Software solutions firm Investortools and technology-driven broker-dealer Millennium Advisors have partnered to streamline the usual muni investment managers' manually intensive workflow, the firms said.
Millennium will provide clients with real-time pricing and trade execution capabilities by connecting directly to the Investortools Dealer Network, or IDN, according to a press release.
Millennium will be a "fully featured electronic trading package for a true Straight-Through-Processing experience," the release said
Within the Investortools software, users will be able to "lift, bid, counter, and receive electronic delivery of allocation details," the firms said.
"This integration streamlines the trading process by allowing users to manage transactions within a single system, eliminating the need to switch to another application to source bonds," according to the release.
Investortools' clients want to receive as much dealer data electronically as possible so they can have "the entire investable secondary market included in all of their electronic trade decision-making," said James Morris, senior vice president at Investortools.
Those desires have led Investortools to continue expanding through partnerships with Millennium, he said.
Investortools' clients "pointed us their way and said, 'We would love to have a Millennium's offers available on the Dealer Network,'" Morris said.
Other recent efforts include adding Tradeweb Automated Intelligent Pricing for munis to the IDN and integrating with Trumid's fixed-income electronic trading platform.
For Millennium's part, the firm had engaged with Investortools as Investortools built out its network to "pipe in" pricing directly to its trading system, said Dan Pecoraro, muni trading lead at Millennium.
But in the past year, he said Millennium "picked it up on our end" and prioritized it as a connection it wanted to be a part of.
Investortools has a "large share" of the SMA space and integrating the offer side and the execution component of the trade lifecycle into Millennium's business is important, Pecoraro said.
"We've seen a [positive] change in how we interact with our customers," he noted. "We have the brand recognition that is a Millennium offering, and they can engage us directly with the workflow they already use."
Both Investortools and Millennium have strong footholds in munis.
Investortools has three different alternative trading systems, with one more on the horizon, and eight direct dealers, Morris said.
If an Investortools client has a "trading relationship" in place with all of ATS and direct deals, that represents around 500,000 different pieces of dealer market data, which is "pretty broadly representative" of the market, he noted.
Meanwhile, Millennium is connected to various electronic communication networks in munis, said Laurent Paulhac, Millennium Advisors Group CEO.
"We want to provide liquidity in as direct way as possible to clients as opposed to go through various layers of intermediation and intermediaries," he said, noting the partnership with Investortools furthers the firm's goals.
"There's a fragmentation in how the electronification is being represented in different firms, and it's important to be able to meet them where they are and in their workflows, which is a strong suit of Millennium," Pecoraro added.
