Best Evaluated Prices Service Provider: ICE Data Services

The growing complexity of investments and portfolio diversification, along with increasing regulatory demands and the continued focus on price transparency, means evaluated pricing has become a critical business requirement for financial firms. 

 ICE Data Services—which includes services from Interactive Data Corporation, acquired by Intercontinental Exchange in 2015—helps clients by providing independent evaluated pricing to front, middle and back offices. With its long-standing End-of-Day Evaluations and Continuous Evaluated Pricing, and other related services, the company tops the reader vote this year for Best Evaluated Prices Service Provider.

“Our Evaluated Pricing service originally started as an end-of-day offering, like many in this business, but in the last five years we have developed it into a near real-time offering,” says Mark Heckert, head of pricing and analytics at ICE Data Services. “Since we have this golden record of pricing for fixed income—which is not a common asset—we’ve developed a number of analytical services on the back of that, which can help clients analyze liquidity in difficult-to-price areas of the market, measure best execution, value securities and understand risk.” 

The company calculates and publishes evaluations representing 145 countries and more than 50 different currencies for approximately 2.7 million fixed-income securities. “The sell side may use us in the price verification process or in the collateral management function. On the buy side, we might be an input to a net asset value for a mutual fund. We could also be used by a risk desk to assess their market risk or by an insurance firm to value their positions. We have a broad variety of clients,” Heckert says.

What sets the company apart is its ability to marry human expertise and technology. Its approach combines both system and human analyses to generate a continuous stream of fixed-income evaluations that processes and incorporates market data throughout the day, which means clients are able to see an effective evaluation, even in confusing, volatile times, Heckert says.

Over the past year, the company has launched an offering that helps its customers address regulatory requirements for liquidity risk management, which involves funds providing greater transparency into their fixed-income investments, starting June 1. It also launched a yield curve offering earlier this year—the first of which is designed to provide transparency into the municipal bond market. 

ICE Data Services will continue its strategy of supporting its customers’ businesses holistically. Heckert says: “We want to make sure that we not only have a strong evaluation offering, but that we leverage our analytical offerings and our models to give clients the tools that provide broad transparency into fixed-income markets.” 

Read more about the Inside Market Data & Inside Reference Data Awards 2019 winners