BondDesk announced Thursday it has launched a new trading service that aims to be “the most advanced retail fixed-income wealth management platform available in the market.”
Known as the BondWorks wealth management platform, it is designed to streamline adviser workflows and simplify their day-to-day activities with a new interface and monitoring tools.
The platform has already replaced the third-party workstation at Philadelphia-based investment bank Janney Montgomery Scott and is now live across the firm’s network of 750 financial advisers.
Kevin Reed, managing director at Janney, couldn’t curb his enthusiasm about how “remarkably powerful” and “easy to use” the program is.
“The BondWorks platform is unlike any fixed-income system we’ve ever seen,” Reed said in a press release. “The implementation process was successful across the Janney platform and had very little impact on our day-to-day operations.”
BondDesk plans to roll out the platform to other clients over the coming months. Their goal is to deploy the system across its entire customer base of more than 100,000 financial advisers.
Greg Stockett, BondDesk’s acting chief executive, called the platform a “game-changer” for retail buyers that “represents the future of the retail bond market.”
“The BondWorks platform takes retail bond investing to a level not previously seen or available,” he said in a press release. “Advisers can now easily and efficiently engage with the bond market in a sophisticated and intuitive way, benefiting from fully transparent bids and offers, extensive market surveillance, and real-time streaming data that supports their workflow.”
The platform enables users to automate time-consuming tasks through “wizard” applications, according to BondDesk. Built-in monitoring tools also help users to receive real-time alerts on specific events, including the status of open orders and price changes for particular credits.
“For the first time, advisers can invest in individual bonds as easily as they can invest in bond funds,” Stockett said.
Other new features include a bond comparison tool and graphical representations of the market from which advisers can directly initiate orders, the company said.
BondDesk is the nation’s largest retail bond-trading venue, providing enterprise-wide fixed-income solutions to many of the top broker-dealers in North America.
It provides a monthly report of observations on the municipal market called the Market Transparency Report.
