored by the system. The onboarding process has been made simple for existing CBRICS participants with an added feature of automated reporting of RFQ trades on the reporting platform to make the entire trade, reporting, and settlement process completely seamless.
NSE Data & Analytics Limited, a subsidiary of NSE, is integrating its fixed income analytics tool on to the RFQ platform, enhancing its usability and providing much-needed research and analytics support to the bond market participants. This tool offers rich fixed income security and portfolio analytics along with providing deep insights into fixed income markets through a highly interactive and user-friendly web-based interface.
Mr. Vikram Limaye, MD & CEO, NSE said, “Pre-trade transparency and bringing bond markets to an electronic trading platform will propel Indian bond markets into a higher growth phase. The RFQ platform brings all major debt securities into a unified marketplace with information, data and analytics to empower market participants and to deepen and widen participation. We strongly believe that we need to attract a wider section of participants to the bond markets to make the market robust and vibrant. We believe the RFQ platform will help us achieve this objective. We will continue to add features and facilitation to make this platform the ‘go-to’ marketplace for participants and the best in class platform globally.”
