Andre Craig is President of CanDeal DNA, a Canadian fixed income data and analytics provider.
What were the key theme(s) for your business in 2023?
A key theme for CanDeal is industry collaboration to optimize our resources to deliver efficiencies and value to Canadian fixed income market participants. In 2023, our CanDeal Data & Analytics (DNA) group expanded our intraday Reference Pricing Service to cover close to 100,000 securities, and 140,000 in our curated Security Master Product, with standard analytics and the addition of Advanced Analytics covering liquidity, interest rate, credit, volatility and market drawdown risks, plus Regulatory Analytics to manage minimum dealer margin requirements and eligible collateral. Working with global vendors, our pricing and analytics products enable unique insight into Canadian fixed income markets for price discovery, valuation, risk and analytics. We also established CanDeal Benchmark Solutions to administer and oversee Term CORRA, the new risk-free rate replacing CDOR, with CanDeal DNA serving as the calculation agent.
What were the highlights of 2023?
Delivering a comprehensive suite of solutions to the Canadian fixed income market is key to increasing the market’s value on the global stage. In 2023, we saw record trading volume of $5.5 Trillion on our CanDeal Markets platform – a 34% increase year-over-year – across bonds, derivatives and money market securities, with particular growth in CAD$ IRS and Repo trading.
The launch of the Term CORRA reference rates in September marked an exciting milestone in bringing a new benchmark to Canadian market participants. Through our collaboration with TMX Datalinx to distribute these new rates, the market is benefiting from a reliable interest rate measure, calculated using price and trade data from CORRA futures contracts traded on the Montréal Exchange. These forward-looking term rates are destined to replace CDOR with a risk-free, robust standard for transacting across the Canadian loan and derivatives markets.
What trends are getting underway that people may not know about but will be important?
As the CDOR rate expires in June 2024, Canadian Bankers’ Acceptances will cease to exist as a money market instrument. The Bank of Canada has identified there is a $45 Billion gap in money market instruments available for investment in the one-month and under tenor. Investors in Canadian money market instruments should be actively exploring existing and new instruments to fill the potential gap in their short-term holdings and ensure that any regulatory or fiduciary approvals required to invest in additional or new instruments is under review. Our pricing universe covers the current BA sector of around 5,000 issues, with around 40,000 instruments across TBills, CP, ABCP and we are committed to covering any new instruments released in this space, such as a possible new 1-month GOC TBill.
Who were the most important/influential people in 2023?
We owe so much to the innovative leaders within the CanDeal team, including in the DNA and Benchmark groups. In June 2023, Louise Brinkmann was appointed as head of our new CanDeal Benchmark Solutions business, bringing the experience and precision to ensure our benchmark services meet global regulatory standards through a strong understanding of all governance and control requirements. Andre Langevin, our Managing Director, Data Insights and Innovation, led the development team tasked with implementing Term CORRA in six short months. Andre’s presentation at June’s Canadian Annual Derivatives Conference detailed the transition from CDOR to Term CORRA with samples of relevant data sets. Our Head of Strategic Partnerships, Robin Hanlon, has been instrumental in operationalizing the expansion of our CanDeal DNA reference pricing solutions, further ensuring transparency across Canadian fixed income securities.
