[1] The function of an SDP is to integrate pricing, liquidity, and information from multiple sources within a bank and provide access to them via a single user interface.
Although the term SDP is sometimes used to describe an entire etrading suite, it properly refers to the integration and connectivity layer that sits on top of trading, pricing, risk management and other back-end systems.
A single-dealer portal is a stand-alone service provided by a bank for trading a specific set of products in one asset class, and is usually narrow in scope.
Early on, however, banks such as Morgan Stanley, Credit Suisse, Barclays Capital and Deutsche began offering single-dealer portals,[3] mostly either via private pages on Bloomberg or via the Internet.
In the absence of any established frameworks, early SDPs were usually built in an ad hoc fashion, often using Java applets to deliver a user interface via the Web.