Capitalizing on its growing capabilities in mortgage tech, the company behind the New York Stock Exchange is making it easier to track daily fluctuations in mortgage rates and hone in on particular market segments with a new suite of residential mortgage rate indices.
Intercontinental Exchange Inc. (ICE) is pulling average interest rates and other statistics from anonymized loan applications that go through the company’s ICE Mortgage Technology platform, which processes about half of all U.S. mortgages.
Lynn Martin
“Observable loan applications provide a wealth of information and can be important benchmarks for loan originators, banks and participants in the mortgage-backed security market,” said ICE executive Lynn Martin, in a statement. “By using a data-driven approach and leveraging the unique strengths of ICE’s mortgage technology and data services teams, we’re bringing a tremendous amount of new data to the market that can offer customers both strategic intelligence and help them manage risk.”
Available to registered users of the ICE Index Platform, the ICE U.S. Residential Mortgage Rate Lock Index Series includes dozens of subindices that allow users to segment the broader composite index by selecting for one or more attributes, including:
- Loan purpose (purchase, rate-and-term refinance, cash-out refinance)
- Term (10-, 15, 20, or 30-year loan)
- Type (conventional, FHA, VA, USDA)
- Status (conforming, jumbo)
- Credit score band
- Loan-to-value ratio (less than or equal to 80 percent, or greater than 80 percent)
Creating the rate indices is another way for Intercontinental Exchange to make the most of its growing mortgage technology segment, which according to the company’s most recent quarterly report to investors, generated $695 million in revenue in the first half of 2021, up from $102 million during the same period 2020.
That’s largely due to ICE’s $11.4 billion acquisition of Pleasanton, California-based mortgage technology developer Ellie Mae in September, 2020. Ellie Mae, along with previous ICE acquisitions MERS and Simplifile, are now known collectively as ICE Mortgage Technology.
But ICE — originally founded 20 years ago as an energy marketplace — continues to generate most of its revenue as an operator of 12 regulated exchanges around the world, including the New York Stock Exchange.
ICE rival Black Knight made its competing of Optimal Blue Mortgage Market Indices (OBMMI) available on Nasdaq’s Global Index Data Service (GIDS) platform in July 2020.
Unlike the ICE indices, the OBMMI primary mortgage indices are accessible to the public on the Optimal Blue website, and can also be embedded in websites or newsletters using a personalized widget.