PDEX, BAP and Bloomberg Announce New Initiatives to Advance the Philippines Bond Market

The Philippine Dealing & Exchange Corp (PDEX), the Bankers Association of Philippines (BAP) and Bloomberg announced several initiatives to advance the peso bond market in the Philippines, increasing transparency, liquidity and efficiency.

PDEX, the Philippine Securities Exchange Commission (SEC)-registered fixed income market operator, has appointed Bloomberg as the technology partner for the electronic trading and surveillance system for the government and corporate bonds traded in its market, using the regulatory oversight features of the Bloomberg E-Bond platform. The platform went live on October 29, 2018. Bloomberg is also the calculation agent for peso government bond benchmarks administered by The Bankers’ Association of Philippines (BAP). Bloomberg’s evaluated pricing service (BVAL), based on market quotes and traded prices, will be used for end-of-day reference prices.

The US$107 billion bond market in the Philippines has seen steady growth of between three to five percent for the last three years, according to data from Bloomberg and the Asian Development Bank. These initiatives will support the domestic debt market reforms laid out by the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas, Bureau of the Treasury and the Securities and Exchange Commission.

“We at the PDS Group are certain that this new partnership with Bloomberg will bring benefits to the stakeholders of the SEC-registered marketplace, our trading participants and issuers. This transition shall allow our community to capitalize on Bloomberg’s strength in fixed income markets and increase awareness of PHP-denominated government securities and corporate bonds, among global fixed income market professionals,” said Mr. Antonino A Nakpil, President and COO, PDEX.

The Bloomberg E-Bond platform offers market participants a robust and flexible set of tools to support the full trade workflow. This includes pre-trade price discovery and analytical tools, the ability to support multi-dealer request-for-quote (RFQ), firm order and capture of voice trades, as well as providing integrated reporting tools. The platform will also be connected to the Bureau of Treasury and PDEX’s settlement systems to facilitate straight-through-processing of all bond trades. In addition, market oversight entities and regulators can review market activity and audit transactions in real-time.

“BAP will use Bloomberg (BVAL) yield curves to derive benchmarks based on government security prices. These benchmarks are used for pricing of loans and fixed income instruments and to measure the performance of financial instruments. Using a data-driven approach, Bloomberg will price government bonds that reflect the market in an objective, defensible way, further enhancing the transparency of the government bonds market, which accounts for almost 80 percent of the country’s bond markets,” said Benjamin Castillo, Managing Director of BAP.

“Bloomberg is excited to partner with PDEX and BAP to build a more robust and efficient bond market in the Philippines,” said Maggie Ng, Bloomberg’s Head of Sales, ASEAN. “It is crucial for the country to have a well-functioning bond market to mobilize the region’s vast savings to invest in infrastructure for its continued economic growth. We will continue to advance one of the world’s fastest-growing countries with our expertise in global fixed income markets and best-in-class technology.”

BVAL draws on Bloomberg’s industry leading reference data and yield calculators to price more than 2.5 million securities daily. Utilizing quality market contributions, reported trades and broker quotes—this pricing data is further filtered, cleansed and verified for ongoing quality and consistency. The entire process is overseen by capital market experts who monitor the final pricing result.

BVAL is the primary pricing source for the Bloomberg Barclays bond indices which are widely recognized by market participants as benchmarks for global fixed income investors. To learn more about Bloomberg’s evaluated pricing service for fixed income please visit www.bloomberg.com/professional/product/pricing-data/.

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Media contact

Grace Ngoh, Bloomberg : +65 6231 3690, gngoh2@bloomberg.net