Build America Mutual and Lumesis, Inc. announced a joint initiative to improve investors' access to municipal bond credit information by making BAM's Obligor Disclosure Brief credit summaries available to users of Lumesis' DIVER Advisor platform.
Municipal bond investors, traders, and sales professionals use BAM's ODBs to make their mandatory reviews of municipal credit quality faster and more efficient, while bond issuers - the public-sector entities that are BAM's members - benefit from increased transparency that can improve the liquidity of their insured and uninsured bonds. BAM publishes ODBs for every issuer it insures, and updates them annually. To date, BAM has published more than 1,800 ODBs.
"Improving market transparency is at the core of BAM's mission to serve municipal bond issuers and investors - and that means delivering useful credit information to the market when it's most valuable," said BAM's CEO Sean McCarthy. "Our integration with DIVER Advisor does that, putting the information in the hands of a retail advisor at the moment they need it to help evaluate a bond purchase decision, or explain a credit to their client."
DIVER Advisor was developed to help the muni bond industry use technology to stay ahead of changing compliance obligations around time of trade disclosure, suitability and standards of creditworthiness under the Dodd Frank law. The new integration will allow users to have one-click access to BAM's ODBs for all insured CUSIPs. DIVER Advisor users will also be able to forward the ODBs to their clients for review.
In addition, DIVER Advisor will flag uninsured CUSIPs that BAM has already pre-approved for its secondary-market insurance program. Bonds insured by BAM in the secondary market can benefit from an improved credit rating and heightened market liquidity.
"BAM's ODBs are a clear complement to the information available on the DIVER Advisor platform," said Gregg L. Bienstock, CEO and co-founder of Lumesis. "The annual ODB is another example of how we provide our user's access to 'material information reasonably accessible' built into their workflow."
