Intercontinental Exchange, a prominent operator of global exchanges and clearing houses and provider of data and listings services is set to acquire New York based Virtu BondPoint from Virtu Financial for a $400 million in cash. The deal is expected to close by the first quarter of 2018, as per the statements released by the companies.
Virtu is a leading financial firm that leverages cutting edge technology to deliver liquidity to the global markets and innovative, transparent trading solutions to its clients. Virtu’s electronic fixed income trading solutions and automated trade execution services will add more value to Intercontinental exchange.
“We believe adding BondPoint’s capabilities to our data and technology infrastructure will allow us to continue to innovate for our customers as the fixed income markets evolve,” said ICE Chairman and CEO Jeffrey C. Sprecher. “We look forward to welcoming the BondPoint team to ICE, and supporting solutions that enable our customers to transact with confidence in an increasingly transparent, automated and data-driven marketplace.”
BondPoint is known for trading corporate bonds, municipals, government agency, treasuries and certificates of deposits. In the year 2016, an average daily par value of $201.7m traded on BondPoint, as per its annual report of that year.
Prior to this acquisition, in 2015 as well, ICE has acquired Interactive Data Corp, a market data provider, for $5.2bn. Just few days ago, ICE finalized another acquisition of Bank of America Merrill Lynch’s Global Research index platform which will become part of ICE Data Services.
The acquisition of BondPoint sets ICE into the race with the likes of MarketAxess and Tradeweb, both of which anticipated to benefit as the trading of corporate bonds becomes more electronic.
