280 CapMarkets gears platform to independent advisors

280 CapMarkets introduced a technology platform, Bond Navigator, geared to helping independent financial advisors meet best-execution requirements.

The San Francisco based technology-driven fixed income business announced the platform on Tuesday, saying the cloud-based application provides greater transparency into bond pricing, availability and characteristics, backed by the resources and expertise of the firm’s advisor liaison, institutional sales, and institutional trading desks.

Gurinder

“Bond Navigator levels the playing field for independent advisors,” said Gurinder S. Ahluwalia, chief executive officer, of 280 CapMarkets. “It empowers advisors with enhanced market visibility, carefully curated offerings, and access to a breadth of products and insights on the markets. Trade requests initiated through Bond Navigator are executed by our experienced team of fixed income professionals, who work to achieve the most competitive price for every order using the full resources of our three desks.”

He said the service model uniquely binds fixed income expertise with a sophisticated technology platform that can help independent advisors save valuable time, grow their business, and feel confident in their ability to support best execution requirements.

For many independent investment advisors, gaining access to a broad universe of bonds is challenging. Large institutions control or manage a majority of the individual securities, strongly influence bond prices, and hold trading insights within proprietary systems. These factors can inhibit an advisor’s ability to compare available bonds in the market, and can also limit pricing transparency.

Bond Navigator addresses these challenges by aggregating data from multiple market sources to give greater insight into buying, selling and managing bonds. 280 CapMarkets said it provides access to thousands of wholesale bond offerings and liquidity solutions, with comprehensive pre-trade price transparency to assist investment advisors in managing their clients’ fixed income portfolios with confidence. 280 CapMarkets’ pre-trade data, combined with post-trade 280 Best X documentation, also supports best execution requirements.

“Bond Navigator brings together data from multiple sources onto a single, easy-to-use screen, providing real-time trading information and pricing transparency,” said Prescott Nasser, chief technology officer. “Advisors now have visibility to a full range of bond offerings, by issuer or series, along with historical trading data, so that they can confidently select the right bonds for their client at the right price.”

The Bond Navigator platform boasts an intuitive user interface and tools for the independent investment advisor, including: a map feature that illustrates the geographic location of issuers; offering and bid/wanted supply by issuer and geographic location; Real-time new offering and bid/wanted alerts; a marketing tool for advisors’ communication with new and existing clients; and a watch list to assist advisors in monitoring bond pricing changes.