A new tool from Bondway.ai offers treasury teams an AI-driven solution for real-time bond market analytics.
Treasury leaders who need quick access to up-to-date market data before launching a bond deal often rely on information provided by their bankers. Or they have to search for info themselves using solutions that may not provide the pricing insights they want. In a recent session of NeuGroup for Capital Markets, members discussed a new, AI-powered tool called Bondway.ai that some users said offers fast, accurate bond pricing and analytics in a user-friendly system.
- “Bond market data can be tricky to access and interpret,” one member noted. “Bondway has been a great solution for providing transparency in bond pricing and market movements.”
- Bondway’s founder and CEO Jeremy Sisselman, alongside head of business development Brad Visokey, explained how the platform works and its benefits. Mr. Sisselman said Bondway was initially developed for banks and the buy-side but emphasized its benefits for corporate treasury.
- He said the tool’s ability to provide a comprehensive view of the bond market, showing price, yield and spread changes over different time periods enables issuers to interpret market movements rapidly and make informed decisions about funding and liability management.
Navigating bond market hurdles. A poll taken during the session found that 89% of respondents regularly attempt to track bond trading levels themselves, preferring this over solely relying on bank-provided bond pricing. The poll also revealed two key challenges faced by treasury teams:
- While most members do contact bankers for information, 77% expressed some amount of caution due to risks including creating expectations among the bankers of a pending mandate for a new deal.
- Banks provide members with extensive bond market information, but 85% of those polled said the data can be frustrating to digest because of varying formats and sources.
Bondway benefits. Bondway aims to directly address these challenges by providing corporates with access to real-time bond pricing. One NeuGroup member who discussed the difficulties of obtaining up-to-date data praised Bondway’s capabilities, which allowed him to monitor live trading activities and support informed go/no-go and pricing decisions during a recent bond issuance.
- “Sure, you can use Bloomberg, but it’s expensive,” he said. “And you can rely on your debt capital markets desk, but it can be kind of tricky to know how bonds are performing without opening a can of worms, and even then you can’t do that very often.”
- Another member likes the platform’s intuitive interface, which they said requires minimal expertise and is faster and simpler than alternatives. This ease of use enables treasury teams to gather insights independently, without extensive training or signaling to banks.
- “The platform is intuitive and only took about 15-20 minutes to figure out,” he added. “It provides DIY access to the bond market without impacting expectations for our banks. And with the real-time and accurate bond pricing provided, we now have a tool at our disposal to challenge [bankers] during pricing calls and aggregate all the information. We see a lot of potential in where this is going.”
How Bondway works. Bondway’s proprietary AI-powered pricing engine replicates the process of a trading professional, incorporating observable market data points to provide pricing for over 17,000 corporate bonds. Each AI-generated price is updated in real-time and comes with a so-called AI Confidence Rating using a scale of 1-10. Bondway allows filtering, so users can focus on the most accurate pricing information.
- Bondway features analytical visualizations, which are based on its AI pricing, with real-time charts of market activity. It also offers views for the new issue bond markets, all of which is powered by data from partner firm Credit Flow Research.
- The Bondway team showcased this through a live analysis of a member company’s debt portfolio, producing insights on potential funding and liability management opportunities, as well as secondary trading patterns that would be nearly impossible to see elsewhere, according to Bondway.
- Bondway’s executives also discussed plans for further product development, having built the technologies from scratch in less than 18 months. More features are in the works, offering treasury leaders a front-seat view of an expanding set of AI-powered bond market tools over time.
