Source: Intercontinental Exchange

Intercontinental Exchange, Inc. (NYSE:ICE), a leading operator of global exchanges and clearing houses and provider of mortgage technology, data and listings services, and ADP (NASDAQ:ADP), a leading global technology company providing human capital management (HCM) solutions, announced plans today to launch a new alternative data offering for the U.S. municipal bond market. This first joint offering leverages ICE Data Services’ background in turning unstructured data into actionable insights and ADP’s deep expertise with workforce data. Initially, this data will be available through the Snowflake Data Marketplace and directly from ICE Data Services.

The U.S. municipal bond market is broad with approximately one million individual bonds from 60 thousand issuers. While there are some well-known larger issuers, such as state or city metropolitan authorities, most of those one million bonds are issued by smaller issuers such as local school districts or hospitals. Because of this, the available data for a majority of issuers can be scarce and is frequently historically derived and dated.

ICE is a market leader in providing risk management tools, including analytics, pricing, reference data, indices and execution services for the municipal bond market. This new offering combines ICE Data Services’ significant expertise in municipal bond pricing and reference data with ADP’s aggregated, anonymized and timely HR and compensation data. This synergy will create tools and analytics designed to help decisionmakers evaluate municipal bond issuers throughout the U.S.

“Due to varying factors including the vast number of issuers, investors have traditionally struggled with transparency and data consistency in the municipal bond markets,” said Lynn Martin, President of Fixed Income and Data Services at ICE. “By creating analytics utilizing ADP’s data and combining with ICE’s market leading pricing and reference data, we’re able to provide our clients with more transparency into the tax base and revenues that support municipalities across the country, giving a richer understanding of an issuer’s creditworthiness.”

The new market data offering via ICE Data Services links ADP’s deep, timely insights around demographics, geographic zones and compensation to specific bond issuers that service debt. This provides more visibility into factors that may impact the creditworthiness of municipal bonds, including current financial health, potential future revenue streams, migration trends and macroeconomic conditions for a region.

“The depth and breadth of ADP’s unmatched workforce dataset, from geographic insights into employment to payroll demographic trends over time, will enable ICE to provide greater transparency in this space,” said Jack Berkowitz, SVP of Product Development at ADP. “We continually look to leverage our data in a variety of use cases across industries to help uncover gaps and unlock opportunity, and we are delighted to partner with ICE in bringing to market this truly unique product.”