Prior to the onset of the financial crisis and the subsequent wave of resulting global re-regulation, the majority of bonds and swaps trading activity within small-to-medium-sized asset management firms, hedge funds and wealth management firms was a game of dependencies. Specifically, the predominantly OTC-traded nature of the majority of daily trades and transactions in both instrument types meant that access to pricing and liquidity on an order-by-order basis for small- to -medium-sized asset managers largely depended on long-term relationships established with bank broker-dealers and non-bank brokers. At the time, scanning the overall global marketplace – or even the regional neighbourhood – to acquire pricing and liquidity data was, at best, a daunting and competitively prohibitive daily task.
