Eurozone central banks to use Tradeweb

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EMEA
Abhinav Ramnarayan

Tradeweb Markets has won contracts to supply its electronic trading platform to the European Central Bank and national central banks across the eurozone for the trading of a variety of securities, including European government bonds.

Tradeweb will provide the central banks with a platform to trade euro-denominated European government bonds, European credit, supranationals and covered bonds, along with US Treasuries, Japanese government bonds, US dollar supranationals and US dollar and yen-denominated interest rate swaps.

The contracts were awarded following a tender process. The ECB looked at various criteria, such as how broad the offering was in terms of coverage and cost.

“This tender was conducted Eurosystem wide, so including national central banks, including for their reserve management,” said a spokesperson for the ECB.

The management of reserves is a decentralised activity, she said.

The ECB itself only trades euro-denominated bonds, she added. The inclusion of the other categories is primarily for the benefit of the national central banks.

A lot of fixed income trading is still done over the phone, but electronic trading platforms are more prevalent in the sovereign bond sector.

An estimated 55% of sovereign trading is done electronically, according to one official working for a trading platform.

The main providers of electronic trading platforms are Tradeweb, Bloomberg and MTS BondVision, said the official.

Tradeweb is part-owned by Thomson Reuters, and IFR is a Thomson Reuters publication.

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