EuroMTS today announced the appointment of Scott Stark to develop the EuroMTS Index, a new eurozone government bond index to be calculated using prices from the MTS Group.
Stark joins the company from STOXX Limited, where he served as Managing Director and where he was a key figure in establishing STOXX Limited as the leading equity index provider in Europe. He is a recognised expert in indices and related instruments including index funds, index derivatives and Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs).
“We are extremely pleased to welcome Scott on board,” says Gianluca Garbi, Chief Executive Officer of EuroMTS.”His in-depth knowledge and expertise in index products, derived from years of operational and marketing experience in the industry, will be a driving force in the success of EuroMTS Index.”
Stark himself added: “The new EuroMTS Index is a great opportunity to bring greater transparency to the eurozone government bond market and it will help create a new marketplace for ETFs, futures & options and other financial products based on bond indices.”
The EuroMTS Index is the planned successor to the established CNO Etrix Indices.EuroMTS claims it will be the first eurozone government bond index calculated in real time, based on tradable prices. “The index design offers institutional investors, fund managers and producers of financial instruments an easily replicated and completely independent government bond benchmark,” says the company. “The development of the transparent and independent EuroMTS Index is made possible by the role of MTS as the independent, pan-European platform for centralised price discovery, enjoying the cumulative result of hundreds of investment banks operating on the system from over four thousand connections across Europe.”
It adds that the EuroMTS Index aims to bring the efficiencies and transparencies long experienced in the equity markets to the bond markets, and to be a valuable addition to the range of instruments currently available to investors, banks and analysts. Furthermore, the EuroMTS Index will complement the products and services offered by the MTS Group to institutional investors. Existing services offered to the buy-side include the sale of real-time market data, and the provision of BondVision, the regulated Dealer to client platform. The availability of real-time market data will offer unique transparency into the index for fund managers, and Bond Vision offers possibilities for introducing index-related functionalities, such as index tracking tools.