TradeWeb, the fixed-income trading platform, announced today that its Euro Commercial Paper (ECP) Live Beta test period was completed successfully. The new ECP product has now gone live, with the initial week’s trading reaching just under Euros 1 billion.
Live testing of TradeWeb’s first European inventory product commenced on 26 November 2002, with 5 dealers and 10 institutional investors. The total number of trades carried out during this beta period was over 250, with the average trade size of EUR20 million. The total volume for this period was over Euros 5 billion, with the majority of ECP trades in Euros, Sterling, Swiss Francs and US Dollars. Average daily offerings have been between 5,000 and 6,000 with the earliest trade taking place at 7:36am (GMT).
“The beta testing has been extremely successful and proved that there is a real need among dealers and institutional investors for a product that can offer efficient functionality to access multi-dealer liquidity,” says Lee Olesky, President of TradeWeb Group and CEO of TradeWeb Europe. “We are very excited with the results we have seen to date and believe that this new addition to our platform will add value to the European investment community. Indeed, the largest trade during the live test period was over EUR90 million, the fastest trade took place in 5 seconds and we have had a record day of EUR600 million.”
“TradeWeb’s ECP product not only saves me valuable time but has vastly improved transparency and liquidity in the ECP market,” said Trevor Denton of T. Rowe Price, a member of the test group.
TradeWeb’s live testing group of institutional investors included Money Funds, Corporates and Sovereigns, with a geographic spread of 40% UK and 60% Continental Europe.
Olesky added: “Even in this live test period, we have already gained approximately 2% of the total turnover in the ECP market. Given the limited number of investors taking part in the test period, this proves very promising as we extend our ECP product and develop further Money Market solutions for our clients. With the addition of ECP, TradeWeb Europe had a record month in January, of over EUR120 billion across all products with its clients.”
TradeWeb’s ECP solution allows users to access the combined inventories of up to 6 of the largest ECP dealers (Credit Suisse First Boston, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank and JP Morgan) through its search engine.