Ediphy Consents to Lift Suspension on UK Bond Tape to Prioritise Market Certainty But Maintains High Court Challenge

PRESS RELEASE FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Ediphy Consents to Lift Suspension on UK Bond Tape to Prioritise Market Certainty But Maintains High Court Challenge

LONDON — Ediphy Analytics (“Ediphy”), the capital markets analytics firm whose affiliate was appointed to provide the European Union’s consolidated tape for bonds, has today formally consented to the lifting of the automatic suspension on the UK Financial Conduct Authority’s (“FCA”) contract award to Etrading Software (“ETS”).

Prioritising Market Certainty

Ediphy has taken this decision to encourage certainty for the UK bond market. It is our understanding that, despite the FCA’s confidence in its contract award, ETS has declined to submit to a regulatory authorisation process without a signed commercial contract. To avoid further delays to the delivery of this critical infrastructure, Ediphy is stepping aside to allow the contract to be concluded and remove grounds for ETS to object to entry into the authorisation assessment.

Ongoing High Court Claim

Whilst we consent to the lifting of the suspension, we maintain our claim for damages in the High Court. As detailed in our Particulars of Claim filed with the Technology and Construction Court, the procurement process was characterised by specific failures by the FCA that require judicial scrutiny:

• Unmanaged Conflicts of Interest: Our claim raises serious, unanswered questions regarding the timeline of a senior individual's dual involvement with the winning bidder and the FCA. As detailed in our pleadings, this individual was appointed to the FCA Board in April 2025 yet subsequently announced a C-suite executive role at the winning bidder in September 2025 – during the critical closing stages of the procurement and ahead of the commencement of the authorisation process – before resigning that executive role weeks later. The FCA failed to complete a conflicts assessment in respect of these conflicting appointments.
• Irrationality & Auction Integrity Failures: Following an alleged failure of its auction software during the closing stages of the procurement, the FCA suspended the auction and demanded that Ediphy provide technical "evidence" of the failure. However, the FCA has since confirmed that its platform generated no client-side records that would have provided such evidence, demonstrating an irrationality in the reasons for its failure to address the system error.

Foreseeable Risks of an Unsustainable Contract

The procurement process has resulted in a contract with an unsustainably low price cap, restricting the average fee ETS can charge to just £0.68. Ediphy acknowledges the significant concerns being raised by market participants regarding the foreseeable risks of the path the FCA is taking – concerns which we share. Specifically, we agree that the current pricing structure creates systemic risks in three key areas:

• Risk of Service Degradation: The winning bidder is required to deliver what it promised in its tender response. Given the extreme price compression, there is a foreseeable risk that design, resilience, latency, or data quality may be compromised. Any such degradation to align with the £0.68 budget must be scrutinised as a potential unlawful material modification.
• Equality of Access: As the operator of the utility, the winner must not leverage its position to advantage its own commercial "value-added" services. We highlight the structural risk that the winner's commercial arm could receive preferential access. We understand and agree that the market expects strict, demonstrable equality of access regarding specifications and API previews.
• Sustainability & Subsidisation: The low price creates a foreseeable risk of financial instability of the provider. The market must remain vigilant against any future requests for regulatory forbearance or rule relaxations used to "bail out" the winner if the contract turns out to be unsustainable.

Chris Murphy, CEO of Ediphy, commented:

"We are clearing the path for the contract to be signed because the market needs certainty.

However, the FCA is proceeding with a contract priced at £0.68, based on the output of an auction system which – as detailed in our claim – suffered a failure that cannot be verified because the software lacked the client-side logging functionality required to produce an audit trail.

It is paradoxical that the regulator selected software to run the auction of this critical piece of market infrastructure that it has confirmed lacked basic audit functionality, while simultaneously failing to transparently manage Board-level conflicts of interest regarding the winning bidder.

While our claim for damages remains in place, we are transitioning our role from challenger to observer. We will be watching to ensure the winner delivers exactly what was promised in the tender, without the service degradation or cross-subsidisation that a £0.68 price tag implies."

ENDS

‍

‍