Market Structure Matters
Interview with Amanda Hindlian, President, ICE Fixed Income & Data Services
Amanda Hindlian, President, Fixed Income & Data Services, Intercontinental Exchange Inc. (ICE), keeps finding herself “in spots where the markets are definitely moving.”
In 2021, after a long stint at Goldman Sachs, where she was Partner, President of the firm’s think tank and COO of Global Investment Research, she stepped into the IPO boom when she joined the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) as its Global Head of Capital Markets.
And last year, when the return of yield and market volatility drove a boom in fixed-income trading, she was in the thick of it again, managing ICE’s global fixed income and data business.
“Last year was impressive in terms of the total number of rate hikes, the cadence between them, and importantly, the degree of the hikes—and the volatility that came on the back of those movements,” she says in a conversation held at the NYSE with Kevin McPartland, Head of Market Structure & Technology Research, Coalition Greenwich.
She believes ICE’s investments helped their fixed-income trading revenues double in 2022. That included leveraging ICE’s core strengths in municipal bonds to drive retail participation in that segment.
“We saw tremendous activity in ICE’s municipal bond market. We’ve essentially made our trading platforms technologically better and more able to respond to different types of queries, and we offer a wide variety of types of execution as well,” says Amanda Hindlian. “Certainly, market volatility benefited us, but we had done a lot of work behind the scenes too.”
She expects markets to be less volatile this year. “I still feel that our trading platforms will continue to perform very well, even though I expect volatility on the fixed-income side to come down over the course of the year,” she states.
Meanwhile, ICE has expanded its data expertise into the sustainable finance and environmental, social and governance (ESG) space. For instance, it has built a “differentiated technology” product that does highly detailed geospatial mapping down to an individual street address in the U.S. currently, thereby identifying the different risks impacting an individual property and how they could potentially affect its value.
“That’s relevant for a municipality that’s thinking about new issuance, and it’s relevant for muni buyers. But it is also relevant to insurance and real estate companies. As a homeowner, too, I would be interested if somebody could tell me with great efficiency and accuracy that the probability that my property will be under sea level in the next 10 years is high,” she explains.
ICE intends to expand the product globally this year—first in Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) and then in other parts of the world. “We also have other forms of sustainable finance data, whether it is at the reference-data level for individual securities or it’s climate transition risk. We are looking at a lot of different areas there, and certainly it’s something that our clients talk to us about regularly,” adds Amanda Hindlian.
The firm’s also leveraging artificial intelligence (AI), given that “every element” of its business is “heavily reliant on evolution in technology.”
“Much of our evaluated pricing has an AI layer that sits over it. We still keep people in the process the same way that they’re still involved in the trading process, because the human brain does matter. Nevertheless, we work hard to understand all the emerging technologies that may impact any part of our businesses,” she points out.
As for the fixed-income markets in 2023, Amanda Hindlian says, “I am sure the Federal Reserve will have to hike rates in the coming year, but I do think that the pace will be more moderate and that the actions that it is taking are starting to make their way through the economy. So, I feel optimistic about the year. And I feel optimistic about our business."