UNITED STATES: ICE Announces Launch of its Fixed Income Quotation Transparency Service

Thursday January 6 2022

On 4^th January 2022, Intercontinental Exchange, Inc. (NYSE: ICE) announced the launch of its leading-edge service that is designed to enable broker-dealers to meet the new requirements resulting from recent amendments to SEC Rule 15c2-11. The ICE solution helps broker-dealers obtain and review issuer information about fixed income securities before publishing or submitting a quotation in a quotation medium in accordance with the newly-updated rule and conditional relief provided in the SEC Staff’s December 16 No-Action Letter.

In October, ICE launched a fixed income quotation transparency service specifically designed to help its customers address the impact of amendments to SEC Rule 15c2-11.

ICE’s service can also assist customers in determining which fixed income securities may be eligible for the relief provided in the SEC Staff’s December 16 No-Action Letter. For example, the dataset allows customers to identify the ultimate parent in the corporate hierarchy, providing users with an indicator that can quickly show the depth of the required data elements available, supporting the customer in making a reasonable determination of whether a security is eligible for relief.

The tool includes more than 15 data fields that are necessary to meet Paragraph (b) review requirements — which refer to specific, publicly-available documents and information about issuers and securities, including prospectuses, current annual and periodic reports, and annual statements — and includes URL links to EDGAR where unstructured data fields can be accessed, allowing users to easily search for additional relevant and applicable Paragraph (b) data. Data from ICE’s solution can also be leveraged by front- and mid-office customers, aligning visibility between traders and risk, as well as compliance and legal teams, within a single customer.

The SEC Staff’s No-Action Letter provides for conditional relief in three phases, ICE is actively working with its customers to equip them to navigate the specific review requirements laid out by the SEC. ICE’s service covers certain corporate, sovereign and money-market instruments and we expect to continue adding additional fixed income assets over time.

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