ICMA Publishes Bond Data Taxonomy v2.0 for Global Bond Markets

ICMA publishes version 2.0 of the Bond Data Taxonomy, reflecting growing market adoption

27 April 2026 The International Capital Market Association (ICMA) today announces the publication of version 2.0 of its Bond Data Taxonomy (BDT), a standardised, machine-readable language for key bond terms developed by and for market practitioners.

This latest release represents the most comprehensive update to the BDT to date and comes at a time of increasing market adoption across the global fixed income ecosystem, including in both traditional and DLT-based workflows. The BDT is now being integrated into a growing number of market initiatives and infrastructures, including a digital asset standards platform developed by Swift, continued adoption by issuers such as the Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA), its application in collaborative industry initiatives such as Project Guardian’s Global Fixed Income Framework as well as digitisation of the Eurobond market involving the ICSDs. In parallel, public sector and regulatory discussions—including those within the Eurosystem’s AMI-SeCo—continue to highlight the importance of harmonised data and messaging standards in supporting post-trade integration and market efficiency.

Version 2.0 reflects extensive engagement with a broad range of industry stakeholders throughout 2025. ICMA worked closely with market participants across the value chain to support implementation of the BDT in real-world workflows and to gather detailed feedback. This inclusive, market-led consultation has directly informed the enhancements introduced in this release.

The updated BDT expands its coverage to support more complex issuance structures, including bonds with multiple series, classes and tranches. It also introduces greater flexibility in data fields to accommodate a wider range of transaction types, including emerging market use cases, while maintaining consistency and interoperability.

Originally designed to support primary market issuance, the BDT has now demonstrated its value across the full bond lifecycle. Its application is increasingly extending into trading, settlement and distribution processes, supporting improved data consistency, automation and straight-through processing across market participants.

Commenting on the launch, ICMA Chief Executive Bryan Pascoe said: “The launch of the Bond Data Taxonomy version 2.0 marks an important step forward in the market’s ability to communicate bond terms in a consistent, open and machine-readable way. The BDT is helping to reduce fragmentation, support interoperability and enable greater automation across the bond lifecycle. Its growing adoption by issuers, market infrastructures and other stakeholders demonstrates the value of common standards in making international capital markets more efficient, resilient and future-ready.”

Gabriel Callsen, Senior Director in the FinTech & Digitalisation Team at ICMA added: “The continued evolution of the BDT reflects ICMA’s role in facilitating standards that are created by the market, for the market. By providing a common, open and machine-readable framework for bond data, the BDT supports both industry efforts and regulatory initiatives to enhance efficiency, reduce fragmentation and enable the adoption of new technologies, including distributed ledger-based solutions.”

Version 2.0 of the Bond Data Taxonomy is available for download here.