ICE launches Compass AI for pre-trade fixed-income analytics

Intercontinental Exchange launched ICE Compass, an AI-driven analytics platform for buy-side fixed-income trading desks. The company announced the product in a statement and named T. Rowe Price an anchor client; the asset manager provided feedback during development and took part in beta testing.

ICE Compass produces prioritized counterparty rankings and pre-trade price estimates. Users can combine their own real-time and historical trade records with ICE market data, pricing streams and the millions of bids, offers and indications of interest that counterparties generate daily. The model tracks intraday market moves, trading costs and counterparty behavior to produce estimates intended to support counterparty selection and cost analysis before orders are placed.

The system uses ICE’s proprietary data, including ICE Continuous Evaluated Pricing, fixed-income liquidity metrics and the firm’s indices. ICE says the model updates its estimates continuously as new trade data is added and applies AI and data science techniques to predict a counterparty’s likely price commitment prior to a trader signaling intent. The platform ranks dealers on the competitiveness of pricing across corporate and sovereign bonds worldwide.

Chris Edmonds, president of ICE’s Fixed Income and Data Services, described ICE Compass as building on the firm’s fixed-income trading and data platform and offering a new level of transparency to the pre-trade lifecycle. Varun Pawar, chief product officer for Data Services at ICE, noted that pooling data from multiple firms and ICE’s data warehouse creates a pre-trade view of dealer rankings and final cost-of-trade estimates. Dwayne Middleton, global head of fixed income trading at T. Rowe Price, said the collaboration supports the firm’s effort to make trading more transparent, data-driven and scalable.

ICE integrated Compass with its wider fixed-income and data services, which include execution, clearing and data solutions. The firm provides fixed-income evaluations on about three million instruments, reference data across global markets and indices covering all asset classes, and reports roughly $2 trillion in assets benchmarked to its indices. For delivery and connectivity, ICE offers desktop tools, data feeds and the ICE Global Network, a set of fiber and wireless links for secure content and execution services.

ICE presents Compass as a pre-trade tool for buy-side desks that need clarity on dealer pricing and expected trading costs. The company says estimating counterparty price commitments and ranking dealers before orders are sent can provide additional information for execution strategy and risk management.