Markit and FT Interactive Data to form strategic alliance

Markit and FT Interactive Data have formed a partnership in corporate and government bond evaluations that the companies believe will provide a greater degree of transparency in the credit markets.

Bedford, Massachusetts-based FT Interactive Data, which supplies daily prices on more than 2.5 million fixed-income securities, will gain access to UK-based Markit’s credit default swap (CDS), credit index and bond pricing data for use in its corporate and government bond evaluation models.

Meanwhile, Markit will provide its clients with access to FT Interactive Data’s fixed-income evaluation services through Markit Portal, its distribution channel for asset pricing and research.

“The alliance provides a significant volume of additional credit market information that will supplement FT Interactive Data’s well-established methodology, and enable us to offer evaluations of corporate and sovereign debt instruments that better reflect the complexities of today’s ever-changing market-place,” said Stuart Clark, president and chief executive of Interactive Data, the parent company of FT Interactive Data.

"We saw an opportunity to take the CDS market perspective and use it to provide additional information in the evaluated bond space. This also eliminates the necessity for clients to have another vendor pipe into their middle- or back-office,” said Mike Rushmore, head of sales at Markit in London.