AllianceBernstein Taps Bloomberg’s BVAL for U.S. Fixed Income Securities

AllianceBernstein (AB), one of the U.S. largest money management firms, has deployed Bloomberg Valuation Service (BVAL) solution to benchmark and corroborate end-of-day values of its U.S. fixed income portfolio investments.

The company said it chose Bloomberg’s offering for its broad pricing coverage, access to in-house evaluation teams, and transparency into the vendor’s pricing models. Bloomberg creates the evaluated prices using a quantitative approach that first values actively traded bonds and applies that to derive relative value prices for comparable but less liquid securities.

The Bloomberg Valuation Service provides end-of-day valuations and risk measurements for a range of OTC derivatives and structured products including a broad coverage of municipal bonds. In addition, it offers pricing for derivatives and structured notes across foreign exchange, interest rate, inflation credit, equity, and commodity markets using data and market standard quantitative models.

Bloomberg says that its BVAL solution is staffed by financial engineers and taps a wealth of sources to produce valuations for more than 2.5 million fixed income securities and OTC derivatives 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The system, which can also be integrated with analysis tools on the Bloomberg Professional Service, tracks current market conditions and consistently stand-up to rigid quality tests by reviewing a number of characteristics ranging from issuer, call protection and coupon-size among other factors.

AllianceBernstein is one of world’s biggest asset managers with $498 billion in assets under management. The company provides research, investment management and related services to a range of clients through its buy-side distribution channels and its sell-side business, Bernstein Research Services. AB licenses BVAL data to calculate the net asset value (NAV) of its corporate, government and municipal bond investments.

Varun Pawar, global head of Bloomberg’s evaluated pricing service commented: “Regulators now demand a transparent and rigorous process for establishing fair and independent asset evaluations. BVAL meets the needs of the largest and most respected investment managers because we provide transparency into our pricing methodologies as well as unparalleled client support through our practiced team of evaluators.”