Intercontinental Exchange has agreed to buy bond-trading platform MarketAxess for $5.7 billion, paying $167 a share. The deal deepens ICE's push into electronic fixed-income trading and builds on a partnership between the two firms that dates to 2024.
Intercontinental Exchange, the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange, has agreed to buy MarketAxess for $5.7 billion, the companies said Thursday. ICE will pay $167 per share. That price is a 33% premium to MarketAxess's closing price on Wednesday.
MarketAxess is one of the world's top electronic bond-trading platforms, serving more than 2,000 customers who trade and analyze corporate and government debt data. The company, listed on Nasdaq under the ticker MKTX, has been one of the biggest beneficiaries of the shift from phone-based dealing desks to electronic platforms over the past decade. Bringing that network under ICE would let the exchange group consolidate bond trading on one large venue.
ICE's largest deal since Black Knight
The purchase ranks among ICE's biggest transactions in recent years. The company paid $11.9 billion for mortgage software firm Black Knight in 2023. It entered bond-market infrastructure earlier, when it bought TMC Bonds for $685 million in 2018, a deal that gave it a meaningful position in electronic credit and rates trading.
ICE and MarketAxess were already working together before the acquisition. In August 2024, the two firms announced a liquidity network integration linking ICE Bonds and MarketAxess platforms for institutional traders. MarketAxess separately took majority control of RFQ-hub Holdings in May 2025, adding to its request-for-quote trading capabilities. That earlier partnership could smooth the integration, though bond-market participants tend to be conservative about switching platforms, Crypto Briefing reported.
ICE's chief describes the goal
According to the Financial Times: "the fixed-income ecosystem that investors have always deserved", said Jeff Sprecher, ICE's chief executive, who described a system meant to be transparent, efficient and accessible to all.
MarketAxess has continued to operate independently and is expected to report Q2 2026 earnings in August. Bloomberg and Tradeweb, among other electronic trading venues, compete in the same market ICE is now expanding into.
Sources: Financial Times, Crypto Briefing
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