IHS Markit (NYSE: INFO), a world leader in critical information, analytics and solutions, today announced that in response to evolving fixed income market structure themes and associated navigation challenges, the firm is focused on continually enhancing its front-office suite of capabilities to provide richer pre-trade insights and price discovery toolkits for users. In a significant step forward, IHS Markit has established connectivity with Lucera and Neptune Networks ("Neptune") to deliver to mutual clients of the thinkFolio investment management platform, Lucera and Neptune, access to high-quality pre-trade data and liquidity signals.

Lucera's LumeALFA Analytics is a new lighter version of its LumeALFA service, a leading fixed income data aggregation and market surveillance tool that provides its clients with a consolidated view of client -selected pre-trade liquidity data from major electronic venues and dealer inventory feeds, as well as connectivity to client-selected execution venues, including single dealer executions. LumeALFA Analytics is designed to provide a real-time view of the entire bond market, including government bonds, investment-grade and high-yield corporates, emerging markets, municipal debt and structured credit.

Lucera's connectivity to IHS Markit's thinkFolio will enable mutual clients of Lucera and IHS Markit to interact with and utilize pre-trade liquidity data and message parsing provided by IHS Markit to help them streamline trading decisions and facilitate best execution analyses. Portfolio managers and traders using thinkFolio can now leverage LumeALFA Analytics to target, search for and sync specific liquidity profiles that support portfolio construction, relative value analyses and rebalancing while also providing dynamic watch lists that alert users to particular market activity.

As part of its enhanced liquidity data delivery model, thinkFolio clients can now also access Neptune's aggregated, real-time axes and inventory directly in the context of other market data. Neptune employs an innovative approach to standardizing large volumes of unstructured data and aggregating liquidity across a vast community of sell-side dealers reducing the "noise" and enabling better informed trading decisions. Neptune now carries $450bn+ in daily gross notional across 70,000 axes and inventory items from well over +38,500 individual bonds. They cover 28 denominations across credit (IG/HY), emerging markets, rates and newer additions in ABS/MBS and municipals.

"As we evolve the thinkFolio platform and deliver the next-generation version of the application, openness and flexibility are foundational principals to support seamless integration with third-party and IHS Markit content and services," said Brett Schechterman, Global Head of thinkFolio at IHS Markit. "Optimal desktop real-estate utility and direct access to actionable liquidity will remain paramount for our portfolio manager and trader personas. Our exciting collaboration with both Lucera and Neptune delivers high-quality pre-trade data and liquidity signals allowing our clients to drive alpha generation and workflow efficiency."

"For the buyside community, the interoperable toolset of thinkFolio and LumeALFA Analytics can increase the likelihood of a successful trade and has the potential to continuously deliver improvements to price discovery and best execution analysis," said Paul Mutter, Head of Global Fenics Sales at BGC Partners. "We're thrilled to expand our relationship with IHS Markit and to connect to thinkFolio to deliver a streamlined experience for mutual clients. The efficiency and scale achieved from thinkFolio capabilities and LumeALFA Analytics' comprehensive and time-stamped pre-trade information will be conducive to cost savings and greater alpha generation."

"Neptune has seen tremendous support from dealers and buy-side clients who have collaborated closely with us and each other, to create an open, standard and technology-based utility," said Byron Cooper-Fogarty, Interim CEO at Neptune Networks Ltd. "thinkFolio clients will now have the ability to consume an aggregated feed of the highest quality bond axes, which in turn allows them to be more targeted in their enquiries for large size bond execution."