Asia Awards 2023: Best evaluated pricing data provider—Intercontinental Exchange (ICE)

Overview

Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) calculates and publishes daily evaluations representing approximately 150 countries and 80 currencies for about 3 million fixed-income and international equity issues. Its coverage includes sovereign, corporate and municipal bonds, structured products, leveraged loans, and the firm’s Fair Value Information Services for international equities, options, futures, and fixed-income products. ICE specializes in “hard-to-get” information and evaluates large numbers of “hard-to-value” instruments.

The solution

On average, less than 1% of the outstanding US dollar debt trades on any given day. ICE produces daily evaluations for 3 million fixed-income and international equity issues. Its evaluations are designed to support financial institutions’ and investment funds’ pricing activities, operations, research, and portfolio management functions. Its continuous evaluated pricing and trading analytics are designed to help clients make judicious and transparent fixed-income trading decisions.

Secret sauce

ICE’s rules-based pricing applications, overseen by a team of evaluators, are designed to capture and incorporate market information and produce a streamlined pricing process reflective of market conditions. Its evaluations team includes approximately 170 global staff dedicated to producing high-quality evaluations and related analytics. The evaluators average over 13 years’ experience and more than 22 years’ total securities industry experience.

Recent milestones

ICE launched ICE Trading Analytics, a fixed-income content suite, designed to help inform trade decisions throughout the order lifecycle and help support efficient and scalable trading decisions. It improves on the firm’s bid–ask spread derivation methods by factoring in historical trade, quote and market correlations. ICE now supports clients’ fair value determinations with security-level data supporting transparency, evaluation challenges, back-testing, and leveling.

Future objectives

Current projects include: 

• Increasing coverage of ICE’s Trading Analytics content: Continuous Market Depth Indicators will provide insight into market activity levels.
• Market Sentiment service showing market trend information at issuer, industry and asset-class levels
• ICE aims to increase precision and quality of bid–ask spreads for traded, quoted and thinly traded bond universes using data science and machine learning techniques.

Why they won

Intercontinental Exchange

Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) wins the best evaluated pricing data provider category in this year’s WatersTechnology Asia Awards, thanks to its ICE Evaluated Pricing service. Extrapolating accurate, reliable, and transparent prices for thinly traded securities is fiendishly challenging for capital markets firms, which is why they rely so heavily on third-party providers like ICE to manage this critical function for them. ICE has 170 specialists on its evaluations team with an average of 13 years of experience, providing color and clarity around the prices they produce for clients.