Supporting more than 1,100 participants, Austraclear® sits at the centre of Australia’s fixed income ecosystem. It holds A$3.3 trillion worth of securities and provides the infrastructure through which issuance, trade settlements and collateral pulse through the market.

ASX’s ReferencePoint® service has long provided reference data products including ISIN Status and the Securities Master List, covering the universe of 10,000 debt instruments, and the Corporate Actions Outlook which provides a two-month time-line of upcoming coupon payments, capital pre-payments and maturities scheduled for processing by Austraclear®.

This comprehensive instrument coverage is the foundation for ASX’s new Austraclear® Debt Market Activity service. Debt Market Activity builds on ASX ReferencePoint® data to deliver daily and periodic intelligence on bond, repo and money market transactions settled in Austraclear®.

Speaking at the recent Debt Market Activity launch event, Group Executive, Technology and Data at ASX, Jamie Crank, noted that Debt Market Activity was developed in close consultation with issuer and institutional clients over a number of years to deliver data outcomes for the market.   

Crank explained that for the very first time, market participants can access anonymised and aggregated Austraclear® data from the source for repo, bond and money markets. “It offers transparency and valuable, unique insights for issuers, investors and intermediaries” he said.

Translating settlement data into actionable insights

While Austraclear® provides the definitive settlement record, deeper analysis of aggregate activity patterns can provide insights and relational context beyond transactional turnover alone. Settlement data from across the fixed income spectrum is aggregated daily and segmented by asset class and tenor to support these new activity-based insights. 

To accommodate less liquid segments, the aggregate activity metrics are produced on daily and longer timeframes at both instrument and sector level to provide balanced transparency.

For issuers and treasury operations, this data can help inform funding and sector-related insights through activity and engagement patterns over time and across the curve. Investors may benefit from new participation and liquidity insights to enable portfolio optimisation and benchmark outperformance, as well as additional context for optimising trade execution. 

Investment banks can more accurately track the relative size of their primary and secondary market participation in the local market by sector, and sell-side dealers and sales teams can now access additional activity, momentum and concentration data to inform price-making, and incorporate in research, idea generation and recommendations for institutional clients. 

ETF providers may also discover that the additional context may inform their benchmark replication processes by contrasting liquidity differentials between similar securities, and hedge funds may find that the data may be a valuable new resource for strategy development and quantifying model outcomes.

ASX’s Debt Markets Data Products Manager, John Cruikshank, says: “Debt Market Activity offers value for all market participants in an increasingly progressive data-driven world. Whether used to prime platforms and pricing models, optimise stock selection, identify developing patterns using AI and machine-learning, or for activity-based strategy development and quantification, the Debt Market Activity dataset offers a new and unique information edge to the market”.   

He went on to say: “Debt Market Activity can help answer questions around correlation patterns, trading frequency, collateral use, and relational dynamics by sector and across the yield curve. Going forward, it could also provide insights for independent pricing models, incorporating activity-related factors like concentration and collateral demand for market impact context and pricing purposes.”

Greater visibility of overall market activity enables participants to better understand liquidity and funding dynamics that can influence execution, risk management and relative pricing. However, this enhanced transparency also requires stringent confidentiality and governance controls. 

Confidentiality by design 

In the high-trust debt markets, discretion is paramount. Austraclear® operates under strict rules that prevent the disclosure of individual trades or participants. Through aggregation and suppression controls, Debt Market Activity ensures data reflects actual market activity while maintaining market integrity and the confidentiality of counterparties.

Debt Market Activity’s approach to data governance is expressly designed to minimise re-engineering risk. All data is aggregated and de-identified across time periods and by instrument, tenor and sector, with additional safeguards for instruments with less activity and liquidity. 

These rules ensure that, in providing new levels of debt market data granularity through Debt Market Activity, confidence among participants and the benefits of greater transparency are more equally balanced. 

Debt markets in motion

Complementing ASX’s existing debt market data services, Austraclear® Debt Market Activity can be considered an important step towards allowing issuers, investors and dealing desks to more deeply compare market-wide activity and liquidity across related market segments and the term curve structure. 

As John Cruikshank notes:  “…the value of the Debt Market Activity is in the added context that market participants now have for the first time. It offers a data-led approach to confirming, optimising or challenging assumptions about market size and concentration, and how collateral use, participation and liquidity are evolving across sectors and maturities.”

Improving transparency will help uncover the underlying dynamics of Australia’s repo, bond and money markets. As a result, more informed decisions and a stronger understanding of the reality of Australia’s diverse and evolving fixed income ecosystem can follow.

To find out more about Austraclear® Debt Market Activity, get in touch with our Information Services Team.