Wow, as a former fixed income trader I find this really interesting. I wonder if they're looking for any help.
There's definitely an issue with getting prices in the FI market. When I was doing it, I used to create a Bloomberg chat with all the likely banks (the usual suspects) and blast them all a message like "EUR 2Y, 1MM/bp, what's your market?". And then wait as some guys were inevitably slower than others, and some people wanted to pull their prices before I got them all. And the more complex the product, the longer it took (swaptions for instance). And of course once you'd picked someone to trade with, everyone wanted to know what price it was. It was a real nightmare.
The question is how exactly this service is going to work. In principle, it's not that hard to distribute prices, especially if they're not actually tradeable like equities (then it gets hard!). I think I've seen at least one service that just gives you an indicative and tells you who to call. These days you could just do a filter with the banks you have docs with, and click and chat with whoever came out on top.
Implementation wise, I'd worry if the banks made it too hard to integrate with them. Even opening a firewall is something that can take time at big shops.
There's also a whole regulatory can of worms. Best execution, and all its consequences.
There's definitely an issue with getting prices in the FI market. When I was doing it, I used to create a Bloomberg chat with all the likely banks (the usual suspects) and blast them all a message like "EUR 2Y, 1MM/bp, what's your market?". And then wait as some guys were inevitably slower than others, and some people wanted to pull their prices before I got them all. And the more complex the product, the longer it took (swaptions for instance). And of course once you'd picked someone to trade with, everyone wanted to know what price it was. It was a real nightmare.
The question is how exactly this service is going to work. In principle, it's not that hard to distribute prices, especially if they're not actually tradeable like equities (then it gets hard!). I think I've seen at least one service that just gives you an indicative and tells you who to call. These days you could just do a filter with the banks you have docs with, and click and chat with whoever came out on top.
Implementation wise, I'd worry if the banks made it too hard to integrate with them. Even opening a firewall is something that can take time at big shops.
There's also a whole regulatory can of worms. Best execution, and all its consequences.