Year’s best market data provider: ICE Data Services

Financial institutions require access to a market data supplier that provides complete information, analytics, index services, connectivity, and data tools for international markets across all asset classes.

ICE Data Services occupies a special position as both a market data supplier and an exchange. It now provides services to some of the largest banks, insurers, asset managers, and pension funds in Asia. It is present in significant regional markets like Australia, Hong Kong, Japan, and Singapore.

ICE can supply more mission-critical data and analytics solutions thanks to its knowledge of the markets, clearing houses, and data industry. As one illustration, it creates indices based on EU Allowance carbon futures contracts sold on its exchanges, enabling exchange-traded fund (ETF) issuers to produce products and offering Asian investors access to the indexes.

It also expands by acquiring top data vendors in their respective asset classes. For instance, in 2014, after purchasing NYSE in 2013, ICE bought SuperDerivatives, a leading data provider in the OTC derivatives market. Then, in 2015, it bought Interactive Data Corporation, a company that offers reference data and fixed-income pricing. S&P Global’s companies that evaluated securities and analyzed the credit market in 2016 followed suit. In 2021, ICE also bought the fixed-income index platform and Kalotay Analytics from Bank of America Merrill Lynch’s worldwide research group. Then, RisQ and Level 11 Analytics were included to increase Ice’s capacity for handling alternate data and climate change.

As explained by Magnus Cattan, vice-president of fixed income and data services for Asia-Pacific at ICE, these purchases have helped ICE to transform into a full-service brokerage.

“These acquisitions also added high-value, exclusive, proprietary information to our database, which really sets us apart from competing providers. Our product portfolio has recently undergone innovation to better serve our clients’ present and future needs, and we have recently acquired businesses in the ESG (environmental, social, and governance) sector”.

ICE purchased Urgentem, a provider of solutions for the transition to a climate-smart economy and worldwide corporate emissions, in July 2022. In addition to adding scenario risk analysis and stress testing for fund managers and banks, Cattan claims that this acquisition increased ICE’s climate risk offering to cover coverage of international public and private firms across additional geographies.

The way ICE provides data to clients is also evolving. Recently, it introduced the Cloud Connect programme, allowing the ICE Global Network, which links the global market community to a variety of data and trading venues, to connect with market participants in the cloud and more than 700 sites across the world.

Clients can use any significant public cloud provider to access ICE’s cross-asset, low-latency, real-time market data, according to Cattan. By minimizing the connectivity costs associated with getting market data, Cloud Connect also lowers clients’ total cost of ownership. Real-time data is routed into customers’ cloud environments using Cloud Connect’s current connections to clients’ cloud environments, negating the requirement for clients to construct separate physical leased lines.

In addition, ICE created the ICE DataVault (IDV). This AWS cloud-based platform enables users to access substantial historical tick data from the ICE Consolidated Feed with a history spanning more than ten years. More than 25 million items from more than 600 sources are covered, and these instruments span multiple asset classes, including equities, derivatives, fixed income, foreign exchange, money markets, commodities, energy, and ETFs.  

 

 

According to Cattan, its cloud-native functionality offers users a practical means of gaining access to huge amounts of datasets in the cloud without having to pay exorbitant transmission fees. Hundreds of gigabytes of data from IDV to their S3 bucket for backtesting and historical analysis purposes, he says, are being transmitted by our clients for an expanding number of use cases in the cloud.

A multi-tenant, fully managed data feed access center in Taiwan called ICE Shared Farm was also recently introduced by ICE. Utilizing Ice’s hosted and managed environments, the service offers consumers a “managed” experience.

“It eliminates the need for dedicated market data infrastructure and equipment and allows clients to quickly ‘plug in’ to get low-latency, real-time market data via cross-connects or local leased lines, which may dramatically lower connection costs,” he says.

In order to ensure that their clients may access Ice’s data over the cloud easily and flawlessly, ICE supports cloud technologies and collaborates with all of the main cloud providers. According to Cattan, many businesses are making the switch to the cloud, and ICE is collaborating with cloud service providers to make it as simple as possible. Additionally, he adds, “We are continually searching for new cloud-based datasets and applications that ICE data can back.”

In the future, Cattan sees ESG as a rapidly changing data requirement. To satisfy the growing demands of its customers, it is consequently continually growing its product. Another area of focus is climate risk, where its most recent acquisitions will support clients.

As well there is a drive in Asia for electronic execution and algorithmic trading. “Asia’s traders need more data to aid in the post-trade analysis and pre-trade transparency”. In order to understand the trends and problems in this market, ICE is interacting with 37 market participants from a variety of geographies and firm kinds, according to Cattan.