Last year was a record year for trading volume for corporate bonds, municipal bonds and agencies trading on ICE Bonds, according to the Intercontinental Exchange.
Specifically, trading on ICE Bonds reached record notional volume of $212 billion for corporate bonds in 2024, up 40 percent from 2023. Also, municipal bond trading reached record notional volume of $178 billion in 2024, up 5 percent from the previous year. Meanwhile, agencies, or bonds issued by government-sponsored enterprises or federal agencies, had record notional trading volume of $28 billion in 2024, up 20 percent year over year.
ICE Bonds attributes its growth in corporate bond volumes to customer adoption of its enhanced sweeps session-based protocol called Risk Matching Auction (RMA). In the fourth quarter of 2024, RMA volumes increased by 100 percent from the prior quarter. Further, they were up over four-fold since the fourth quarter of 2023. ICE Bonds conducts multiple RMA sessions each week, with 50 registered firms and over 400 users participating.
“The volume growth we are experiencing is primarily driven by increased adoption of our trading protocols by a combination of retail-oriented brokerage firms and institutional investors,” Peter Borstelmann, president of ICE Bonds, said. “Over the past year, we’ve made significant progress in expanding our customer network, expanding our execution protocols and workflows, and introducing our unique liquidity to a more diverse set of market participants, which is resulting in record transactional activity.”
The company also cited the expansion of its global liquidity network of traders and portfolio managers as a reason for the surge in trading.
ICE Bonds offers deep liquidity pools that support multiple trading protocols including click-to-trade, sweeps, auctions, and RFQ.