MarketAxess was formed in April of 2000 in response to investors' need for a single trading platform with easy access to multi-dealer competitive pricing in a wide range of credit products. MarketAxess offers fully-disclosed electronic trading in U.S. high-grade corporates, Eurobonds, emerging markets, high yield/crossover, credit default swaps (CDS) and U.S. agency securities.

We launched trading on our electronic platform with eight broker-dealer clients and 60 institutional investor clients. We have consistently added new clients to our trading platform, increasing the number of broker-dealer clients to 30 and the number of active institutional investor firms to approximately 730.

Our broker-dealers' substantial presence in secondary markets provides a broad base of credit securities and deep pool of liquidity for our institutional investor clients, which include investment advisers, mutual funds, insurance companies, public and private pension funds, bank portfolios and hedge funds.

As an exclusive provider of enriched TRACE data to The Wall Street Journal, MarketAxess Corporate BondTicker™ data service combines FINRA’s TRACE data with MarketAxess tools to provide market participants with the most robust corporate bond price information available today.

Following the launch of the first fully-electronic CDS index trading platform in 2005, in January of 2007 we launched CDS single name list trading, leveraging a core list trading technology MarketAxess pioneered in 2002 for our cash trading.

In June 2006, we introduced our DealerAxess® service, which allows our broker-dealer clients to transact U.S. corporate and emerging markets bonds and CDS trades on our platform with other broker-dealer clients. Our broker-dealer clients can execute these trades in a more efficient manner and at lower transaction costs than in the traditional voice-brokered inter-dealer market. Although DealerAxess® shares the same core technology as our client-to-dealer platform, it is a completely segregated trading platform. MarketAxess Corporation, our U.S. subsidiary, acts as intermediary in these transactions between broker-dealer clients by serving as counterparty to the two broker-dealer clients involved.

MarketAxess Europe Limited, the fully-owned U.K. subsidiary of MarketAxess Holdings, Inc., announced the start of operations in the United Kingdom in August, 2001. MarketAxess received FSA regulatory approval and began European secondary trading in U.S. dollar and Euro-denominated Eurobonds in September of 2001. In 2002, the platform added trading in other European credit products including bonds issued in Pounds and floating rate notes (FRNs). As on our U.S. electronic trading platform, all trading in Europe is done using a multi-dealer disclosed counterparty model. MarketAxess Europe Limited is the first platform in Europe to offer this capability for corporate bonds. The disclosed counter party model is an inquiry-based trading system that allows institutional investors to view multiple bids and offers from participating dealers. As of 2006, our European institutional clients can access U.S. credit liquidity.