The LSE Directory / Data providers
ICE Data Services is the market-data and analytics business of Intercontinental Exchange, Inc. (NYSE: ICE), the operator of the New York Stock Exchange and a group of global futures and derivatives exchanges. The unit sells continuous and end-of-day evaluated pricing, security reference data, fixed income and multi-asset indices, a consolidated real-time market-data feed, and desktop, web and API-based analytics tools to banks, asset managers, hedge funds, insurers, corporate issuers and software vendors. ICE's own corporate site now presents this same product set under the heading "Fixed Income & Data Services," though "ICE Data Services" remains the name used for several of the operating legal entities and much of the surrounding product branding. Its core specialization is pricing and reference data for instruments that do not trade on a continuous, transparent market, evaluated prices for fixed income, complex derivatives and thinly traded securities, sitting alongside more conventional real-time exchange data. At the June 2016 launch of the expanded ICE Data Services brand, the business combined New York Stock Exchange market data, SuperDerivatives' derivatives-valuation technology and Interactive Data Corporation's evaluated-pricing and reference-data business into one unit, giving it coverage from raw exchange ticks through to the independent fair-value marks that funds use for NAV calculation and regulatory reporting. This is the differentiator against vendors that sell only real-time exchange feeds: they typically do not also produce the independent evaluated prices asset managers need to value hard-to-price bond and derivative positions. The business traces its lineage to Interactive Data Corporation, founded in 1968 in Waltham, Massachusetts as a financial-industry time-sharing services company; it was owned successively by Chase Manhattan Bank, Pearson PLC, and private equity firms Silver Lake Partners and Warburg Pincus before Intercontinental Exchange acquired it for approximately 5.2 billion dollars in a cash-and-stock deal announced in October 2015 and completed in December 2015. At the June 2016 relaunch, ICE Data Services quoted continuous and end-of-day evaluated pricing on 2.7 million securities and reference data on more than 10 million instruments, drawn in part from the 11 exchanges then operated by ICE and NYSE. Certain group entities, including ICE Data Pricing & Reference Data, LLC, are registered with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission as investment advisers, with trading-related services provided through affiliates that hold FINRA, MSRB and SIPC membership. The index business has grown into a significant part of the unit: ICE offers more than 6,000 standard and custom fixed income indices and, across all asset classes, over 8,500 fixed income, equity, currency, commodity and mortgage indices, built on what ICE describes as a 60 year track record in index provisioning. By ICE's own figures, its indices serve as the benchmark for roughly 2.0 trillion dollars in assets under management, plus a further 775 billion dollars in passive fund AUM. The company has also been layering AI-assisted tools into its data-quality and trading-analytics products.
