“The underwriters have discretion to allocate shares and it’s also true in bonds,” said Jay Ritter, a professor at the University of Florida’s business school who has been covering the IPO market for more than three decades. “That discretion can be used for good or bad.”

New Platforms
The digital platforms still account for just a fraction of orders in the new issue market and they’re mainly in the business of facilitating communications. But advocates and specialists say their growth is unstoppable. Here are a few of the new entrants to the market:

Ipreo, a technology provider jointly owned by a unit of Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Blackstone Group LP, started allowing investors to directly post their bond orders to banks electronically last year in a system called Investor Access.

Neptune Networks, which is owned by 19 banks and publishes trading levels to subscribers, has been asked by investors and lenders to create a system for new issues. No decision has been taken yet, according to Chief Executive Officer Grant Wilson. There’s also Overbond, a Toronto-based origination and execution platform that connects investors and companies for bond sales. Another system, Origin, makes it easier for banks to find issuers starting with Europe’s 300 billion-euro market for private placements known as medium-term notes.

Ipreo, Neptune, Overbond and Origin said their approaches are collaborative, evolving and constructive. Bloomberg LP, the parent of Bloomberg News, provides services that facilitate bond ordering and distributes information on new debt offerings.

Minnows vs. Whales
Ipreo keeps a record of investors’ bids for bonds and the allocations they receive. That could help regulators investigate whether bonds are fairly disseminated, Andrew Falco, head of fixed income trading at $324 billion firm Fidelity International, said at a conference in Amsterdam in November.

That kind of transparency could handicap the giants that hold sway in the corporate bond market.

When Verizon Communications Inc. sold a record $49 billion of bonds in 2013 via Barclays Plc, Bank of America Corp., JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Morgan Stanley, more than 15 percent of the eight-part offering went to Pacific Investment Management Co. while BlackRock Inc. came away with about 10 percent. After the deal, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission launched an investigation into whether Wall Street banks give certain clients preferential treatment in bond sales.