What is BondWave LLC?

BondWave is a financial technology company and registered investment advisor that provides tools to facilitate individual bond investing. These tools are used by traders and advisors in order to provide better service to their customers. We believe in the value of investing in individual bonds and the importance of this asset class in any investor's overall strategy. Because of the size and complexity of the bond market, simple tools have not existed to make this process easy for traders and advisors to more effectively service their clients.  As a result, the vast majority of retail investors access bonds via funds where they are unable to achieve the same benefits that individual bonds offer.  BondWave wants to change this.

By creating sophisticated yet simple solutions for all stakeholders in the process, we believe that advisors can better leverage individual bonds to achieve the investment objectives of their clients.  Our tools enable strategy-based investing - including portfolio creation, monitoring and rebalancing - while greatly enhancing the communications between the trading desk, advisors and their clients.  We are liquidity and trade agnostic, so our sole focus is simply to provide the best tools and user experience.

What is 'Strategy-Based Investing'?

Strategy-based investing helps firms efficiently manage individual bond portfolios. Our solutions enable the creation of rules-based strategies that can be used to construct and monitor client portfolios.  Strategy-based investing allows firms to provide a disciplined and customizable approach to individual bond investing while also helping the advisor with their obligation to determine suitability, facilitate best execution and enable post-sale monitoring. 

How is BondWave different from other portfolio analytics and trading platforms?

Unlike other service providers that offer execution and clearing services through their own liquidity pools, BondWave's sole focus is on simplifying and adding transparency to the process of individual bond investing - period.  Our vision is to make this asset class as attractive and accessible to advisors as equities or packaged/managed products.  Given the inevitability of rising interest rates, we believe that advisors should be talking to their clients NOW about moving assets from bond funds to individual bonds. 

We have no interest in the trade, and enable a broader view of liquidity to support best execution.  Our strategy-based philosophy may assist the advisor with their obligation to determine suitability requirements and our customized monitoring and ability to identify risk concentration helps support post-sale surveillance.  Because we are liquidity and trade agnostic, we believe we are uniquely positioned to focus on providing essential tools to help advisors develop meaningful and lasting relationship with their clients.

What do you mean by liquidity and trade agnostic?

Simply put, our mission is to provide the tools to make individual bond investing smarter and easier. We see this being achieved in equities and packaged products and believe there is a void in the market with fixed income. Our motivations differ from those of a liquidity provider and/or transaction platform. That is why we are agnostic to our customers' preferred liquidity sources whether they are the primary market, secondary market, institutional accounts, other customer accounts at the firm or any combination thereof. Our strategy is to partner with other firms in the market that provide liquidity and/or transactional services so that we can remain independent from limiting aspects of the market. Our tools are aimed at giving advisors better and more informed access to the fixed income market in a way that is intuitive and easy for traders and advisors to consume so that they can have better meetings with their clients around their fixed income portfolios.

Who uses BondWave solutions?

We serve a wide range of customers, from small independent RIAs to some of the largest broker-dealers and custody providers in the financial services industry. 

Although we have some RIAs who find significant value in our DeskView solution for its business intelligence and reporting capabilities, our typical clients are larger broker-dealers who rely on us to streamline trade opportunity mining, account management and reporting activity across their entire book of business.

Our fixed income analytics tool, RepView, has been integrated into a well-known custody provider's advisor web portal where its fixed income data, analytics and reporting features are used by well over 13,000 active users each month. BondWave also provides outsourced strategy-based investing services to both large and small RIAs.

How would BDA members benefit from using BondWave solutions?

We see significant value in individual bonds as a distinct asset class and we will continue to offer and develop solutions that make bond investing simpler, smarter and more efficient. Our primary objective for each customer is to help them deploy a coordinated, holistic approach to individual bond investing that enhances communications, enables our clients to retain and grow fixed income assets under management and support long-lasting relationships with their customers.

BDA Member Profiles

The BDA regularly features and profiles member firms through these emails and the BDA website. For more information, please contact Mike Nicholas at mnicholas@bdamerica.org or (202) 204-7901.