Singapore Exchange (SGX) and Temasek announced that its digital assets joint venture (JV) ­Marketnode ­ has partnered with Covalent Capital (Covalent), to build Asia Pacific's first, end-to-end digital infrastructure in the fixed income space. Marketnode will tap on the accelerated need to digitalise and optimise workflows to meet demand for capital in Asia, starting with fixed income (FI). The partnership is poised to consolidate primary FI workflows as bond issuances continue to grow in Asia ex-Japan, where G3 primary issues have grown 46% to USD 387 billion over the last two years, totaling more than 800 new issues in 2020 with more than 450 issuers and 200 arranger banks. Through their partnership, Marketnode and Covalent will work together to streamline the listing, straight-through processing and settlement of bonds and activities in bond lifecycle management. It will connect Covalent's OMAS platform, which is a data, book building and allocations tool, with SGX's listing, post-trade and asset servicing capabilities, thereby providing the Asian bond market with a unique, one-stop listing, issuance and lifecycle management platform.