DPC DATA signed an agreement to provide its municipal news products to Fidelity Investments' financial advisor and retail investor clients.
DPC DATA tailored its MuniPOINTS information product to provide faster access to local and regional news that could make a financial advisor or retail investor aware of a potential material event prior to it occurring.
“We are thrilled to collaborate with a market leader like Fidelity to configure our products to give their customers actionable data and insights they need about municipal bonds,” Ken Hoffman, president of DPC DATA, said in a release. “Our highly accurate indexing and tagging processes make it easy for our clients to access the most comprehensive collection of municipal news and disclosure-related documents available.”
Hoffman said DPC hosts the content for Fidelity, which embeds it into its own site. It’s a proprietary network and includes all new issues and outstanding CUSIPs. While EMMA provides data, DPC enhances it with relevant tagging and keep that process in place, even after the first EMMA filing. “That’s what makes us different, makes it more useful, accurate and transparent,” Hoffman said.
“Fidelity’s millions of customers now have instant access to all information affecting municipal bonds to help them be better informed as investors,” said Richard Carter, vice president of Fixed Income Products and Services at Fidelity, in the release. “DPC DATA has unique tools that display verified primary and secondary market filings, extracts key information verbatim from every Official Statement, and is a top source for local and regional municipal bond news.”
DPC’s product delivery infrastructure supports nearly 1.2 million material event notices, 780,000 financials, and more than 370,000 Official Statements, DPC said. And, since 2011, the database has added more than 600,000 obligor-relevant news articles licensed from thousands of local and regional publications.
“Our clients get an increased awareness and access to important issuer and obligor information. Only DPC can provide such a tremendous opportunity to get in-depth insights about the bonds they’re investing in,” Hoffman said.
For Carter, the agreement with DPC adds another layer of transparency and information for Fidelity's clients, via its website.
“Prior to this agreement with DPC, we offered all relevant data points — coupons, maturities, ratings, access to MSRB trade data and EMMA,” Carter said. With the addition of DPC, he added, it provides another level of intelligence.
Through a bond details page, a customer can drill down on a more granular level than previously available on Fidelity’s own platforms, he said.
“We want our clients to be as informed as possible and we like DPC’s quality control metrics,” Carter said. “Issuer events are lined up with the right CUSIP and the summary is friendly to retail investors; a sort of one-pager of pertinent information.”
DPC was one of the original SEC-designated Nationally Recognized Municipal Securities Information Repositories (NRMSIRs) and has since integrated EMMA data into its own systems.
