“To put it in layman terms, it’s like buying a book before Amazon bookstore came along where you’d walk into a book store and buy a particular title for $10 without knowing the same book cost $7 at another shop two blocks away,” Ware explains. “As a trader and owner of a muni bond, I can take one bond and offer it across different platforms at various prices. Based on each platform and its audience, as a trader I know where the more and least sophisticated eyeballs are, and I price my bonds accordingly. We can solve this problem because when an advisor places an order through our platform we canvass the various different exchanges to find the best price on any one given bond.”

280 CapMarkets’ service is a mix of old-school customer service involving human beings on the trading desk at its broker-dealer, and a new-school cloud technology product called Bond Navigator, a fixed-income platform that’s still in beta mode but is expected to be available free to advisors later this year. 

280 CapMarkets believes that offering Bond Navigator gratis will help bring many users to the company’s trading desk for more in-depth help in accessing the muni bond market.

Fees charged by 280 CapMarkets will depend on the type of bonds being bought. “Once we get the order we’ll utilize our capital to try to buy those bonds as cheap as possible, and we’ll pass on those savings to the independent advisor,” Ware says.

And given that Bond Navigator will be a free service, the company says that’s further motivation for its bond desk to provide the best price so that it can keep advisors coming back for more.

“Advisors can go to Bond Navigator and buy those bonds wherever. They don’t have to buy them through us,” says 280 CapMarkets CEO Gurinder Ahluwalia.  

“We have to win their business,” adds Ware. “That’s what 280 is all about.”
 

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