ICE Connect offers workflow and cost efficiencies as the platform continues to evolve. Maurisa Baumann VP, Desktop and Feeds Products, ICE, explores. This article was originally posted on ICE.com
August is typically a quiet month in markets, characterized by low trading volume and little volatility. The beginning of August 2024, however, saw major drawdowns with global equities and government bond yields tumbling around the world.
The selloff – triggered by a Bank of Japan interest rate hike that forced foreign exchange traders to rapidly unwind carry trades using the yen as the funding currency – demonstrated once again the necessity for ready access to relevant, accurate and timely market data.
Most data platforms are built with the needs of the front office in mind, providing traders with up-to-the-second market information to support order execution, but this is just the first step in the transaction lifecycle. Post-execution, trades need to be confirmed, settled and may require central clearing and the ongoing exchange of margin.
This post-trade work – undertaken by compliance, risk management, treasury and accounting professionals in the middle and back office – necessitates access to market data to reconcile the trades executed by their front office colleagues.
Such data is usually sourced from the same platform used by trading teams, typically a market data service which offers a myriad of functions that are extraneous for the purposes of trade confirmation.
Consequently, the back office often finds itself working with a Swiss army knife when what it requires is a scalpel. While an all-encompassing data platform does the job, it is often vastly overpowered in terms of their requirements. Furthermore, the cost for such a platform is considerable, often necessitating middle- and back-office professionals to share information access.
Following the success of ICE Connect across energy and commodity markets, customized data packages have been created to serve the fixed income and wealth management segments. The platform can also be customized for middle and back-office needs, in addition to the front office. Originally created as a desktop interface, industry demand for cost efficiency saw ICE develop the option of web-based access – allowing users to access data on their own devices at a cost significantly below other premium data services.
ICE Connect brings together our proprietary exchange data with third-party data across fixed income, equities, foreign exchange, derivatives, energy and commodities – with extensive fundamental data for energy and equities. This is supplemented by data from over 180 equities and futures exchanges, and news feeds such as Dow Jones and Dataminr. In fixed income, ICE’s high-quality evaluations and reference data provide pricing across the broad spectrum of global fixed income assets. The breadth of this offering negates the need to manually aggregate information from multiple platforms.
Users can choose from customized datasets across major asset classes, with direct access to relevant information and instruments at login. Additionally, ICE Connect is available over ICE Global Network, which ensures connectivity to market data.
New data integration capabilities for energy, commodities
Market data clients have traditionally been mere receivers of information, requiring them to extract data and commingle it with external information to build risk management models and conduct other analytics.
Clients recently noted that they want to conduct data analysis using ICE’s visualization tools directly, rather than through the cumbersome process of exporting exchange data into other tools or Excel sheets. Energy and commodity clients can now use these visualization tools on their data by adding this capability on their infrastructure – whether in the cloud or on-premises – all without altering the original source content or location.
In the past decade, many industries have migrated from a one-size fits-all product model to a pay-for-what-you-need model, including sectors as disparate as aviation, insurance and streaming.
Financial market participants are demanding comparable capabilities to configure their market data consumption to their own requirements. Moving forward, market data providers will need to act accordingly by introducing a broader and more flexible range of customizable pricing models for clients in the middle office, back office, and beyond.
