Global exchange and clearinghouse operator the Intercontinental Exchange, has concluded its acquisition of the Bank of America Merrill Lynch Global Research division’s fixed income index platform, exchange officials have announced.
Terms of the agreement were not disclosed and the financial impact of the transaction will be immaterial to ICE in 2017, but the new business will be folded into ICE Data Services.
“We’re excited to expand the breadth and scale of our index offering to give customers increased choice of third-party benchmark solutions,” said Lynn Martin, president and COO of ICE Data Services. “With the addition of these indices, we are able to offer a comprehensive portfolio that includes the addition of more than 5,000 global fixed income, currency, and commodity indices and leverages our trusted pricing and reference data solutions to meet the needs of our customers.”
The acquired indices will be renamed ICE BofAML Indices and will become part of ICE Data Services’ suite of businesses, which provides proprietary indices, and third-party index and ETF calculation services, as well as proprietary market data, pricing and analytics, desktops and connectivity solutions. ICE BofAML Indices are the second largest fixed income indices by assets under management globally, and with the completion of this acquisition, the AUM benchmarked against the combined fixed income index business of ICE will be nearly $1 trillion.
ICE BofAML Indices will be offered alongside ICE’s existing index offering, which includes the ICE U.S. Treasury indices, which were introduced in 2015, and ICE’s index services, which serve as the basis for ETFs and structured products across fixed income, currencies, equities and commodities. The collective index families are powered by ICE Data Services’ award-winning evaluated prices, reference data and analytics, which provide high-quality information on more than 10 million financial instruments across all major asset classes, including futures, options, equities and fixed income.
The full suite of ICE BofAML Indices are available on ICE’s Global Index System (GIS), as well as a broad range of third-party research platforms and execution venues.
