JP Morgan joins Bloomberg SwapTrader

JP Morgan has become the latest investment bank to provide prices through SwapTrader, Bloomberg’s multi-dealer euro interest rate swap dealing platform for end-users launched in February, signalling a further move towards the electronic execution of swaps.

As with Thomson TradeWeb’s own multi-dealer platform, which JP Morgan already uses, SwapTrader employs a request-for-quote system where the user requests up to three price quotes from different dealers for any given swap it wishes to trade. However, SwapTrader will be free for existing Bloomberg users.

“As derivatives become more transparent, more liquid and more efficient to execute, we expect this to attract new clients, such as real money asset managers, into the derivatives market, and for them and existing users to transact in increasingly significant size,” said Michael Davie, chief operating officer for European credit and rates at JP Morgan in London. He acknowledged that interest rate swaps had been slower than other markets to adopt electronic trading and processing platforms, which "could be attributable to the non-standard characteristics of the majority of interest rate derivatives transactions executed in the market". He was also keen to highlight the importance of efficient post-trade confirmation process for attracting users.

The original backers of Bloomberg SwapTrader on its launch were ABN Amro, Bank of America, Barclays Capital, Morgan Stanley and the Royal Bank of Scotland.