Intercontinental Exchange – the US trading venues group collectively known as ICE – has launched a credit default swap (CDS) clearing service for two indices in the Asia Pacific region.
ICE’s CDS clearing houses will now clear credit default swaps for the iTraxx Australia and iTraxx Asia ex-Japan Investment Grade indices.
The company will also clear six additional sovereign names: Australia, China, Indonesia, Korea, Malaysia and the Philippines.
The launch will take the number of sovereign names cleared by ICE Clear Credit to 27 globally while ICE Clear Europe clears seven sovereign CDS names in Europe.
Stan Ivanov, president of ICE Clear Credit, said in a statement that the expansion to the company’s services represents a ‘truly global’ suite of products.
In the statement to market, ICE said that transactions cleared in the first two months of this year had surpassed those cleared in total for all of 2015.
ICE launched its CDS clearing houses in 2009. Its credit CDS clearing house businesses clear more than 500 single name and index CDS instruments based on corporate and sovereign debt.
In March, ICE said it was considering launching a bid for the London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG).
However, Deutsche Boerse and the LSEG officially agreed on an all-share ‘merger of equals’.