Intercontinental Exchange announced that it has acquired the American Financial Exchange (AFX), an electronic exchange for direct lending and borrowing for American banks and financial institutions. And ICE has acquired 100% of AFX from 7RIDGE. This acquisition is not expected to have a material impact on ICE’s 2025 financial results or ICE’s deleveraging or capital return plans.
ICE built a unified network of mortgage assets for managing the U.S. mortgage life cycle spanning a life-of-loan offering from consumer acquisition to the secondary capital markets. And this network was created to deliver ICE’s mission to lower mortgage costs for lenders and borrowers through digitizing the mortgage workflow ecosystem.
AFX also operates the credit-sensitive American Interbank Offered Rate (AMERIBOR). And AMERIBOR is set daily based on unsecured interbank loans executed on the AFX platform through a network of over 1,000 American banks and financial institutions, producing an interest rate which reflects banks’ actual unsecured borrowing costs.
Along with operating deeply liquid interest rate futures and options markets, ICE is a leading provider of indices, offering over 5,000 global equity, fixed income, commodity and foreign exchange indices to support benchmarking and performance measurement by investors. And as of September 2024, ICE accounted for approximately $670 billion in AUM across passively managed products and approximately $2 trillion in AUM across active and passive strategies combined.
KEY QUOTE:
“AFX becoming part of ICE marks an extraordinary opportunity for AFX and we are confident that ICE’s leadership will amplify AFX’s success and its purpose to serve regional and local American banks by creating a transparent, robust and efficient interbank lending ecosystem.”
– Carsten Kengeter, CEO at 7RIDGE
“Complementing our leading global index business and our best-in-class mortgage technology network, AFX is a natural fit to ICE. AFX’s focus on regional, midsize, community and minority-owned banks covers many of the same customers ICE serves through our mortgage technology network. We look forward to continuing to serve this important market, delivering innovation and new product development made possible through the addition of AFX to our portfolio.”
– Christopher Edmonds, President of ICE Fixed Income and Data Services
