Commentary by: Chris Edmonds | President, Fixed Income & Data Services, ICE

Even in today’s digital age, information asymmetry continues to characterize the dynamic between buyers and sellers. Nowhere is this truer than in fixed income markets. On one side are dealers and market-makers, ingesting millions of pieces of incoming market intelligence around bond prices, order flow and client volume every second.

On the other are buy-side firms that rely on indications of interest and requests for quote (RFQs) to get a sense of where assets are currently trading. It is here that the information asymmetry takes on a tangible cost: once the buy-side issues an RFQ for a bond or a basket of bonds, the act of requesting a quote influences the price that responding dealers send back to them.

Quantifying the financial cost of indicating trading intent is difficult, but in a market where the U.S. alone sees $1.8 trillion in fixed income assets traded each day,1 even a drag of a single basis point equates to $180 million in aggregate cost to fixed income investors daily — or more than $45 billion annualized.

The core of the problem is information leakage surrounding the buy-side's pre-trade intent. If communication between bond dealers and the buy-side were more precisely targeted, it would yield significant benefits for both parties: tighter bids and offers for the buy-side, and higher client win rates and order flow for bond dealer desks. This is precisely what our new ICE Compass platform helps to provide.

ICE Compass is an AI-powered trading analytics platform that gives fixed income trading desks prioritized sell-side counterparty rankings and price estimates before executing trades.

Here’s how it works: the platform combines a bond market participant’s own real-time and historical trading data with ICE’s market data and pricing streams, as well as the millions of bids and offers, indications of interest and other pricing data points that the entity receives from trading counterparties each day.

ICE Compass enriches this raw data by applying our proprietary data assets, such as ICE Continuous Evaluated Pricing™, fixed income liquidity metrics and indices. The ICE Compass model tracks intraday market movements, trading costs and trading behaviors to generate estimates that help support counterparty selection and pre-trade cost analysis.

By applying AI and predictive analytics, the platform estimates counterparty price commitment prior to indicating trading intent. Practically speaking, this means that if a buy-side firm is typically serviced by 10 bond dealer counterparties, ICE Compass will rank each of them on the competitiveness of their bids and offers by fixed income asset class, by maturity, and other parameters.

Equipped with these pre-trade insights, the buy-side can go directly to the counterparty estimated to be most aggressive on price and execute with them, minimizing information leakage and lessening the possibility of bond prices moving against them.

ICE Compass also delivers benefits for the sell-side: bond dealer desks that are most competitive on price will be rewarded with greater client volume and order flow as the platform will recognize and recommend them to buy-side participants.

Rather than disrupting the existing relationships between the sell-side and their buy-side clients, ICE Compass is designed to make their communication more meaningful. The platform will help sift out non-competitive prices from daily workflows and allow more aggressive market makers to rise to the top. ICE Compass also has the potential to break the existing practice of buy-side firms using backward-looking post-trade transaction cost analysis (TCA) data as a means of identifying competitive dealer counterparties based on their price aggressiveness in the recent past.

Even better, the ICE Compass data model improves over time and is continuously enhanced as new trading data is incorporated, progressively refining the platform’s counterparty rankings and pricing estimates.

T. Rowe Price has already signed onto the platform as an anchor client, with their participation just the latest step in the asset manager’s “continued evolution toward a more transparent, data-driven, and scalable trading model.”

Over the coming months we’ll be adding more participants on both the buy-side and sell-side to ICE Compass and demonstrating to the wider fixed income community the value of a platform that enables users to gain new pre-trade insight and estimate costs before they go to the market.