College students have CliffsNotes. Law students rely on case summaries. And now, for the municipal bond market -- MuniPoints.
DPC Data Inc. announced earlier this week that MuniPoints, its one-page summaries of municipal bond deals, would soon be available through BondDesk Group's online trading platform. The summaries will appear as hotlinks for BondDesk customers who pay an added subscription fee.
"We have been producing this data for a client for about two or three years, and they were distributing it in different formats," said DPC Data president Michael Ruvo. "When they stopped, some of the market participants that they had been distributing it to kind of came to us and looked for the service to be restarted, if you will, or continued."
Several potential clients requested that the MuniPoints be available through BondDesk, Ruvo said.
DPC Data is a nationally recognized municipal securities information repository, and has been compiling official statement information into a MuniPoints format since 2001. The fact sheets are compiled by the 20-person staff of DPC Data's Philippine subsidiary in Manila, he said.
"You really can't automate this stuff because there's not a consistent filing format," Ruvo said. "So, [official statements] can be different for different types of bonds that come out. There's really no way to automate that and predict where you're going to find certain things."
BondDesk saw the opportunity as a way to offer a new product that provides more deal information prior to and at the point of sale, said Tony Miscimarra, president of BondDesk Trading LLC.
"With as much regulatory lift around disclosure and providing information prior to or at the point of sale, for us it was an easy decision," Miscimarra said. He added that it helps financial advisers to narrow down exactly which bonds are a good fit for their clients without having to plow through entire official statements.
"If we have 9,000 or 10,000 municipal bond issues reflected at any given point as live and executable, MuniPoints will have an 'M' link on virtually 100% of them," Miscimarra said.
Since 2001, DPC Data has indexed 750,000 Cusips to MuniPoints summaries. But this means that some of the bonds still being traded were issued before DPC Data began its summarizing work.
After performing a test run of sorts with one of the larger broker-dealer firms, the two companies said they would likely make the first round of MuniPoints summaries available to BondDesk customers around the turn of the year. (c) 2006 The Bond Buyer and SourceMedia, Inc. All rights reserved. http://www.bondbuyer.com http://www.sourcemedia.com
