ICE Bonds will integrate Investortools' Perform fixed-income portfolio platform with the firm’s deep liquidity pool, Intercontinental Exchange Inc. said Wednesday.
Perform offers an end-to-end portfolio management system, which includes trade allocation, compliance, trade messaging and performance attribution to institutional and private wealth managers.
The system will now be configured to allow straight-through access to ICE Bonds’ all-to-all municipal bond market. And with this connection, Perform customers will have access to ICE Bond’s trading protocols, including click-to-trade, portfolio trading and request for quote, as well as access to liquidity for municipals, corporates, Treasuries, agencies and certificates of deposit.
“We’re thrilled to complete this integration with Perform, offering their clients the ability to access our municipal markets in a seamless and efficient manner,” Peter Borstelmann, president of ICE Bonds, told The Bond Buyer. “By coming through our ICE FI Select interface, it will provide users with an aggregated view into ICE Bonds liquidity and access to multiple execution protocols, not only across municipals but also corporate bonds, as well other asset classes."
He said it will provide customers with an opportunity to tap into liquidity that they may not have been able to seamlessly access before.
Jon Anderson, chief product officer and co-head at Investortools, said getting access to ICE’s liquidity would be a great help to their customers.
“Providing a seamless and efficient environment for our customers to design portfolios and execute strategies has always been a key priority for us,” Anderson said in a statement. "With straight-through integration to ICE Bonds, we’re thrilled to streamline trade execution for our clients and allow them to leverage ICE’s leading municipal bond market liquidity.”
This is not ICE’s first foray into the muni market, rather it is part of the company’s continuing expansion into the public finance arena.
In May, ICE invested in BondLink in a deal that provides data sets to BondLink's municipal issuer clients. The year before, BondLink partnered with ICE to give issuers a cloud-based market data dashboard on a real-time basis.
In April, Lumesis made the tax-exempt ICE Municipal Yield Curve and spreads for all underlying trades available to customers using its DIVER New Issue and Secondary Pricing services.
In January, ICE partnered with ADP to launch an offering for the muni market that linked ADP insights on demographics and compensation to specific bond issuers and geographic zones.
In 2020, risQ partnered with ICE to bringing its data to the muni market by providing analysis of climate risks for issuers. And in 2019, ICE launched the ICE US Broad Municipal Index, (ticker: MUNI), which tracks the performance of more than 58,000 investment-grade tax-exempts.
Borstelmann said this latest move shows how the company can bring value to their clients in the muni space.
“We continue to identify additional ways to integrate our data and execution solutions together to create tools clients need to transact efficiently,” he said. “Our investment in BondLink, partnership with ADP, and this integration with Perform — these are just a few examples of how we’re working to deliver unique content and innovative solutions to the municipal space."
