LONDON, May 7 Reuters Banks and asset managers are vying with Europes exchanges to develop technology that can deepen the pool of investors in the continents capital markets and better compete with Wall Street.

The United States has long had a 39;consolidated tape39; aggregating stock and bond prices from competing trading platforms for investors to spot the best deals, and the European Union and Britain seek to match this over the coming three years.

The purpose of the tape is to democratise access to market data and to make sure that everybody is seeing the full breadth and depth of the market, said Natan Tiefenbrun, president of North American and European equities at Cboe Global Markets, a panEuropean stock exchange.

The current messy and fragmented system for market data discourages investors, Tiefenbrun added.

EU securities watchdog ESMA said it will consult before the end of May on its criteria for selecting winning bidders to run a tape for bonds initially, and then one for stocks.

The two contenders that have emerged so far to run an EU stocks tape highlight the tensions between exchanges and banks and asset managers over the price of market data.

Exchanges had opposed a tape in order to guard their lucrative data, while asset managers and banks say there would be no data without their trades. To bring exchanges on board, the EU has mandated exchange contributions to a tape.

EuroCTP, backed by 14 exchanges including Deutsche Boerse and Euronext, is…