Tradeweb Markets Inc. (Nasdaq: TW), a leading, global operator of electronic marketplaces for rates, credit, equities and money markets, today announced it has expanded and enhanced its platform for trading specified pools of mortgages. The specified pool platform now enables mortgage originators to trade alongside other secondary market participants, expanding the electronic marketplace.
The first trade on the new platform was executed today at 10:15 am EDT.
For mortgage originators including banks and non-banks, Tradeweb’s new platform automates how they trade these complex pools, reducing time-to-trade and replacing a manually-intensive legacy process. Other enhancements to the platform include access to historical transaction data, seamless straight-through-processing and robust trade analytics. Tradeweb built this new trading functionality based on the workflows of leading mortgage originators and other market participants.
Specified pools are baskets of individual mortgages that have been securitized into unique mortgage-backed securities, allowing investors to better match their investments with their trading strategies. According to SIFMA, daily trading volume for specified pool mortgages averaged $25.9bn for the first eight months of 2020, up 57% from $16.5bn during the same period in 2019.
Colm Murtagh, Head of U.S. Institutional Rates at Tradeweb, said: “We believe better connected markets make for more efficient markets for our customers. To that end, working out how best to serve mortgage originators and integrate their trading into the broader secondary market has been a long-held vision of ours, and we are delighted that is now reality. We’re confident that this latest innovation in mortgage trading will extend the reach of electronic trading at a time when ease of execution is particularly vital.”
Tradeweb is a leader in electronic mortgage trading and the frequent, high volume nature of specified pools makes this market well suited for increased electronification and automation. This new platform provides market participants with a flexible, streamlined way to buy and sell MBS CUSIPs and trade consolidated pool inventory with key liquidity providers. Tradeweb is also a leader in To-Be-Announced (TBA) mortgage trading, with executed volumes exceeding $32tn for the first eight months of 2020.
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