Hi, everybody. Welcome to our next session, this afternoon. I'm Ben Budish. I'm Barclays analyst, covering the U.S. brokers, asset managers, and exchanges. With us, this chat is Chris Gerosa, CFO of MarketAxess. Chris, thanks so much for being with us.
Hi, Ben. Thank you for having me today.
Let me just start. You know, before we dive into any specific topics, I wanna get your view on the current macro environment. 2023 started with some pretty strong volumes, but it looks like, you know, the banking crisis created some distress in the market, and since then, volatility has really been quite low since the past few years. So how do you view the state of the macro environment right now for fixed income trading? How is September kind of looking to date?
Yeah, it's been a very challenging operating environment so far, what we've seen in Q3, and if you asked me six months ago, I never thought we'd be sitting here today with the VIX trading at 13, low vol, low spreads. And it's, I don't know what it's gonna take, but it's not good for our business in terms of the U.S. credit business. You can directly correlate strong performance in our high yield franchise that we built through the VIX. When the VIX is trading at 13, there's not a lot of ETF market making activity, and so we've seen challenges around our high yield share gains. Excuse me. And for high grade, new issuance has been very healthy so far in September.
We've tended to face challenges in the first week or two, but it does add secondary volume that's longer term tailwind for us. But in terms of the interest rate environment, it's been very challenging for where you're seeing the duration trade. With the Fed uncertain on when they're gonna stop their messaging and raising rates, it's putting pressure on duration, and duration isn't going long like we would need to see for extending our high-grade fee capture. So those two dynamics around low volatility and the VIX and where the interest rate curve is in the interest rate cycle, it's been challenging for our U.S. credit business for sure.
Maybe for investors who may be, like, less familiar with the dynamic between duration and fee per million, can you walk us through how this works and maybe remind us the relative sort of fee rates you get on the different types of products? Based on the current, you know, rate curve, I guess, who knows what happens with volatility, but how could that kind of evolve over the next 12 months?
Yes. Only one of our products is subject to the risks around duration. It's US high grade. It's a spread protocol, and the market convention for how you trade high grade, it's a DV01 of a basis point, and the DV01 of a bond is directly impacted by duration. Duration is defined as years to maturity and bond yields. What you saw in the last few years was a very aggressive rate hike by the Fed, which put negative pressure on our high-grade fee capture. Just to size it up, every 100 basis point move in yields contributes to a $5-$6 impact on fee capture. When you have 500 basis points going up, you're gonna see our fee capture go down by $30-$35 per million.
The other side of duration is years to maturity, and as I alluded to earlier, there's a tendency to trade in the front end of the curve, which is lower years to maturity. We're seeing that as we speak through this so far in September and what we've seen in Q3. But when the Fed approaches the end of that cycle, and there's more certainty on where the Fed is stopping the rate hikes, the extension of duration, people are a lot more confident in extending years to maturity of bonds that they're trading because you're not subject to the mark-to-market risks of a rising yield curve. And that's very impactful. That's more impactful than bond yields, because every one year maturity, it's a $15 impact.
So when we had the peaks of $200 per million in the middle of 2020, when yields were low, years to maturity or over 10 years, fast-forward to where we are today, bond yields being up 400 or 500 basis points, years to maturity, around 8 or 9 years, that's what's brought our fee capture down to that $140 barrier. But we're confident that the cycle is gonna turn. We've seen this over the last 10 years, that when we approach the end of the cycle, and the messaging is that the Fed is done, that's a tailwind that we're confident we'll see in contributing to our high-grade revenue growth.
Got it. So it sounds like, you know, the current rate environment, we're really kind of waiting to see traders start going longer duration. You know, do you think if we kind of look at the futures curve, and it's sort of fair to think that markets are price-pricing at a near peak, do you think sort of, just over time, as rates start to come down, is that enough of a tailwind to kind of get credit per million going? Or do we just see the curve sort of, you know, revert to its kind of normal upward sloping shape? What sort of factors-
I think a lot of it's been priced in already. The front end, you're looking at short, short-end Treasuries with a 5 handle. The years of maturity of bonds trading on our platform is around 8-10 years, and a lot of that's been priced in. You see the 10-year get close to 5. So I think it's more the messaging out of the Fed, where the actual rate actions have been priced into the curve. So I think we've taken the brunt of what impact bond yields are gonna have on fee capture. It's that tailwind behind people being confident that they can extend duration, which is going longer years to maturity, and that's, that's why we're confident that we'll see the high-grade fee capture rebound from the levels we're at today.
Got it. And then are there any other kind of key macro maybe regulatory factors, you know, that can kind of influence bond trading activity while we're on the kind of higher level macro topic, either from an electronic trading, you know, share perspective, or, you know, in terms of kind of velocity, any other things we should be-
Yeah, Ben, before we get into the regulatory climate, I just wanna round out the discussion on fee capture, because you did ask about the other products.
Of course.
So product mix is a big factor on how we look at our total credit fee capture. So far in Q2, as we reported in our August volume release, mix of lower High yield has a negative impact on our credit fee capture. High yield is our highest fee capture product at $300 per million, and a year ago, we saw elevated trading volume in High yield, which was a very positive influence on our total credit fee capture. But as I mentioned earlier, with VIX being where the levels they are today, lower High yield activity on the platform, it's gonna naturally depress our fee capture into that $150 range. But it is a price-based product, so it's insulated from the movements of duration and the movement in bond yields.
Eurobonds and emerging markets, which round out the composite products, they're both also price-based, where Eurobonds trades at a range of $120 per million and emerging markets trades at $150. So recognizing that high yield is at that $300 handle, the lower level of high yield is gonna cause that 164 to go below 160 when you see less levels of contribution. And as we succeed in growing our geographical footprint across emerging markets and local markets, the success in local markets commands a lower fee capture rate because of the government nature style bonds or trade, they naturally trade below $100 per million. So the volatility in our total credit fee capture isn't necessarily driven by any sort of fee reduction or fee actions.
In the recent years, it's more or less been driven by the product mix.
Got it. And then I think the other part of the question was, any other kind of broad macro factors, anything in the regulatory landscape, that we should be paying attention to other than sort of the, the rate activity and what's going on at the Fed?
Yeah, I think the regulatory environment in focus with what's going on with the banks, the additional capital charges that the regulators are looking to potentially impose on the banks, is maybe gonna limit the amount of trading volume of credit bonds that trade on their platforms. Which is a good thing for MarketAxess because we've developed this liquidity pool in Open Trading, which was meant to be there to provide our institutional clients with liquidity to the extent that the dealers aren't as active within that community. So I think that that's a potential tailwind in terms of regulatory development. So they're still working their way through the regulation and how it's gonna play out, but there, there's nothing in terms of the fee cards that would impact a regulatory environment would impact. It's more or less bringing more volume onto the platform.
Got it. Thanks. Maybe, you know, dovetailing into, you know, kind of overall market share growth through newer protocols. So maybe to start out, when we think about, you know, market expansion, volumes, market share, I think both you and your, your biggest competitor would agree that the biggest competition remains the phone. So what do you think is the biggest hurdle at this point, that you're not a new company anymore, even though there's still kind of a lot of growth in front of you, but at this point, what's the biggest hurdle to kind of penetrating more of that, you know, phone-based share? You're bringing more volume to electronic platforms, you're driving more trading velocity, or both.
You've heard me talk about this a lot in the last couple of quarters, but it's all about blocks. Blocks is our number one issue in high grade today. If you look at the, the time series going back 3 years, high grade blocks as a percentage of TRACE, has been hovering around 37%. That's the total market in terms of high grade block share. Our percentage of high grade share has been hovering between 10%-12%. You look at our high grade share, it's been trading in a 20% range for the last 3 years. So we realized that we had this issue with blocks, and the issue is, it's information leakage.
If you're looking to sell a $10 million IBM bond, when you bring it to our competitive moat with the liquidity pool around Open Trading that we built, when you bring it to Open Trading, that $10 million is gonna get exposed to potentially the 2,000 institutional clients that are trading within Open Trading. It may potentially impact the price. You have a lot more comfort minimizing the information leakage risk and going to the dealers that you have a relationship with. Our solution for that in the near term is we're rolling out our new trading platform, X-Pro, which has a lot of functionality built into it, leveraging the valuable data set that we've built.
We wanna take your $10 million IBM bond and look at dealers that have been actively trading that bond over the last two or three months, and direct you to the dealers where we think you can get a better price of execution, which is moving away from open trading. Albeit, open trading is still very valuable to us because the longer term solution for us addressing blocks is the Adaptive Auto-X, which is the automation suite that, again, is embedded within this new UI X-Pro that we're rolling out as we speak. The concept with the algo is the algo will break up the $10 million IBM block. It will feed it through the various protocols that we've invested in over the years, that are now available in that one cockpit view through X-Pro, and get you the best level of execution.
We'll have the transaction cost savings reporting available to the clients to prove that they were getting best ex by feeding it through the algo. That's a longer term horizon until it materializes, because it's a completely different way of trading fixed income then. I think that may be a one or two-year event, but in the near term, we've got X-Pro, we've got a very aggressive sales outreach program to do what we need to do to bring on the blocks that we can control onto the platform.
Well, you started to answer my next question about Adaptive Auto-X. Give me the level set, though. You know, you've been sort of facilitating automated trading for your clients several years now, and you report a lot of stats, you know, the number of all trades that have been automated, and the like, when we kind of get our regular updates from you. But maybe just a level set, how is Adaptive Auto-X different from what you've been doing in terms of, like, automated trading prior? Yeah, what is, what is the sort of advancement with the product in particular?
Yeah. So Adaptive Auto-X is an AI algo-driven solution, and we were proud to announce that we completed the first institutional client credit algo back in Q2, and we partnered with a company called Pragma, of which we just recently announced we made a decision to acquire Pragma and partner with them for the longer term. But it's an algo-driven methodology, which the algo feeds the trade through the different protocols that are within the network and identifies the timing during the day of when you should trade, who you should trade with, which protocols you should trade with. So it's a very complicated, sophisticated way of trading fixed income that doesn't exist today.
It's really driven by the complexity around the algo, which we wanna make sure we get it right in terms particularly around the transaction cost savings, but also in terms of the robust control framework, because we wanna make sure that it's operating effectively and it's delivering a good experience to our clients.
Got it. And so the pilot phase for Adaptive Auto-X, I think you talked about eight clients participating. Is there any update there, any kind of feedback from those clients? You've talked about cost savings reports. Is that something... Can you start to tangibly, you know, point to, like, material cost savings or any details you can share around, like, what that could mean as you start to reach out to other clients with Pragma?
Well, we're gonna have reporting available in the Q3 earnings call in October. What I will say is that it, it is embedded within X-Pro, so the ability for us to succeed on delivering increased usage of X-Pro and naturally having that algo solution embedded within X-Pro, I think will feed to increased adoption across the algo solution and the overall usage of our new trading platform, the X-Pro system.
Got it. And then what about the sort of broader rollout? Like, Is there a pipeline of clients who are wanting to get on the platform? I think in the last call, you talked about some kind of, like, pent-up demand, or is this more of a sales-driven approach from MarketAxess?
Yeah, we had more sophisticated clients in their early pilot phase, and we've got a lot of demand from the larger clients that are on the platform, and the teams working through adding them on to the platform, working with them in terms of how we're testing and utilizing all the best case scenarios that they want us to test in the algo solution. But it... This, this is gonna. This is gonna take time. This isn't a one-quarter event, where in one quarter we're seeing this S-curve of increased adoption. And we got to make sure that we're giving that good experience to the client.
So we're gonna be careful about how we're rolling this out, and, there is increased level of demand from our larger clients, but we wanna make sure that we get it right with the smaller pilot group, because ultimately we want them to have a good experience, so they're sticking on to the platform.
I don't know if you can share, but at this point, are there more than the original eight, or is it sort of pipeline or you-
Yeah, a handful more.
Yeah, a handful more. Got it. Well, you mentioned earlier, you talked about Pragma, which was a recent acquisition. Talk a little bit about more, a little more about your plans here. Is the intention sort of just to integrate Pragma's capability into Adaptive Auto-X? Does it, you know, kind of... As I understood it, they do some, you know, facilitate some trading and things other than fixed income. How does it kind of fit in? What's the plan there?
So our initial approach with building the automation suite on the algo, we did not have the in-house expertise that had that algo SME experience. And what we did is, we did an RFP. We elected Pragma to be the commercial partner to help us build that solution. And as we were working with them, we recognized the value, and we ultimately decided to acquire Pragma. So Pragma was that third party that was helping us build Adaptive Auto-X. And as we've talked about M&A opportunities over time, we've always said that there could be bolt-on acquisitions that would be tech accretive, and this has been a tech accretive play that brings a unique skill set in our tech resources that can help us build the algo suite.
Also looking at derivatives and FX, that we don't have those expertise in-house, and they've had a long history of succeeding on that front. As we think about other products and areas where we need to develop FX hedging or interest rate hedging solutions, the Pragma team can help us think through that. It was a really nice way to add a lot of good tech resources in-house and partner with them for the longer term. As we talked about a year ago, we had a lot of challenges about finding good developers, and this was a nice way to, in one-stop-shop, bring a lot of good developers onto the team.
Got it. Makes sense. Now, what about the data side? So talk a little bit about how the data feeds into your algorithmic trading capabilities. You know, you develop, you generate a lot of proprietary data from trading activity on the platform. How do you monetize this? Is there sort of another revenue opportunity there? It's about, you know, feeding the algo and driving more trading through that. How do you think about that?
Yeah. The data opportunity is massive, and there's two ways that we're gonna monetize data. When you carve out the proprietary data, that is the important... It's the engine behind our automation suite. Like, you can build an algo, and you can put a new X-Pro, new trading system out there. If you don't have the underlying data to help you make the right decisions or help the algo make the right decisions, it's not as valuable as it is with the data set that we have driving that engine. And so we're very selective on what we treat as proprietary that's being monetized through additional trading volume and fee commission. There's the other data opportunity, which is more of your bread and butter around end-of-day pricing, evaluated pricing, which I think is a tremendous opportunity for us.
Because as we add more and more share into our products, we have access to that much more data that makes that end-of-day product valuable. And it's not an end-of-day price that's marking a book at the end of the day. This is introducing a completely new client base to us, where there's a massive opportunity in the secondary end-of-day market, that corporate treasurers or corporate controllers are gonna be looking at opportunities to identify resources where they can perform what's called an independent price verification on the bond portfolios that they are managing in their books and records, because the auditors love to see what's called an IPV process that's in place. That's where I think we can bring a valuable data set to bring those new clients value that they're looking for as they close their books and records.
Got it. You know, the next question I had here was kind of on your, your new trading platform. You touched on that a little bit, but kind of similar to the question I asked you earlier on Adaptive Auto-X. Can you talk about what sort of was updated or improved here versus your prior trading experience? You know, do you expect this to drive incremental trading activity, more market share growth? What, what is the upgraded experience for your customer?
Yeah, we've had the same trading GUI over 18-20 years. Not to bring competition, but if you look at some of the other service providers, they look the same as they did 20 years ago. One of the issues that we had with our old trading platform is, to the extent a client wanted to change functionality, it took a long time for us to run that requested change through a PI planning event, and it could take anywhere from 2-3 months to get that functionality delivered to the client. Under the new trading platform, this NextGen X-Pro, we can deliver requested functionality changes much quicker to the client. That's a home run for us, particularly as we work through the value proposition we built in X-Pro with portfolio trading.
What we want our clients to do is bring their entire list, MarketAxess, and allow them to introduce the views and angles of how they want to slice and dice that list of bonds, and maybe select their five less liquid bonds by leveraging off of the CP+ data we have introduced in the trading GUI. And carving that out and taking it out of the basket of PT, because it's that much more expensive to do the trade, and leave your highly more liquid bonds in the PT trade. You just couldn't have that same level of experience on the old X-Pro, on the old trading platform, where X-Pro introduces that level of flexibility to the clients today.
Maybe one last question on sort of the credit trading side and a very high-level question. I get this a lot. Me and my peers ask you this a lot, but let's ask it again. Right now, as we understand it, high grade is around 40% electronified, high yield is around 30%. The question that's always asked is, where can these go? What's your kind of view there? How should investors think about the 5, 10+ year opportunity in terms of, like, the longer-term potential of, you know, electronic trading share?
Yeah, I'll focus on three areas. You mentioned high grade is around 40, high yield is 30. Emerging markets, our best guess is around 5 or 7%. It's very difficult to get an exact pinpoint on that because you don't have the same level of reporting overseas as you do here with U.S. TRACE. But there's a lot of runway for us. There's a lot of runway for the other two competitors that are in the marketplace, and I think that the institutional clients are never going to want concentration risk. So there's plenty of runway for us to capitalize on the opportunity ahead, with U.S. credit being high grade and high yield, and we're expanding our geographical footprint to make sure we capitalize on the EM opportunity. I think it could go to 80 or 90%.
Some of my peers think it could go to 95 or 100, as you've seen in other asset classes. Albeit, whether it's the 80-95, there's just tremendous opportunity, and that's why we're continuing to invest to make sure that we can capitalize on that.
That's very helpful. So maybe pivoting to some of your kind of different client types. So can you talk a bit about client growth? What's the profile of kind of the new customers joining the platform? And I think you've kind of called out hedge funds, private banks, seeing more dealer-initiated flow. What are the kind of trends there? What does the new customer cohorts look like?
Yeah, you hit the nail on the head, and we put report on this in the second quarter earnings call, that it's, it's the hedge funds, a lot of smaller clients. The reality is we've got the largest players on the platform, same as the competition. And the, the challenge for us, that beachhead that we need to overcome, is blocks. We need to get those larger clients to trade more blocks on the platform. But in terms of the newer clients that are coming on, they're, they're more focused, in particular, EM local markets, or more recently, we've seen added client base into the muni bond offering, of which is an early, not as mature product offering that we have on the platform. Our, our muni bond share is between 5% and 6%.
Getting back, there's a lot of opportunity to grow our muni bond franchise, and we're adding institutional clients in that space to help us accomplish that.
Got it. Talk a little bit about your Treasury business. Treasury trading environment is already a little bit more electronified, perhaps a little more competitive than corporate credit. Talk a little bit about your positioning, the value prop here and, you know, what are your ambitions and what are you kind of doing to try to grow share current?
Yes, our entrance into the rates or U.S. Treasuries was consummated through the acquisition of LiquidityEdge. We recognized that we had a gap with the spotting functionality for high grade, and we needed to acquire a treasury asset, which we purchased LiquidityEdge at the end of 2019. As we partnered with LiquidityEdge, recognizing the value of all-to-all within credit, our long-term focus Treasuries is to help build an all-to-all solution like we've done in credit with open trading. That, to the extent that the liquidity or a credit event, like we'd experienced in March of 2020 and March of 2023, ironically, where you saw the credit open trading pool succeed, where it delivered liquidity that wasn't available in the market.
I think of ourselves in that phase of the journey, where we were back in 2012, 2013, when our largest clients wanted an all-to-all solution because in the wake of the financial crisis in 2008, there was nowhere to trade corporate credit. We worked with our largest clients to develop Open Trading, and you've seen its success. It was battle-tested in March 2020 with the pandemic and the liquidity event, and more recently, the credit event in March 2023. We're working towards that end to have that same liquidity pool available for U.S. Treasuries, but it's gonna take time.
You know, we talked a lot about the macro environment earlier as it pertains to corporate credit. Any other particular factors to think about other than what we've discussed previously, as it pertains to the rates in particular?
The end of the cycle. Yeah. Yeah. I, I think it's correlated to what we're dealing with in, in the U.S. credit market.
Makes sense. Let's move over to maybe munis for a minute. So you acquired MuniBrokers a little over two years ago. As I understand, the integration is set to be completed this year. It looks like you've had some success growing electronic trading here, although I think volumes have kind of pulled back versus earlier in the year. So walk us through the dynamics a little bit here that are currently going on, and how do you see that market, evolving?
Yeah, MuniBrokers was an acquisition that expanded our presence in the muni bond space. We had a taxable offering, but we needed to do something to address our penetration into the tax-exempt, and tax-exempt is a much bigger piece of the overall muni market. It's roughly 70%-80% of the muni market, but I will point out, it comes with a lower fee capture rate. But to any extent, we made that acquisition in 2021, and it's worked out well for us. We're integrating MuniBrokers into the Open Trading network, where we're becoming broker of record.
It did reach some headwinds, and it fell behind a little bit because of the issues that we faced in March and April around the regional banking crisis, where that wasn't a primary focus for our clients to connect and do what we needed to do. But I think we caught up on that front, and what we're doing is we're flipping trades from the old model, which was a subscription-based model, into our Open Trading fee model. Which economically is a win-win for us because we're adding more volume onto the platform, of which they'll see the benefits of having access to the Open Trading liquidity pool and getting the best price of execution. But just by comparison, when you stack the fee cards up side by side, the subscription fee model is around a $60 per million fee rate.
When it gets flipped over to Open Trading, it could be anywhere from $150-$200 per million. So just by making that switch for the clients, we'll have a nice pickup in our fee capture, which will be contributing to our total credit fee capture increases over time.
Is achieving that simply a matter of completing the integration, which is ongoing, or is there sort of another, and I guess, can that unlock any other opportunities, or is it sort of a matter of a-
It's really the integration and getting those dealers connected into our network. And so it's more about the integration play and change in trading behavior as well. We see a trade by phone for munis. That's, it's a very common way to trade munis, and they've been doing that for a number of years, and they recognize the cost savings that are being delivered by accessing open trading. Over time, I think you'll see a change in behavior, where there's a gravitational pull towards the electronic channels because you're getting that better price of execution.
Interesting. I was gonna ask if you could maybe talk about that, too, like, the structural differences between the muni market... For example, there are many, many, many more, you know, bonds outstanding than corporate bonds. People tend to trade, like, local bonds, you know, based on where they live, to get the tax advantages. Those things make it more challenging to achieve, you know, a much higher level of, like, quantified-
Yeah. It's much more fragmented than. There's many more, over 1 million, and when I think about the muni space, currently, it's. There's not gonna be as much velocity in munis. Because you're right, it tends to be more of a buy and hold, and it's a retail-oriented platform, but there's still a lot of precepts, horizons that can trade.
Mm-hmm.
When they see the value of Open Trading, I think that you'll see that, as I was able to do earlier, the gravitational pull coming into the electronic channels.
Great. Maybe one last question on munis. I think you mentioned earlier this year that Auto-X, pretty rapid growth when it was launched into the muni market. How has that progressed, and is there a place for Adaptive Auto-X to be applied to munis as well?
Yeah, those are early days. We still have to work out the success of rolling out Adaptive Auto-X into U.S. credit, but I think that'd be a longer runway until we see the success and the increased adoption levels with the muni market.
Pivoting over to portfolio trading. So can you talk a bit about your progress here? What are you seeing in terms of client participation? And I think a few months ago, you said participation was generally down a bit versus a couple of years ago. So maybe from a macro perspective, you know, what's the right environment? And I think any color you can share on things like enhancements you made to the platform more recently.
Yeah. Portfolio trading, going back to 2021, the competition had a portfolio trading offering that we did not in the early part of 2021. We were very quick to react and introduce that to our institutional clients and continued to add to our share gains since Q2 of 2021. If you go back and you look at the market environment or the conditions in 2021, it was a very extended period of tight bid-offer spreads, low volatility, very similar to what we're seeing today in August and September, except it was a very long period. It was over a 12-month period that you've seen that.
The number of participants in portfolio trading that found that protocol a very efficient means of transferring risk or rebalancing portfolios, it could have been upwards of 15 dealers and anywhere from 70-80 institutional clients using the protocol. The way PT works is it's a very efficient means to do the trade, and if you have 1,000 pieces, you're putting 1 price on that entire basket. When bid-offer spreads are tight and there's low credits volatility, it doesn't cost you a lot to get that trade done. Fast forward - and by the way, percentage of TRACE, it was around 6%-7% of TRACE volume going back to 2021. When you fast forward to the end of 2022, when the markets were getting choppier, bid-offer spreads were widening. You saw the number of participants come down quite a bit.
The overall percentage of TRACE went from 7% down to 4%. The number of dealers went from 15 to 5. The number of institutional clients went from anywhere from 70 down to 15, and that's what we've seen at the end of 2022 and the beginning of 2023, as markets were much more volatile. You come forward to today, and we're back to where we were in a 2021-like environment, where TRACE or PT as a percentage of TRACE is 7%. You've got 12-15 dealers that are active again, you've got over 50 clients. The protocol is very efficient means for certain clients to get big trades done. We have the offering on our platform, and we had a very important release during the month of August.
This past August, which introduced a lot of functionality that I think closed the gap with the competition. And so we feel that the additional functionality, coupled with the portfolio analytical tools that we've embedded in XPro, has caught us up to the competition, if not put us ahead. And time will tell as we continue to add our share. But we proved before that in 2021 and going into the first half of 2022, that we can quickly catch up to the competition and continue to increase our share in PT.
Let's move over to emerging markets. So you mentioned before that it's probably one of the lowest levels of penetration of, you know, electronic versus as a percentage of the whole. Maybe the kind of level set. Talk a little bit about what that business looks like today. What countries are you in? How much of it is U.S. investors buying local bonds, or local investors buying local bonds, or local investors buying, you know, U.S. government or corporate bonds? What's the sort of makeup as it stands?
Yeah, so for EM, we're in 26 or 27 different currencies. And for the value proposition with our platform in emerging markets, it's Open Trading. But if you think about Open Trading, we're a counterparty to the middle of that trade. So by opening up Open Trading in certain jurisdictions across the globe, it can be very expensive to deal with the regulatory investments and the oversight of certain regulators across these jurisdictions that we're thinking of introducing Open Trading. And so we're performing the business analysis of what's the revenue opportunity and the demand of our clients relative to the investment to establish an Open Trading presence in some of these markets.
I'm happy to announce that this quarter, there's four local markets that we are opening up Open Trading, where we found a way to open up the channels to the local clients, that we don't have to invest in that regulatory oversight because the requirements there are quite low. And what Open Trading does for the clients is it allows them access beyond the local dealers. So by opening up the liquidity pool to the global dealer community, those local clients will have better execution levels as compared to the local dealers that they're dealing with.
And so it's an area of focus, it's an area of investment that we're making, and certain jurisdictions that we're not in today are Japan and India, of where we're looking whether or not it makes sense to pursue those further and have boots on the ground to where you can accelerate the delivery of your services there. But we're mindful of what the costs are associated with that.
Got it. And then in terms of thinking about that kind of share growth, you, you talked about opening up the Open Trading platform. Are the kind of dealers on your platform, are... Is it something they already engage in, where they sort of maintain an inventory in those local bonds, or is that something that they would need to build out as well? Like, the getting to 5%-10% to go from, like, 10% to 20%, 20% to 30%, what are the sort of steps that needs to happen? Is it just more adoption of Open Trading? Is it more dealers need to make changes? How do we kind of-
It's getting in the markets that we're not in today with our protocol. It's introducing Open Trading into those markets, and there's no reporting. It's complicated because you don't have the same standards of reporting requirements over there. But as we think about what we try to do as a best effort, is gather all the intelligence that we can from our banking relationships to try and size up what that EM opportunity looks like. And we just recognize that there's a lot of work and there's a lot of opportunity across the globe.
Got it. That makes sense. Switching topics again. Maybe can you talk a little bit about retail trading? So your platform is mostly institutions, but maybe the kind of higher level topic of the rates are higher. We're seeing things like annuities being sold at sort of record levels versus, you know, the years before COVID. So what are you seeing in terms of retail participation in the bond market? Are you seeing, you know, more kind of platform flow, and what is sort of your go-to market there?
Yeah, retail overall is, to put it in context, it's a very small slice of the overall high-grade market. Institutional depth is 70% of high-grade. Dealer to dealer is probably 27-28%, and you've got a couple of percentage points of retail. So when we think about the investments on how we're thinking about the retail opportunity, we recognize that there's a limitation to how much you can grow that. Indirectly, we do have access through retail, through the SMAs, the JP Morgan Asset Management, the Goldman Sachs Asset Management. They're representing high net worth individuals that are going to begin to redeploy cash if they haven't done so already, like you saw in the beginning of this year, when fixed income became an attractive asset for everyone because you could clip more than a 5% coupon.
We have access indirectly through the SMAs, and they're very active on the open trading accounts.
Got it. That's helpful. Maybe let's talk about info services a little bit. You've been showing some really healthy growth there over the past couple quarters. What are the key drivers? How sustainable do you think that growth is?
Yeah, that's, that's sustainable. Yeah. Data, data is, I mentioned earlier, a big opportunity for us. We brought in new leadership, with Kat Sweeney and Pierce Ward. Not to name drop, but, you know, they've been an integral part of getting the data franchise to a much better place and helping us think through the longer term business plan on how we can further monetize that asset. But it's really been about the CP+. As we've expanded our share, we've been expanding the CP+ offering across all the products that we traffic in. So expanding our desktop access, as well as expanding where CP+ touches upon in the product, the asset classes we're in.
Right. And are there any signs that that sort of progress in info services, you know, could translate into, you know, a pickup in bond trading activity? Are customers taking this data because it's newly available, or are they taking it because they're preparing to deploy more strategies? Any clues there?
Well, I think the proprietary data that we select, that we don't want to monetize with the data offering, which feeds through information services, that's the element that's going to drive increased adoption and electronification, and that's going to be a permanent contribution to the income statement. Building out the data business, as I mentioned, evaluated the end-of-day opportunity. As we think about that, it's going to require an investment, and we're very mindful of the operating margins that we want to achieve longer term in the business. So we're thinking through the right channels and which angles we got to go through in terms of building out the data business.
Because you can build it organically and have your customer-facing element, which is a pretty heavy investment up front, where you won't see that revenue opportunity immediately, as compared to looking at some other alternatives, which may require partnering with somebody who's already in the space.
Got it. Maybe we got 30 seconds left. One last question, sort of, on trading behaviors and velocity. So we talked about, like, electronic share growth and what it takes to get there, but what about seeing just more turnover? Is it a matter of getting costs down, bringing more liquidity onto the platform, more adoption of auto-- you know, algorithmic trading protocols? How, how do we-- how could we see, you know, velocities with the client up in addition?
In my opinion, it's increased adoption through the automation suite.
Great. Well, we, we'll be on the lookout for that. Unfortunately, we're just about out of time.
Okay.
Chris, thank you so much for joining.
Thank you.
It's a pleasure to have you.
Thanks a lot, Ben. Thank you.