Generative AI hindering the digitization of bond trading market

Corporate bond trading platform LTX, owned by Wall Street provider Broadridge, has launched BondGPT, an OpenAI GPT-4-powered chatbot to answer bond-related queries. With a prompt of Ask me anything about bonds! users can ask BondGPT anything from Which IG utility bonds mature between 2025 and 2035? to What telecom bonds have the highest liquidity in the past 30 days? While chatbots are not new to Wall Street, the use of technology in bond trading has been slower to take off than in the equities market. However, firms such as Tradeweb, MarketAxess, and Bloomberg have been making efforts to digitise the trading of corporate bonds to save time and speed up the process. LTX itself was launched in 2020 as an AI-driven corporate bond trading platform focused on boosting electronic trading volumes. BondGPT aims to be the platform’s latest addition, with its own virtual personal assistant to bridge the gap in bond trading technology. However, with the market’s reliance on larger banks, progress in fully optimising it may be slow.