when it was founded the company s primary focus was on energy products specifically crude and refined oil natural gas power and emissions 5 through various acquisitions the company s activities broadened to include other commodities such as sugar cotton and coffee in addition to foreign cash exchanges and equity index futures 6
in response to the 2007 08 financial crisis sprecher formed ice clear credit which would serve as a clearing house for credit default swaps over the counter otc derivatives and provide crucial risk management services for the market in march 2009 ice clear credit was created and approved by the federal reserve as a bank and two years later was designated as a clearing house and regulated by the cftc and sec 7 ice was the first to offer clearing services in the otc energy and credit derivatives markets 8 according to ice s q1 2022 report ice had cleared more than 16 4 trillion in credit default swaps up yoy by 9 7 9since its founding in 2000 ice s company growth has primarily been achieved through the acquisition of other exchanges it s first acquisition was the international petroleum exchange ipe now ice futures europe in 2001 5 in the following decade the company expanded by acquiring the new york board of trade nybot in 2005 winnipeg commodity exchange which is now ice futures canada in 2007 creditex group in 2008 and climate exchange in 2010 10 several more acquisitions occurred the next ten years nyse euronext in 2013 interactive data corporation idc in 2015 standard poor s securities evaluations inc in 2016 virtu bondpoint in 2017 chicago stock exchange chx in 2018 and simplifile lc in 2019 1112 ice s most recent expansion has continued with the acquisitions of ellie mae in 2020 and black knight in 2022 1314in june 2016 ice launched a new suite of data services and software called ice data services the proprietary real time data valuations analytics reference data evaluated pricing and connectivity solutions employed by ice data services are used by nyse superderivatives interactive data idc and other ice customers including financial institutions asset managers and individual investors ice data services also provides its customers with unique data from global exchanges and fixed income markets 15according the 2021 fia report ice is the fourth largest exchange group in the world behind cme group brazil s b3 and the national stock exchange of india ranked at the top spot 16 as of july 2022 the company has a market capitalization of 53 88 billion 17