Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) beat out Nasdaq and the financial data publisher Markit in a highly contested auction for IDC. It has agreed to pay IDC’s private equity owners, Silver Lake and Warburg Pincus, $3.65 billion in cash and $1.55 billion in common stock.
“The deal will throw ICE … deep into the market for pricing illiquid bonds,” The Financial Times said, noting that new global banking and markets regulation “is set to usher in more electronic quote-driven trading and clearing in fixed income markets in America and Europe.”
ICE “is “trying to provide extensive tools to financial institutions so they can price some of these over-the-counter products that aren’t easy to value.,” Rich Repetto, an analyst at Sandler O’Neill + Partners, told Bloomberg.
Silver Lake and Warburg Pincus paid about $3.4 billion to take IDC private in 2010. The investment firms have been weighing a sale of the company as well as an