SS&C’s Fixed Income Benchmark Study – Selecting Suitable Vendors

To help our client's vendor selection process for fixed income instruments, we have released the eighth edition of our fixed income benchmark study. We analyzed transaction data from 240,000 trades across 34 product types by comparing end of day prices from eight pricing vendors with trade prices on our platform.

The findings provide valuable insights into how pricing vendors prices align with "probable exit values" for fair NAV calculation and reporting purposes.

We analyzed three dimensions of performance-market coverage, market alignment and consistency-to create a composite performance assessment for each vendor. While these three core performance dimensions provide meaningful insights into vendor suitability selection for fixed income products, additional parameters such as access to evaluators, availability and quality of pricing transparency information, reliability of service and delivery technology, cost and more should also be considered.

The results of this edition of the study showed thatICE Data excelled in market alignment, showing robust performance across multiple categories, including investment-grade sovereign bonds, US government bonds, various US agency debt types and US municipal bonds. It also provided prices with the smallest differences in four of the eight corporate bond categories.

Pricing Direct performed strongly in emerging market categories for both sovereign and corporate bonds, as well as in the US agency and asset-backed CLO and CDO spaces.

BVAL led in market alignment for several asset-backed security types, non-US convertible bonds, emerging market non-investment grade bonds, supranational bonds and US treasuries.

Understanding which vendors provide the accurate pricing enhances the decision-making process across multiple asset classes, ensuring that holdings are valued fairly. Investors and portfolio managers can use this report to assess vendor reliability, while risk management teams can use it to ensure that asset valuations reflect true market conditions and compliance teams can use it to meet regulatory requirements around vendor due diligence.

To view our comparison charts of all participants in the study, download the full report.