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The UK’s Bond Tape Is Live. Its Equity Tape Is the Harder Build.

For most of the past decade, an investor who wanted a single, authoritative picture of where UK securities had traded could not buy one. The data existed, scattered across exchanges, multilateral trading facilities and the reporting arrangements that sit behind them, but no one stitched it into one stream. On 22 June the bond half of that problem was solved. The equity half, which the Financial Conduct Authority moved on with a package published on 31 July, is the harder and more contested build.

A consolidated tape is market plumbing rather than a market. It takes the trade records that venues and approved publication arrangements already produce and merges them into a single, standardised, near real-time feed of what changed hands, at what price and when. The United States has run tapes like this for decades. Europe never had one. When Etrading Software’s ETS Connect UK switched on the UK bond consolidated tape in June, it became the first such service operating outside North America, and it drew more than 1.6 million licence subscriptions in its opening week.

The bond tape was the easier of the two to deliver, and its early uptake shows why the FCA is pressing on. Bond trading is episodic and largely over the counter, so a post-trade record that arrives seconds after a deal is genuine progress for a market that previously relied on fragmented dealer runs. Equities are a different animal. They trade continuously, at high frequency, across a dense web of lit venues, dark pools and systematic internalisers, and the value of the data falls away quickly as prices move. Building a tape that is timely enough to be useful, without simply reproducing the raw feeds that exchanges already sell, is a materially harder engineering and policy task.

It is also where the money is. Market data is one of the most lucrative lines exchanges run, and a mandated tape that pools their prints into a cheap, or free, reference feed touches that revenue directly. The design questions that follow are not technical footnotes. They decide who contributes data, how contributors are paid for it, whether the tape carries only completed trades or also pre-trade quotes showing the best available bid and offer, and how much a subscription costs. Each answer redistributes value between the venues that generate the prices and the investors who want to see them in one place.

The 31 July package is the FCA’s attempt to settle the largest of those questions before it spends public and industry effort on procurement. It runs to two consultations. CP26/31 sets out a policy statement for the framework of a UK equity consolidated tape and the next steps for delivery. CP26/30 covers supporting equity market transparency and wider market structure. Both are open for feedback until 16 October 2026.

“A consolidated tape will make it simpler and easier for investors to see the whole market picture,” said Simon Walls, the FCA’s executive director of markets. “Today’s package settles the big design questions and sets the path to deliver the tape within the next 18 months.” That phrasing matters for anyone pencilling in a launch date. The regulator is not promising an operational equity tape in early 2027. It is describing a path to delivery within roughly 18 months of the July package, which points to late 2027 or early 2028, and only after it has weighed the consultation responses and run a competitive procurement to appoint a provider. Procurement itself has not begun; the FCA has said it will consider feedback before starting it.

The politics around the build are visible already. The Association for Financial Markets in Europe, which speaks for the wholesale banks and brokers that would consume the tape, has backed the framework, arguing that a comprehensive, reasonably priced feed would sharpen the competitiveness of UK equity markets against larger rivals. Exchanges have been more guarded, wary of a design that erodes proprietary data income or hands a low-cost substitute to the very firms that pay for their premium feeds. The gap between those positions is precisely what the consultation has to close.

For the wider competitiveness agenda the tape is a small but telling test. Ministers and the FCA have spent two years trying to make London a more attractive place to list and to trade, through the new listing rules, the digital securities sandbox and the PISCES framework for private-company share trading. A consolidated tape is quieter than any of those, but it goes to something more basic: whether an investor can trust that the price they see is the price the whole market saw. Britain has now proved it can build that for bonds. Doing it for equities, where the stakes for the data owners are far higher, will show whether the harder half of the reform can survive contact with the people who profit from the status quo.

Finance & Markets Correspondent
Covers: Finance, capital markets, technology investing

David Whitmore covers the intersection of capital and code — the funding rounds, market structures and policy moves that shape how money flows through the technology economy.