Data services is Intercontinental Exchange’s fastest-growing business and the acquisition of Interactive Data will make it the No. 3 provider.

The owner of the New York Stock Exchange is expanding its fast-growing data services business by acquiring Interactive Data Corp. in a deal worth $5.2 billion.

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.”

IDC evaluates prices for 2.7 million financial securities every day, including 46,000 corporate debt issues, 1.1 million U.S. municipal bonds and 45,000 high-yield bonds.  ICE’s purchase will make it the third-largest data provider behind Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters, according to the consulting firm Burton-Taylor International Consulting LLC.

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