WASHINGTON The Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board on Thursday released a long-range plan envisioning a sweeping series of upgrades to its electronic information products, including the role-out of “EMMA 2.0,” that would expand the universe of information available to investors and other market participants.
The plan, the result of one year of formal development, is designed to further the MSRB’s mission to promote a fair and efficient market and was signed off on by the MSRB board late last month. The proposed changes would be rolled out over, ideally, five to seven years if approved by the board and the Securities and Exchange Commission, after receiving public comments.
MSRB executive director Lynnette Kelly stressed Thursday that the plan assumes a flat budget and that costs, day-to-day events, and changes in priorities would affect the timing.
Basically, the board envisions collecting a whole range of new information from a variety of sources, integrating that information on EMMA, and making it available to investors and market participants in more user friendly and searchable format.
Enhancements could include providing information on: upcoming new issues; complete real-time offering price information for new issues; pricing information for pre-award conditional trading commitments; conflict of interest disclosures for underwriters and municipal advisors; and expanded liquidity and credit support documents.
The new data could also include: municipal derivatives disclosures; pension and other post-employment benefit disclosures, bank loan and municipal lease disclosures, publicly-available bid-offer information; and more contemporaneous real-time trade price and yield information for all muni trades.
“EMMA 2.0 would incorporate a re-engineered real-time trade price system, representing the next generation of the MSRB’s existing Real-time Transaction Reporting System (RTRS), to become a central transparency platform (CTP) to provide a comprehensive, interactive and real-time display of a suite of pricing-related market data,” the MSRB said in its vision for the future.
“While maintaining all execution activity in the hands of private-sector market participants through their own platforms” such as through voice brokerage, electronic platforms or other processes, “the CTP would, over time, evolve to become a centralized venue providing universal public access to pre-, concurrent/real-time (live) and post-trade pricing information across the municipal market.”
The information would be accumulated through primary market pricing and secondary market-trade data submitted to the MSRB, as well as live and historical bid-offer and related pre-trade information provided voluntarily by private-sector CTP participants.
The MSRB called its plan an “evolutionary approach to establishing an integrated set of market transparency products.”
The board is encouraging market participants and others to comment on the plan and has posted a link on its web site,
