IAP.L Regulatory News (IAP)

ICAP plc Trading Statement

London - 24 March 2010. ICAP plc (IAP.L), the world's premier interdealer broker, is making this trading statement in relation to ICAP's financial year ending 31 March 2010 and, in particular, its final quarter from 1 January 2010 to 31 March 2010. ICAP expects to announce its preliminary results for the year ending 31 March 2010 on 19 May 2010.

Commenting on ICAP's fourth quarter and outlook, Michael Spencer, Group Chief Executive Officer of ICAP, said "Overall our business is in good shape and our revenue for the second half of the year is expected to be in line with the first half. We continue to benefit from scale and diversity and believe that ICAP's share of the inter-dealer broking markets revenue1 increased in 2009 compared with the previous year, although overall industry revenue declined."

"We have successfully expanded and diversified our business through a series of significant investments during the past ten years, and whilst our expansion into full service agency cash equities in Europe and Asia failed to match up to our expectations we have taken decisive action to stem the losses from that venture. We are now concentrating our efforts on a number of opportunities, in both broking and post trade risk services, where we believe we can build and grow profitable businesses."

"The debate about the future of the financial markets, especially OTC derivatives, continues undiminished. Discussions between legislators, regulators and market participants, are rightly aimed at strengthening financial regulation and market infrastructure. Although there are often multiple, overlapping and occasionally inconsistent demands, there are a number of areas of broad agreement. These include proposals for more transparency for regulators and international adoption of the new Basel 3 proposals for banks' capital requirements."

"There is no doubt that our markets will change and we believe that we are well prepared to take advantage of that change. We expect our electronic broking business will be a substantial beneficiary of a demand for more transparent markets. In addition, the development of a global trade repository for OTC interest rate derivatives by TriOptima will address the needs of regulators for information about counterparty exposures and meet demands for transparency of aggregated post trade data."

"The Group continues to anticipate that profit before tax, amortisation and impairment of intangibles arising on consolidation and exceptional items for the financial year ending 31 March 2010 will be in the range £295 million to £315 million2."

Highlights of the quarter to date

Overall, taking the Group's core voice broking business, electronic broking and post trade risk services together, profit margins are expected to have been maintained or slightly improved in the second half of the financial year.

·; Voice broking - in the core voice broking businesses the interest rate derivatives markets have been active on both sides of the Atlantic. The commodities markets have, overall, maintained the steady growth this quarter as we have seen throughout the year. In the credit markets, cash continued to be more active than derivatives. Overall, the emerging markets in the Americas, Asia and Europe had an active end to the financial year.

·; Our investment in the new voice broking businesses had mixed performances as reports of our strategic review of our full service cash equities businesses inevitably affected revenue in that business. Although our shipping business continues to make small losses we believe that it is well positioned for a turn in the shipping cycle. Our Brazilian businesses are continuing to grow revenue and increase market share and we expect them overall to reach breakeven within the next financial year. The equity derivatives businesses maintained market share in more difficult markets and the LME business continued to show steady growth.

·; Electronic broking - average daily volumes on our electronic broking platforms, BrokerTec and EBS, performed well, with January and February 2010 volumes increasing by 23% on the previous year. Total average daily volumes in fixed income products on the BrokerTec platform (US Treasury products, US repo and EU repo) were $525bn, an increase of 31% on January and February 2009. Average daily volumes in spot foreign exchange on the EBS platform were $156bn single count during January and February 2010.

·; Post Trade Risk services - ICAP's Post trade risk and information businesses continue to perform strongly. The Information business has seen a healthy improvement this year. Traiana's Harmony Message Centre FX processing service handled an average of 354,000 tickets per day in January and February 2010, compared to 167,000 tickets per day in the corresponding months a year ago. ReMatch, our new multi-lateral market risk matching service for Credit markets, has made a good start. Reset has seen slower markets of late but the business and its prospects are sound. The acquisition of the remaining 61.78% of stock in TriOptima is expected to complete today. TriOptima operates a portfolio reconciliation service that currently handles 5.8 million trades representing over 75% of all non-cleared OTC derivative transactions globally. triReduce, the portfolio compression service serves over 150 bank and non-bank subscribers worldwide and in 2009 eliminated $40.3 trillion of outstanding derivatives contracts.

1 Excludes cash equities and post trade services

2 Includes the operating losses of approximately £25 million for the discontinued agency cash equities businesses

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A conference call for analysts and investors will be held at 09:00 GMT on Wednesday 24 March 2010 to discuss this statement. For dial in details please contact Maitland on +44 (0) 20 7379 5151.

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About ICAP

ICAP is the world's premier interdealer broker and supplier of post trade risk services. The Group is active in the wholesale markets in interest rates, credit, commodities, foreign exchange and equity derivatives. ICAP plc was added to the FTSE 100 Index on 30 June 2006. For more information go to www.icap.com.