ETS Connect UK reports strong market uptake in first week of UK bond Consolidated Tape
Over 1,600,000 licence subscriptions to date as the service gets underway.
ETS Connect UK, the FCA-authorised Consolidated Tape Provider (CTP) for UK fixed income markets, today reported that in the first week since launch over 1,600,000 licences have been subscribed to, reflecting strong and broad demand across the bond trading ecosystem. This includes over 50 licences for users and redistributors who have onboarded directly with the CTP, and over 1,600,000 licences via redistributors, the vast majority being for individual users.
Data quality: a transparent and evolving framework
ETS Connect UK has confirmed that it will produce a monthly Data Quality (DQ) summary report based on the DQ Framework for the CTP.
We committed from day one to full transparency on data quality. We are publishing data quality metrics on an aggregated and anonymised basis, broken down by contributor type, so that the market has a clear and consistent view of how the tape is performing and how it is improving over time. James Haskell, COO at ETS Connect UK
The CTP has also confirmed its intention to open-source the full suite of data quality validation logic underpinning the tape. This will allow redistributors and market participants to reproduce the underlying checks and build additional analytics on top of the base dataset.
Where a trade looks potentially erroneous, the tape will have a flag to highlight this. By publishing the validation logic openly, we want to enable third parties to enrich that signal — identifying which validation rule was triggered and the scale of the deviation that caused it. Sassan Danesh, CEO at ETS Connect UK
Launch week overview
In the first week, the CT processed an average of 47,009 inbound records per day, representing an average of 177.69bn GBP covering 23,922 unique ISINs. Real-time publication dominated at 80.09% of records, with a median latency from the CT of 20ms. The service also supported normal trade lifecycle activity, with cancellation records representing 2.25% and amendment records representing 2.55% of inbound records.
Data quality outcomes were favourable, with reject rates at 0.07% for APAs and 0.02% for venues, while DQ warnings were limited to 1.38% for APAs and less than 0.01% for venues. At this early stage of the service, these metrics demonstrate stable CT processing performance, broad instrument coverage, effective handling of trade lifecycle events, and a very small proportion of records requiring rejection or warning.
Stabilisation period and the road ahead
ETS Connect UK has structured the post-launch period in phases: an initial three-month bedding-in period focused on service stabilisation, which will allow us to assess and address potentially erroneous trade records and determine the appropriate thresholds for identifying such trades, followed by a nine-month optimisation phase during which additional data quality checks will be introduced and existing algorithms refined against the growing historical dataset.
Over that period, the CTP expects data quality to improve steadily as back-testing against live data becomes possible for the first time.
