ICE Buys TMC Bonds for $685 Million

The deal is expected to close in the second half of the year subject to regulatory approval.

ICE declined to comment on the specifics of the deal outside of publicly released information. In a statement accompanying news of the acquisition, ICE president Benjamin Jackson said that TMC Bonds would offer new choices of liquidity access for its customers.

“TMC Bonds will offer a new and complementary access point to liquidity for our customers and expand our portfolio of diverse solutions in the global fixed-income markets across analytics, execution and post-trade,” said Jackson. “As the fixed income markets continue to automate and migrate to electronic trading, ICE’s trading and data infrastructure offer customers more choices to access liquidity, conduct price discovery and manage risk in more efficient ways.”

TMC Bonds—which operates an anonymous trading platform for various fixed-income asset classes including municipals, corporates, Treasurys, agencies and certificates of deposit—was established in 2000. It is considered a leader in the municipal bond sector and will be operating within ICE’s fixed-income trading and data solutions.

ICE has been expanding its fixed-income portfolio of late, with its purchase of the BondPoint trading venue for $400 million in October last year from Virtu Financial. It also bought Bank of America Merrill Lynch’s fixed-income index platform around the same period.