BondWave Taps Industry Veteran Miscimarra to Help Expand Services

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BondWave LLC, a financial technology company and registered investment advisor, plans a suite of new technology products in early 2017 that will enhance its existing services, and has hired a bond industry veteran to lead the effort.

Tony Miscimarra, who has more than 30 years as a bond trader and fixed income financial technology innovator, joined the Wheaton, Ill.-based company as managing director of business development, the firm announced in a June 15 press release.

In his new role, Miscimarra is responsible for educating traders and advisors about the firm's existing strategy-based investing offerings, such as a portfolio creation and monitoring and rebalancing tool, in addition to enhancing communication between the trading desk, advisors and their clients.

He oversees revenue and infrastructure management and growth aimed at improving BondWave's presence as a provider of financial technology solutions that facilitate individual bond investing in the global fixed income security space, including U.S. municipal bonds.

"Since municipal securities represent nearly a third of all outstanding fixed income securities, this sector has always been – and will continue to be – a key focus of BondWave's overall business strategy," Michael Ruvo, the chief executive officer, told The Bond Buyer on Tuesday.

The firm's new suite of products will consolidate the existing product-based services into a single, fixed-income intelligence platform focused on model-based investing, the CEO said.

BondWave has about 720,000 accounts and $123 billion of fixed income assets running on its platform. The company aims to facilitate, leverage, and simplify individual bond investing, while offering customizable tools to help advisors with bond pricing analysis, bond basics, trade opportunity mining, business intelligence and reporting, and compliance assistance.

Ruvo, who has been president of BondWave since 2013, was appointed CEO on May 11 and is working to improve transparency and liquidity in the fixed income market

"We believe the opportunity now exists to bring a new level of transparency, data insights/market intelligence and open market structure to the fixed income space that is not currently available and more closely resembles the equity markets," Ruvo said.

"Tony's addition to our team is an important aspect of BondWave's plan to innovate in fixed income over the next several years," Ruvo said in the release. "Tony shares our vision that traders, advisors and investors are woefully underserved because capturing a single view of the bond market has been elusive, and they have lacked intuitive tools to analyze and monitor trading opportunities."

Miscimarra joins BondWave from Tradeweb Direct where he served as managing director since 2014. Previously, he was CEO of Fixed Income Solutions LLC, a technology solutions company, and prior to that he held senior roles with BondDesk Group, Instinet Fixed Income and UBS Securities. He began his career as a bond trader before transitioning to institutional fixed income sales. He holds a Bachelor of Arts in political science and economics from the University of Pittsburgh.

BondWave has a wide range of customers, from small independent RIAs to some of the largest broker-dealers and custody providers in the financial services industry, according to the firm. Its financial technology tools are used by traders and advisors that help them better leverage individual bonds as part of their clients' investment objectives.

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