And it’s not like they have much incentive (or even the legal obligation) to change. The bond market is littered with startups that have tried -- and failed -- to loosen Wall Street’s grip on bond trading and make it more efficient. Names like BondBook, Bond Connect, BondGlobe, BondHub, BondLink and XBond. Even GSessions, the online platform White developed at Goldman, flopped.

“Data is really the big focus in the bond market now,” said Kevin McPartland, head of market-structure research at Greenwich Associates. Nevertheless, “we can’t minimize the importance of the big dealers in the market and their pricing and everything that comes along with it.”

Too Much
White and his backers are undaunted. Prior attempts to modernize the corporate-bond market failed because they were trying to change too much at once, without first tackling the fundamental issue of transparency, according to Eric Noll, a former top Nasdaq executive who’s also invested in BondCliQ.

“When many people look at fixed income -- say it all should be electronic, it should be an exchange -- they try to solve all of the market at once,’’ Noll said. “Every time somebody has tried to do that, it has failed.’’

Both Niederauer and Noll say Nasdaq serves as a model. From its humble beginnings in 1971 as a place where dealers could electronically quote bids and offers for stocks too tiny for NYSE to bother with (but not trade them), Nasdaq ultimately grew to become one of the biggest markets in the world. Along the way, trading exploded.

Before Nasdaq, “you didn’t know what the real price was on a Nasdaq stock because there was no ability to look, no pre-trade transparency,” Noll said. “What it did was really allow dealers to compete with one another.”

Imperfect Analogy
The analogy isn’t perfect of course. Much of the surge in volume occurred after Congress mandated in 1975 that all stock prices be publicly displayed on a central feed. That’s not the case for corporate bonds and BondCliQ’s feed will only be visible to its own participants. What’s more, the automated quote system was created by the National Association of Securities Dealers (hence the Nasdaq acronym) with built-in buy-in from its member firms.

White, who left Goldman in 2015, sees plenty of opportunity. One reason is that dealers themselves often don’t have a full picture of supply and demand, and hesitate when they don’t “have enough information to make the market.”

BondCliQ could change that because it will enable all participants to see the same quotes, including size, at the same time, he said. To attract dealers and encourage them to provide bids and offers on the platform, BondCliQ employs a revenue-sharing model where dealers split 80 percent of the revenue, which the firm generates by charging money managers, bond-trading platforms and analytics providers for access to the data feed.

Ranking System
A ranking system determines how the pie is split. The most consistent and competitive the quotes, the bigger the cut of the profits.