After almost four years of restoring a measure of integrity to the London interbank offered rate, Intercontinental Exchange’s Finbarr Hutcheson has earned the right to leave it behind. Whether the benchmark itself will survive long after the impending exit of the chief executive of ICE Benchmark Administration remains a thorny question.

Libor  has long been ubiquitous, though not for the same reasons it is today. The benchmark is often called the world’s most important number, and underpins hundreds of trillions of dollars of financial instruments around the world, from student loans to mortgages and over-the-counter derivatives.