April 06, 2020

FTSE Russell and JSE launch fixed income indexes

  • Partnership combines FTSE Russell’s status as a leading global index provider with JSE’s regional expertise in fixed income
  • Extends a longstanding equity index partnership to provide investors with a comprehensive range of fixed income indexes
  • This extended offering now offers investors attractive multi asset capabilities across South African capital markets

FTSE Russell and the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE) today launched a series of co-branded fixed income indexes, following the extension of their index partnership to fixed income.

Under the terms of the agreement, FTSE Russell will now serve as the benchmark administrator for JSE’s fixed income indexes and will provide daily index calculations on the FTSE/JSE All Bond Index Series (ALBI) and FTSE/JSE Inflation-Linked Index Series (CILI). These indexes are designed to represent the performance of domestically issued South African government, state-owned and corporate bonds, providing investors with comprehensive market coverage.

The partnership combines the regional expertise of the JSE with FTSE Russell’s robust governance framework to produce transparent, objective investment tools. Investors will also benefit from leading multi-asset and fixed income research, thought leadership and strong analytics capabilities to analyse the South African fixed income market.

FTSE Russell and JSE have partnered in providing equity indexes since 2002 and agreed to launch co-branded fixed income indexes in 2017. Together, this partnership now offer investors a complete range of index solutions across asset classes.

Waqas Samad, Group Director, Information Services, LSEG and CEO FTSE Russell said:
"We are delighted to expand our important and long-standing partnership with JSE in South Africa to include fixed income indexes. FTSE Russell aims to be the world leader in multi-asset indexing and now, domestic and overseas investors in local South African debt are able to benefit from FTSE Russell’s robust, transparent and objective approach to managing fixed income benchmarks.”

Dr Leila Fourie, CEO, JSE, said:
“Our partnership with FTSE Russell has seen local and foreign investors in stocks listed on our markets benefit from the expertise of an independent global index provider for almost twenty years. Today’s launch extends these benefits to corporate and government bond investors and will improve international access to our debt markets.”

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About FTSE Russell

FTSE Russell is a global index leader that provides innovative benchmarking, analytics and data solutions for investors worldwide. FTSE Russell calculates thousands of indexes that measure and benchmark markets and asset classes in more than 70 countries, covering 98% of the investable market globally. 

FTSE Russell index expertise and products are used extensively by institutional and retail investors globally. Approximately $16 trillion is currently benchmarked to FTSE Russell indexes. For over 30 years, leading asset owners, asset managers, ETF providers and investment banks have chosen FTSE Russell indexes to benchmark their investment performance and create ETFs, structured products and index-based derivatives. 

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For more information, visit FTSE-Russell site.

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