Intercontinental Exchange, a leading global provider of technology and data, announced record 2024 trading volume for corporate bonds, municipal bonds and agencies trading on ICE Bonds. ICE Bonds attributes this strong growth to increased usage of its corporate bond sweeps protocol and the expansion of its global liquidity network of traders and portfolio managers.

Trading on ICE Bonds reached record notional volume of $212 billion for corporate bonds in 2024, up 40% from 2023. Municipal bond trading reached record notional volume of $178 billion in 2024, up 5% from 2023, while Agencies, or bonds issued by government-sponsored enterprises or federal agencies, had record notional trading volume of $28 billion in 2024, up 20% from 2023.

“The volume growth we are experiencing is primarily driven by increased adoption of our trading protocols by a combination of retail-oriented brokerage firms and institutional investors,” said Peter Borstelmann, President of ICE Bonds. “Over the past year, we’ve made significant progress in expanding our customer network, expanding our execution protocols and workflows, and introducing our unique liquidity to a more diverse set of market participants, which is resulting in record transactional activity.”

ICE Bonds attributes its strong growth in corporate bond volumes to customer adoption of its enhanced sweeps session-based protocol called Risk Matching Auction (RMA). In the fourth quarter of 2024, RMA volumes increased by 100% from the prior quarter and were up over four-fold since the fourth quarter of 2023. ICE Bonds conducts multiple RMA sessions each week, with 50 registered firms and over 400 users participating.

The ICE Bonds RMA allows traders to efficiently upload their inventory of bonds and our proprietary algorithm then proposes potential matches between buyers and sellers of the same bond or list of bonds. The protocol leverages ICE’s Continuous Evaluated Pricing (CEP™) to propose a pricing level for the bonds, which traders can either affirm or reject on a line-item basis or in bulk. We believe that this process gives traders an efficient way to reduce risk exposure as they access a broadening pool of fixed income liquidity.

ICE Bonds offers deep liquidity pools that support multiple trading protocols including click-to-trade, sweeps, auctions and RFQ, with a vast breadth of fixed income data. Focused on execution efficiency, ICE Bonds enables both anonymous and disclosed counterparty interactions, and trading from odd-lots to blocks for Corporates, Municipals, Agencies, Treasuries and Certificates of Deposit.

Source: ICE