Genesis Global announced today that T. Rowe Price, one of the world’s largest asset managers, has deployed Primary Bond Issuance (PBI), a Genesis solution addressing data management and workflow challenges in the market for corporate bond deals.
Customized by Genesis for the specific needs at T. Rowe Price, PBI helps the firm’s fixed income investment teams operate efficiently and effectively throughout the bond deal lifecycle, from roadshow to pricing, by optimizing how it tracks and invests in deals. Efficiency in these markets is a critical success factor for asset managers, because bond deals can be published, priced and allocated by bank syndicates in as few as two hours.
The Genesis solution provides a consolidated, real-time view of deals coming to market by aggregating data from deal information providers used by T. Rowe Price. Connectivity to chat functionality facilitates collaboration and decision making among the firm’s traders, analysts and portfolio managers. Integrations with T. Rowe Price’s portfolio modelling and order management-related systems deliver efficient workflow and minimize switching between applications.
“The new issue application, built to our specifications and delivered through the Genesis platform, enables a scalable and repeatable investment process in the primary bond market,” said Dwayne Middleton, Global Head of Fixed Income Trading at T. Rowe Price. “By addressing data fragmentation and improving collaboration across trading, portfolio management and research, we now have a modern, integrated tool to view the market and assess opportunities with greater speed and precision. A particularly valuable feature is the ability to generate a composite deal record that captures the full structure of each transaction, which becomes essential during periods of elevated issuance.”
“We believe that PBI gives T. Rowe Price an edge in the highly competitive market for corporate bond deals,” said James Harrison, co-founder and CEO of Genesis Global. “Our ability to customize our solution to meet the data, workflow and system integration needs of the fixed-income team at T. Rowe Price is a testament to the expertise offered by Genesis and the adaptability of our technology. We look forward to working with this innovative client as they bring more products onto their PBI solution.”
To meet T. Rowe Price’s exacting needs, Genesis enhanced how PBI processes and reconciles information the firm receives from its deal data sources. Through a highly collaborative process with T. Rowe Price’s technology managers, traders and trading analysts, Genesis designed an algorithm to automatically merge multiple messages from multiple sources referencing the same deal into one composite record.
The composite produced by PBI covers the entire structure of the deal. For example, issuer ticker is represented at the deal level, currency and coupon type at the tranche level and registration type (Reg S, 144 A, SEC Registered etc.) at the security level.
Based on T. Rowe Price’s requirements, Genesis also added bond deal roadshow tracking to PBI, expanding the solution’s data management and workflow tools to cover the entire bond deal lifecycle.
The customized version of PBI replaces a self-built system at T. Rowe Price that was due for a major upgrade. Covering investment-grade corporate bonds, to start, the solution will be used by traders, trading analysts, research analysts and portfolio managers in Baltimore, Hong Kong and London. T. Rowe Price expects to extend the solution to high-yield and emerging-market corporate bonds in the coming weeks.
PBI is built on the Genesis Application Platform and is configurable to accommodate user preferences for integrations and workflow design. It is one example of how Genesis helps institutional asset managers automate their investment process with modern applications that transform how portfolio managers, traders and credit analysts share market data and internal analytics and make collaborative decisions about risk and opportunities in the markets.
Capabilities offered by PBI include:
- Managing entire deal pipelines, from roadshow to pricing, with one platform
- Aggregating, reconciling and normalizing deal data sourced by clients
- Integrating users’ analytics, reference data and compliance systems to provide an enriched view of each deal and centralize deal-related workflow
- Connectivity to order management systems to seamlessly request and receive allocations
- Customizable alerts and workflow tools
- Full audit functionality
- Ability to embed collaboration tools like Symphony to facilitate investment decision making.
