The DESK: IMTC Partners With ICE Bonds

The DESK, Markets Media’s publication for bond traders, reported on July 7 that fixed income liquidity from ICE Bonds is now available on the IMTC platform. The item by Lucy Carter notes that mutual clients can access BondPoint and TMC, ICE Bonds’ marketplaces, on a click-to-trade basis through IMTC’s portfolio and order management workflows.

Russell Feldman, CEO of IMTC, told The DESK the agreement “enhances our ability to help clients trade faster, act on liquidity more efficiently, and produce executable output in accordance with portfolio strategies.” He added that by embedding electronic trading directly into IMTC, the firm is making it easier for clients to optimize and execute within one connected workflow.

Read the full article by Lucy Carter on The DESK: IMTC partners with ICE Bonds.

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Q&A

Why is electronic trading harder to bring to fixed income than to equities?

Fixed income trades over the counter across millions of individual securities, not on a central exchange the way most equities do. Every bond has its own CUSIP, liquidity is fragmented across venues and dealers, and many issues trade infrequently, which makes standardized, screen-based electronic trading far harder to build for bonds than for stocks. That structure is why electronification reached fixed income later and unevenly, and why progress depends on aggregating liquidity from multiple marketplaces and connecting it to the workflows where portfolio decisions actually get made. IMTC’s approach is to bring electronic venues such as ICE Bonds’ BondPoint and TMC into the same platform where managers construct and optimize portfolios, so the scattered liquidity of the bond market becomes reachable without hopping between disconnected systems. The harder market structure is exactly why connected workflows matter more in fixed income than they do in equities.

What does “execution certainty” mean in fixed income trading?

Execution certainty is the confidence that an order sent to market will actually fill, at or near the expected price and size, rather than moving away or going unfilled. In fixed income, where liquidity is thinner and more scattered than in equities, that certainty is harder to come by and more valuable when a desk achieves it. It rests heavily on access to deep, reliable pools of liquidity and on a clean path from decision to order, so reaching established electronic marketplaces such as ICE Bonds’ BondPoint and TMC gives managers more venues to source and complete a trade. When that access sits inside the same platform used to build and check the portfolio, as it does through IMTC’s integration with ICE Bonds, the order that reaches the market is the one the manager intended, which supports both the certainty of the fill and its alignment with strategy.

Why does trading connectivity matter when evaluating a fixed income portfolio management platform?

Trading connectivity decides how directly a portfolio decision can become an executed trade. When evaluating a fixed income platform, the venues it connects to and how tightly trading is wired into the rest of the workflow are real selection criteria, because weak connectivity forces managers to rekey orders into separate systems and breaks the link between strategy and execution. Platforms that treat trading as an afterthought leave desks stitching construction, compliance, and execution across disconnected tools, which adds delay and room for error, while strong connectivity lets an optimized, compliance-checked set of trades flow straight to market. IMTC wires electronic marketplaces like ICE Bonds’ BondPoint and TMC into its portfolio and order management workflows, so buyers assessing fixed income technology can weigh execution connectivity alongside construction and compliance instead of treating it as a separate purchase to bolt on later.

How does connecting trading to portfolio construction help fixed income teams scale?

Connecting trading to portfolio construction removes the manual handoffs between deciding what to trade and executing it, which is what lets a fixed income team manage more accounts without adding proportional headcount, since every rekeyed order and reconciliation step is capacity spent on process rather than on portfolios and clients. As account counts climb, those repeated steps compound and become the ceiling on how much a desk can handle well. When construction, optimization, compliance, and execution share one workflow, managers move from an optimized set of trades to a fill without rebuilding orders elsewhere. IMTC’s integration with ICE Bonds extends that connected workflow to execution, letting clients trade through BondPoint and TMC directly from the platform where portfolios are built. For firms focused on growing their book, keeping trading inside the same system is what turns growth into something operations can actually sustain.

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