PHOENIX - Financial services technology provider Ipreo has launched a new municipal bond platform aimed at giving the company's customers a much more detailed look at how and to whom their bonds are selling.
The new platform, which has been in a beta development stage since May, is replacing Ipreo's standard "monitor" that clients had been using. Will MacPherson, product strategy and marketing lead at IPREO, said while the new monitor was developed with issuers in mind, it is a useful tool for other members of the deal team, too. The new monitor provides detailed data and visuals useful to issuers, underwriters, and others as well.
"It's really released for the 'muni origination persona,'" he said. "Everyone involved in the origination process."
MacPherson, who worked at Goldman Sachs for 10 years prior to joining Ipreo, said the new platform developed from a more tech-startup perspective than typical financial services software products. It has already been used for dozens of deals with good feedback, he said.
Roughly 95% of the market already uses Ipreo for deals, MacPherson said, so starting this week those clients will see the new monitor instead of the old interface. The new interface offers large graphs of activity tracking different tranches of an offering, allowing users to click on any maturity to get more information about its orders.
The monitor also allows users to track individual orders as they come into the order book, view syndicate member participation on the deal, and launch reports to get a thorough breakdown of orders by either syndicate member or investors across priority types, syndicate member types or investor types.
"We've used the beta version on several transactions, said Terry Hull, associate vice chancellor for finance at The University of Texas system. "It's a significant improvement. It's a better user interface, and more dynamic. We thought very highly of it."
Hull said he especially appreciated the ease of accessing information compared with the previous version.
Features planned for future rollout include a "monitor the market" feature that will allow users to place their deal data more in context with wider market activity as well as economic news. It will also offer even more textured investor information with investor profiles detailing individual investors and showing historical participation, roadshow participation, and more.
"This is a big deal for us at Ipreo," MacPherson said. "I think the market is really excited for it."
