Intercontinental Exchange (ICE)

Intercontinental Exchange, Inc. (ICE) is an American company that owns and operates financial exchanges, clearing houses and data services. Its best-known business is the New York Stock Exchange, which it acquired in 2013. ICE also runs major futures markets for energy, agricultural commodities and interest rates, including the benchmark Brent crude oil futures contract, and provides price data, indexes and technology for the US mortgage industry.

Founded in 2000 in Atlanta, Georgia, ICE grew from an electronic platform for trading energy contracts into one of the largest exchange groups in the world. It is listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker ICE. Its main rivals include CME Group, parent of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, and Nasdaq. ICE has also been involved in crypto through founding the digital asset company Bakkt.

ICE is a company that runs marketplaces where other people trade. On its stock exchange, investors buy and sell company shares. On its futures exchanges, oil producers, airlines, farmers and banks agree prices for oil, gas, coffee, sugar and interest rates months or years ahead. ICE earns fees from each trade and from guaranteeing that deals are honoured.

It also sells information. Banks and fund managers pay for ICE's price feeds and indexes, and mortgage lenders use its software to process home loans. In that sense, ICE is less like a single market and more like a company that builds and maintains the plumbing behind many markets.

Jeffrey Sprecher founded ICE in 2000 with backing from banks and energy firms to create an electronic, over-the-counter marketplace for energy trading as an alternative to phone-based dealing. In 2001 it bought the International Petroleum Exchange in London, gaining the Brent futures contract, and in 2005 it listed its own shares. It bought the New York Board of Trade in 2007, adding contracts on coffee, cocoa, sugar and cotton, and expanded into clearing for credit default swaps after the 2008 crisis.

In 2013 ICE completed its acquisition of NYSE Euronext, owner of the New York Stock Exchange. It spun off the European exchange business, Euronext, in 2014, while keeping NYSE and the London-based futures exchange that had been part of the group. The following years brought major data and technology purchases, and from 2020 a series of acquisitions in mortgage technology, including the loan software maker Ellie Mae and, in 2023, the mortgage data company Black Knight.

• Exchanges. ICE runs the stock exchange NYSE and its sister markets, as well as futures and options exchanges in the United States, Europe and elsewhere, covering energy, commodities, interest rates and equity indexes.
• Clearing. Its clearing houses act as central counterparties, standing between buyers and sellers and holding margin to guarantee trades.
• Fixed income and data services. ICE supplies bond pricing, reference data and indexes widely used by asset managers, and its benchmark administration unit took over responsibility for LIBOR in 2014, during reforms that followed the rate-rigging scandals.
• Mortgage technology. Software and data used to originate, process and service home loans in the United States.

ICE announced Bakkt in 2018 as a regulated platform for digital assets. In 2019 Bakkt launched physically delivered bitcoin futures contracts through ICE's US futures exchange and clearing house, an early attempt by a major exchange group to offer crypto products with traditional safeguards. Bakkt became a separate public company in 2021, and ICE's role in it later declined. In October 2025, ICE announced a large strategic investment in the prediction market platform Polymarket, linking the exchange group to event-based trading on blockchain rails.

ICE's US exchanges and clearing houses are regulated by the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, and its European operations by authorities in the United Kingdom and the European Union. Clearing houses of its size are treated as systemically important, which brings strict rules on capital, margin and default management.

As one of a small number of global exchange operators, ICE has faced scrutiny over market concentration, the cost of market data and the fees charged for access to exchange connections. Its mortgage technology acquisitions drew antitrust review, and it agreed to sell certain businesses as a condition of the Black Knight deal. Supporters argue that its scale brings efficient, well-capitalized markets; critics say it gives a few firms too much control over essential infrastructure.

• Intercontinental Exchange