On Wednesday, the IntercontinentalExchange Group?(NYSE:ICE) announced?management appointments and the Board of Directors for its?Singapore-based exchange and clearing house, subject to regulatory approval.
In addition, ICE also revealed that the?Singapore Mercantile Exchange?and?Singapore Mercantile Exchange Clearing Corporation?will be renamed ICE Futures?Singapore?and ICE Clear Singapore in the coming week, according to a press release.
As for management appointments, ICE Futures Singapore and ICE Clear Singapore will be headed by Lucas Schmeddes as the President and Chief Operating Officer. Schmeddes was previously Chief Operating Officer of ICE Endex in?the Netherlands.?Jennifer Ilkiw?will be Vice President, ICE, for the?Asia Pacific?region.
The following directors will serve on the boards of ICE Futures?Singapore?and ICE Clear Singapore:?Jeffrey C. Sprecher, Chairman and CEO, ICE;?David S. Goone, Chief Strategy Officer, ICE;?Vijay Iyengar, Founder and Managing Director of?Agrocorp International Pte Ltd;?Tan Soo?Nan, CEO,?Singapore Pools (Private) Limited?and?Ang Swee Tian, former President of theSingapore Exchange Ltd.
In this year’s second half, the exchange and clearing house are expected to transition to the ICE trading and clearing platforms and currently a business transition period is in place. The SMX market has been closed as ICE implements market and technology changes while consulting with market participants, clearing members and regulators.
Along with ICE’s announcement, the Financial Times wrote a piece this week by Jeremy Grant, “ICE in Asia: Jeff Sprecher in his own words,” discussing its move into Singapore.?
Here’s a few of the questions and answers:
FT: What made you decide to build market infrastructure in Asia?
JS: “I was watching the Emir [European Market Structure Regulation] legislation make its way through the UK and then the discussions around Mifid II and ? we were trying to shape those as best we could. And there was this G20 commitment that was made a while back that regulators were going to try to avoid creating any regulatory arbitrage. But it became very clear to me that the Emir and Mifid II regulations were going to be significantly different than Dodd-Frank, at least in the first version. And we got this sense at ICE that our customers were going to be facing a ?Balkanisation? of trading. In other words, it was going to be hard to sit in any one location and trade around the world. The second data point was when MF Global collapsed.”
FT: Why is it the preferred outpost?
JS: “Well, we did a study. It was preferred because in 2000 when we started ICE a lot of our customers were here, a lot of the oil guys were here. And I think those were because of tax incentives that had long been put in place by the Singapore government. So we came here because our customers were here. But a few years ago we decided to do a study, which is a bit atypical for our company because we?re entrepreneurial. We had different opinions on where we should be, and it was really the influence of China. And the question we were asking ourselves was, in the future, will Singapore still be the hub for trading or is it going to naturally move to Hong Kong?”
?To read more of the interview, please click here.?