Months before new Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board rules on transparency in the municipal bond market take effect, 280 CapMarkets plans to offer a free cloud-based service to help advisors find the most appropriate and best-priced municipal securities for their clients, starting this fall.
(Related: SEC Approves Rules Helping Advisors Buy, Sell Bonds)
“When an advisor searches for bonds for clients the result is thousands of securities,” says Dave Rudd, co-founder of 280 CapMarkets and head of institutional sales. “They have to differentiate the good from the bad.”
(Related: 4 Trends to Keep an Eye on in the Muni Market)
But that’s very difficult to do because of the nature of the muni market. “There are millions of active CUSIPs in the municipal bond market compared to 85,000 ticker symbols in the corporate bond market and a vast difference in liquidity,” says Rudd. “Advisors struggle to compare apples to apples, and the dealer community has taken advantage of that. Our goal is to represent a free-market solution by making it transparent.”
Most important, the new service will make the prices of muni bonds more transparent and help advisors manage and monitor muni portfolios, according to Rudd and Gurinder Ahluwalia, co-founder and CEO of 280 CapMarkets.