UPDATE: Intercontinental Exchange Buys Interactive Data for $5.2 Billion

ICE officials say the acquisition will build on "ICE's global market data growth strategy by expanding the markets served, adding technology platforms and increasing new data and valuation services."

"This transaction furthers our expansion into meeting the financial information needs of our market participants globally. With our diverse markets across virtually all asset classes, IDC will enable us to address more growth opportunities by leveraging the distribution and reach of our complementary global platforms for trading, clearing and data on a combined basis," says ICE chief executive Jeffrey Sprecher, calling IDC "the cornerstone" of the next phase of ICE's service expansion.

In its statement announcing the deal, ICE did not go into detail about how it intends to integrate and leverage IDC's assets, but highlighted its clearing and benchmark valuation services in addition to its exchange operations.

Brad Bailey, research director in Celent's securities and investments group, notes that ICE has assembled a portfolio of acquisitions over the past decade, such as Creditex and its ICE Clear Credit clearinghouse, adding that a real-time fixed income evaluations service such as IDC's Continuous Evaluated Pricing service would prove valuable to the exchange in terms of providing transparency, as well as allowing it to do more in higher-margin businesses beyond equities.

Douglas Taylor, founder and managing director of Burton-Taylor International Consulting, says the deal would make ICE the largest global exchange operator by revenues, while also making it the third-largest data vendor with revenues of nearly $1.6 billion (ICE's $631 million plus IDC's $939 million). ICE is likely to be most interested in IDC's Pricing and Reference Data business, including its evaluated pricing business, since evaluated pricing is "currently a critical and growing business within our industry," Taylor says.

"The entire pricing, reference and valuation datafeed segment globally has been growing at nearly twice the pace of real-time and trading datafeeds within the industry," at 9.56 percent growth compared to 5.3 percent growth, respectively, Taylor says. "For IDC, the Pricing and Reference Data business (valuation data in particular), which is about 70 percent of revenue, looks well-placed to continue to benefit from risk-related regulation," though ICE may be less interested in IDC's real-time desktop business, he adds.

Just over one year ago, the exchange also bought data and risk management software vendor SuperDerivatives for $350 million to accelerate the expansion of its multi-asset class clearing strategy─SuperDerivatives already provided ICE's Liffe derivatives exchange with daily volatility data based on trade data from OTC and exchange-traded derivatives markets to support end-of-day pricing calculations for options on the FTSE 100 index.

IDC chief executive Stephen Daffron says the deal gives the vendor "The long-term capital, strategic support and collective set of relationships," to grow and evolve the company.

The deal is expected to close by year-end, and will comprise $3.65 billion in cash and $1.55 billion in ICE shares. Silver Lake and Warburg Pincus acquired IDC in 2010 for $3.4 billion.