Bloomberg Receives SEC Approval for its Confirmation Matching Service 

Bloomberg today announced its subsidiary, Bloomberg STP LLC (Bloomberg STP), has received approval from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to offer a confirmation matching service (CMS), for DTC-eligible equity and fixed-income securities.

“The financial industry is under pressure due to both financial and operational challenges to create more efficient trade processing solutions with better operational controls,” said Ben Macdonald, Global Head of Product at Bloomberg. “Bloomberg’s CMS has been developed in response to industry concerns with the ‘single point of failure’ model that exists today, as well as calls from market participants for alternatives, competition, enhanced efficiencies and a more robust clearance and settlement system.  We believe that additional straight-through-processing services and more efficient offerings are needed to advance and strengthen the market, especially with the move to T+2 settlement in the US.”

Bloomberg’s CMS advances automated post-trade processes and facilitates the implementation of shortened settlement cycles. Bloomberg’s CMS offering will include the following:

• An open architecture platform that supports both central and local matching to meet the demands of the industry.
• Industry standard communication protocols (e.g., TCP/IP, SNA), message and file transfer protocols (e.g., FIX, MQSeries, SWIFT), software message format standards (e.g., FIX, ISITC), and message languages and metadata (e.g., XML).
• Support of the FIX global post-trade processing guidelines. The guidelines provide a standardized approach to workflow, reducing the complexity and in turn, the costs and the time required for issue resolution.  Bloomberg is a member of the FIX working group and has adopted the FIX working group’s specifications, guidelines and best practices.
• Seamless integration with the Bloomberg Professional service, as well as other third-party user interfaces, third-party order management systems, electronic trading systems and post-trade functionality to minimize the number of manual connections. These synergies will increase the speed, accuracy and reliability of the post-trade process.

Source: Bloomberg

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