Ice Bonds plans expansion after record volume in 2024

ICE BONDS is to develop two new trade components and expand internationally internationally Commercial volumes for corporate bonds, municipal bonds and agencies that are traded in 2024.

Peter Borstelmann, ice cream

Peter Borstelmann, President of ICE Bonds, told Markets Media: “We are in the process of developing two new components of our offer: an inquiry to the quote (RFQ) for mortgage amounts (MBS) specifications and a Spread Based Click to Trade (CTT) for corporate bonds.”

According to Borstelmann, the CTT-based CTT is introduced to a strong institutional demand and builds on the success of the price-based CTT liquidity of ICE Bonds in municipal bonds and corporate bonds.

Clicking to act offers the possibility of increasing efficiency by automating the entire trading cycle for odd loose. With access to CTT-liquidity pools, a buying vine dealer can be available for additional transparency, evaluate potential orders based on detailed pricing, use a rules engine to validate orders and orders are quickly carried out with straight-line processing. If a dealer sends an RFQ onto the market, he has to wait for answers and may need a certain number of offers, an “acceptable” price level or a specific counterparty to answer before execution. This is a time -consuming process for a smaller trade with odds.

Risk involvement

Intercontinental Exchange reported that the trade in ice bonds in 2024 achieved a record volume of $ 212 billion for corporate bonds. In particular, 40% rose by 40%. Enables the dealers to efficiently upload their stock of bonds and a proprietary algorithm, and then suggests potential matches between buyers and sellers of the same bond or the same list of bonds.

Borstelmann explained that ICE bonds in 2023 to revise and relate to their RMA product by improving the algorithm, introducing new screens and the designed user-friendly and web-based screens and gave users more flexibility and control over their experiences.

The sweep initially started with one session per day, and ice bonds focused on refining experience based on the user feedback. The platform switched to two sessions a day because the team made improvements and worked with partners to optimize the time of each session. ICE Bonds now conduct several RMA meetings with 50 registered companies and the participation of more than 400 users.

RMA's distinction feature is that the Sweep is a protocol that occurs during a session, which according to Borstelmann, which according to Borstelmann. As a result, it is very popular for dealer-to-dealer cycles to clean the risk and manage your risk profile.

“Through iteration and close cooperation with our partners, we have reached a point where RMA ran on all cylinders,” he said. “While the Sweep area is quite competitive, we quickly developed as a clear second option after Tradeweb has been an established leader for some time.”

RMA is currently working for investment grade and high corporate bonds and ICE bonds preliminary discussions about whether they are suitable for other investment classes.

Borstelmann said Ice Bonds Forriere newly newly innovative functions at the end of the quarter, so that the possibilities have the opportunity to systematically swap the name of each session and to manage the risk more effectively or with source risks.

“This improvement builds on a legacy component and includes innovative logic, which we believe that they improve the promise of value and differentiate between other session protocols,” he added.

Continuous evaluated pricing

The protocol uses the continuous evaluated ICE (CEP) prices to suggest a price level for bonds, either confirm or reject dealers on a line base or in large quantities, which offers an efficient way to reduce risk exposure. Borstelmann described CEP as a powerful and effective product, and while ICE bonds are supposed to make it an important distinguishing feature in its liquidity network, the company also actively supports its introduction on other platforms.

“Our goal is to establish CEP as an industry standard for composite price sources and to ensure that the value is generally recognized and used,” he added.

There is also a strong demand to integrate composed pricing together with live content, to integrate executable content and to enable dealers and portfolio managers to make a more sound trade decisions. Borstelmann often gave the Separate Managed Account (SMAS) example with mandates, where you have to see both a compound price and a executable price as part of your investment guidelines.

“The growth of SMA accounts and the increase in ETFs with solid incomes lead to a shift in smaller trade sizes, which are bread and butter,” he added. “At the same time, institutional companies are increasingly recognizing that they can access better pricing and liquidity by using our network and expanding the traditional round-solder activities.”

Community

The trade in the municipal bonds with ice bonds last year achieved a record volume of $ 178 billion, an increase of 5% compared to 2023. Fictional trade volume of agencies or bonds, which were issued by state -sponsored companies or federal authorities last year, rose by 20% from 2023 to 28 billion.

According to Borstelmann, the growth of ICE Bonds in Munis was expanded by a concerted effort to expand the network of the platform, especially among institutional accounts.

“We successfully presented the value of the depth and width of our liquidity and the participants through our initiative to integrate our executable content,” he added.

The company sees Munis a significant chance of Greenfield, since the sector is still in the early growth phases, with only about 15% of the market act electronically according to ICE.

Growth strategy

Borstelmann said that ICE bonds continue to make progress in the strategy of integrating executable content upstream in OMS/EMS, EMS, portfolio and other trading locations of third-party providers.

“This enables a wider sentence of users to easily access our liquidity, to evaluate and react to our liquidity, which shows the value, the depth and width of our offer as well as the quality of our prices first -hand,” he added. “These efforts have already achieved sensible results.”

For example, ICE BONDS and Marketaxess announced plans for the connection of their respective liquidity networks in August 2024, the operator of Electronic Fixed Income trading platforms. The interaction between liquidity pools aims to improve the price transparency, the best execution and the entire market liquidity for all participants through the presence of ICE BONDS and the presence of ICE Bonds in addition to the institutional trade of market taxess.

Richard Schiffman, Marketaxess

Rich Schiffman, Global Head of Trading Solutions at Marketaxess, said in a statement: “Our joint efforts focus on granting access to deeper liquidity in terms of municipal and corporate bonds and diversifying trading options for participants on our market.”

ICE BONDS user base is mostly in the USA, but Borstelmann said that foreign investors continue to have strong interests that are looking for access to US dollar liquidity.

“We support customers in the UK, Swiss and Asian -Pacific and are working on approval for European customers,” added Borstelmann.

The group expanded its business segment of ICE mortgage technology with the takeover of Black Knight in 2023. Borstelmann argued that ICE was lucky enough to have access to extensive and unique mortgage content, and is of the opinion that it will finally offer a differentiated value in the trading decision process.

“With our RFQ, we are just starting to enter the mortgage room and to consider this as a valuable addition to our customer base in view of the loan cycle,” he added.

Audrey Costabile, coalition Greenwich

The US mortgage rating market (MBS) is about to have an electronics boom that has changed the trade in corporate bonds, US state bonds and other fixed income products. In a report in February 2025, the advice announced that MBS products make up almost a quarter of the average daily volume of the US trade in fixed income, but more than Three quarters of the trading volume takes place by phone or chat.

Audrey Costabile, Senior Analyst at Coalition Greenwich Market Strue & Technology said in a explanation: “In the next few years we would expect an increase in MBS electronification in the next few years, which are motivated by the same forces that have promoted the e-trading boom in other products, improvement and developing transparency Trace reporting requirements. “

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