B3 and Leto invest $7.19M in private-credit data firm Idex
What's the deal? B3, Brazil's main exchange, and Leto Asset Management are investing roughly US$10.2M in Idex Analytics, a firm specialising in fixed-income indices, data, and pricing. The deal gives B3 up to 40% of the company, with an option to buy the rest from 2031.
What does Idex do? It owns the Idex-DI and Idex-Infra, benchmark indicators in Brazil's private-credit market that track the most actively traded secondary-market paper. It will stay independent under current management, and the agreement is non-exclusive.
Why now? Brazil's private-credit market has grown sharply over the past five years, but most trading still happens by phone or chat before being recorded on B3's platform, leaving prices opaque. Idex chief executive officer Willian May said a study found "only 30% of the market has transparent pricing," with the rest held back by low liquidity.
What's the endgame? B3 wants to deepen its role in data and analytics for fixed income and private credit, including new indices and a data platform built with Market Data B3. It also sees room for fixed-income ETFs: "we saw fixed-income ETF volume grow and it will keep growing," said André Veiga Milanez, B3's chief financial officer.
What could go wrong? The deal still needs clearance from antitrust regulator Cade and notification to securities regulator CVM. The exchange also acknowledges resistance to electronic trading in the market it hopes to modernise.
The signal: FIDCs and securitisation debentures raised US$19.3B in the first half of 2026, up sharply year on year, yet the market still struggles with transparency and pricing. The investment is modest against that scale, but it hands B3 a foothold in established benchmarks as it bets on making an opaque market more measurable and tradable.
Read more: valor.globo.com
Image credit: Generated with Gemini
