All right. Well, thanks everybody for joining us for our next session. It's my pleasure to welcome Jeff Sprecher, Chair and CEO of Intercontinental Exchange. Over the years, ICE evolved from an energy platform into a network of trading data and mortgage solutions. Most recently, of course, ICE closed on the Black Knight acquisition, further solidifying its footprint in the mortgage space. With over half of its total revenues coming from recurring income, ICE remains focused on double-digit earnings growth over time. Now, this is our twelfth Fireside Chat. I actually had to go back and check how many times we've done this. So Jeff's been a long supporter of the conference, so really appreciate you being here, and looking forward to this chat, as always. Also suggests you're a survivor in investment banking. Let's not, let's not go there. Yeah. I started the company, so I mean, I can justify- Yeah -being there. Well, if you, if you really want to go there, my first question is actually about kind of how ICE has evolved. And I- Right ... as I was writing these questions, I remember the first time we did this, ICE was an energy platform. Yes. It was also December, and then a couple of weeks later, I was grabbing a cocktail with a, with a client friend of mine, when The Wall Street Journal broke the news that ICE is buying New York Stock Exchange. And we kind of looked at each other, put the drink down- Yeah or maybe finished it really quickly, and, like, went back to the office. Yeah. You know, when you look at it today, ICE is really three very distinct businesses. They're connected by network, but you guys are an exchange, you guys are a data provider, and you guys are now a mortgage business. As investors look out for the next sort of 3-5 years, should the market expect ICE to sort of drive deeper into the existing verticals, or do you see room for further sort of horizontal expansion? Yeah. First of all, thanks for having me for the, what, my twelfth year? Yeah. 12th year. And I hope I can be here for 13. Really, we have a very simple business, but it's made complicated by the way we financially report because we have segments, as you know, since you follow and model them. But we really just have digital businesses that match buyers and sellers, and then we provide a lot of information, either about the transactions, to make them transparent or information that help people enter into the transactions. And to answer your question, these networks that we have just keep growing. And I think of it just like television network, which is, we either wanna do things that will make the network grow, or we wanna find programming that we can put on the existing network, that if it's on our network, it will grow. And so there's sort of two levers there. We've been fortunate to be doing this in a massive analog-to-digital conversion world, where both have been growing, both our programming and what we offer across our networks have been growing, and just the size and scale of the networks have been growing. We don't talk about ourselves as being, you know, a cloud provider, but really that's what that is. We have our own proprietary cloud. We're cloud agnostic, so Goldman Sachs can come and do business with us on any one of the cloud providers, 'cause they're all hooked to us, but we also have our own cloud that we can control and manage the costs in. That's really, we call it a network, and then we probably should have renamed it a cloud. We'd probably trade at a higher multiple. But, I just see that we'll keep pushing those two envelopes: more network, more content on the network. Got it. All right. Well, let's talk about some of the content, I guess. Yeah ... on the network. Let's, let's start with the mortgage business. So BKI, Black Knight, you recently closed the deal. Let's talk a little bit about how the integration is coming together. As you now own the business, what are you learning about the business? Any more attractive areas or revenue synergies that you guys are discovering? First of all, the integration has gone fast and well, which is helpful. We've done a number of acquisitions, so we know what to do. The most important thing for us is to get our culture into that company quickly, and make any staffing changes quickly. Getting close to 100 of my colleagues have moved to Jacksonville, Florida, already in the last... You know, we've owned the company maybe a little more than 60 days. It helps that it's Florida. You know, it's not Miami, but it is, it is Florida. And so we've had a lot of people raise their hands and gone in there, so we've been able to quickly get cross-pollination. The other thing that's kind of surprising, pleasantly surprising for us, is they, they ran their business in a number of verticals. We're a much flatter organization, and so by taking out some of the, the pieces in the middle, we've, we've been able to get that existing team working together better. We're, we're very focused on the data that they have. You know, we're in a artificial intelligence data, you know, revolution going on right now, and so we were very, very interested in figuring out what data is inside a mortgage application and servicing, and what housing information is in there, and we've been able to get the teams working on that very, very quickly. So that's been helpful. Lastly, we bought a company called Ellie Mae, which had loan origination software, and then we bought Black Knight, which has servicing, in other words, calculate your payments and property taxes and what have you, and we're putting those end-to-end. Both those were sort of legacy businesses, high market share, legacy businesses that were largely green screen, COBOL, on-premises, installed, you know, bank systems... and we've been moving them into our cloud. We were fortunate to find that Black Knight had already been thinking about that, and so there were already a lot of tools in there that we were able to grab quickly, and now we're leaning into to, to-- You know, what we're going to end up doing is putting those systems in our data center. The COBOL, you know, green screen stuff will go in our data center, and it will be behind our cloud, and then people will be attaching to it with a lightweight app. Which is how people want to do business today, much more consumer-centric, easy to train people, easy to deploy. So we've been pleasantly surprised that the architecture and the pieces that are in there is going to allow us to do that much faster than we had anticipated. Got it. And- So moving along a little faster- Yeah ...... I guess, is the- Yeah Got it. Let's talk about some of the organic growth wins that you've had recently, particularly on the origination side. There's a couple of big ones that you've announced, one being JPMorgan selecting Encompass for their loan origination system, and then you had M&T and Fifth Third further expanding their relationship with ICE Mortgage. Can you frame what these mean for revenues in that business? And then more importantly, how does sales pipelines are forming with respect to other larger bank deals? Yes. Let me start with the second one first, because it's not intuitive that we are going to have our best year ever in selling loan origination software. I mean, most people think we're in a mortgage recession because volumes are down. But in terms of people that are acquiring software, they're using this business cycle to replace legacy systems. And we're having our—we probably will have our second-best year against 2017 in selling servicing systems. So you see the industry... It's indicative, I think, the first part of your question, which is, a lot of large lenders that hadn't embraced the cloud, had had on-premises software, legacy stuff, have bought into the vision that we have, which is an end-to-end platform, life-of-loan platform, customer-for-life platform, so that the lender can stay attached to the consumer all through the home buying and payment process. They're buying into that. And so we've been very vocal about announcing some of these big lenders that have come onto our platform, really as a way of signaling to the other big lenders that haven't come on our platform, like, "You're falling behind your peer group. And it's, it's going well. In terms of the way you, Alex, think about my company and many, many of you in the audience, it'll take some-- we won't be able to recognize that, that as revenue for a while until we actually implement. And that means getting these big lenders off of their, legacy stuff, getting their people trained, getting their files moved over, and what have you. So, so, you know, as a manager, it bodes well for the comp- for me, it bodes well for the company in future years because we've really locked in a, a heck of a, you know, earnings pipeline. Yeah. Let's think about maybe slightly longer-term revenue trajectory- ... for the business. After you guys acquired Black Knight, you still talked about kind of a high single digit revenue growth for the mortgage business combined- Yeah ... over time. Let's unpack that a little bit. What is the growth algorithm to get you to that high single digit? I know 2024 is likely to be below that, and a lot of that is going to be functional- Yeah ... about the environment. So, you know, if the environment is better, obviously, you'll be above that, probably low single digit or mid-single digit you talked about. Yeah. But longer term, what are the key pieces to get you to that high single digit revenue? So we have acquired. I've done five or six acquisitions in the mortgage space that put everything end to end, and what that really is, is now an end-to-end network. And so the lenders that are on that network, when they're talking to third-party vendors who provide things like title insurance or flood report or, you know, you name it, anything that goes into an underwriting decision on a mortgage, the wholesale lenders, all kinds of people, they say, "Just come onto that network. You don't have to... Well, I'm not going to build a separate pipe to you. I'm not going to put my firewall guys in, you know, trying to figure out how to get you into my network. Just get on the ICE network, and you can deliver it." And when—and so we have, I think, 1,400 third parties that are doing business across our network because we get into the firewall. That ICE cloud has already inside Goldman Sachs, and your people know how to manage that with us. When we do that, we usually charge a commission or a piece of the compensation of the third party using our network. So it turns out that that part of our business will be very transaction-oriented. It will be very much levered one-to-one with the growth in refinancing and new loans. And then the bulk of the business, the network itself and all the software that we have, we are moving very quickly from what was a legacy business that was paper-based business, where everything was transaction priced, to subscription. We want to run our part of the business as being a growing, compounding subscription base, and we've done it like a mobile phone plan, where you buy a tier of minutes, and if you go above that tier, then we charge you by the minute. And so interesting for us is that this year, we've disclosed that 60% of the people that are coming up for renewal have gone to a higher tier, which is not, again, not intuitive. 40% have stayed the same or gone to a lower tier. For the ones that have gone to a lower tier, to the extent that they do more business, then they break through the minute ceiling, and that will raise our per transaction charge. So long-winded way of saying we'd like to sort of be a company that has this growing compounding revenue, has very little downside risk to investors and us as managers, and then—but a lot of upside when transactions are rocking and rolling. It's—You know, we get all these estimates about housing and look at them, and they're—none of them are worth the paper they're written on. It's just amazing how poorly people forecast consumer behavior in housing. But the one thing I know, and partly why we've leaned into this area, is there is this massive demographic of millennials that are in their prime earning. These were all the people that 10 years ago we said were never gonna leave their parents' basement, they were never gonna buy a car, they were only gonna Uber, and all this stuff. These people are now, you know, in their 30s. They're married, they have kids. They don't wanna live in the mom and dad's basement. The mom and dad want to give them the down payment, so that they can get the grandkids out of the house. And I don't know when it hits. There's obviously we had COVID, supply chain issues- Yeah ... real issues in housing, housing policy, higher interest rates, but you can't deny that big demographic, and at some point, that group is gonna buy more houses. Yeah. Another aspect of the deal or of this business we've talked about in the past is some of the interesting adjacencies- Yes ... that could come out. One of them—the two that really always stood out to me is, one is kind of modernizing mortgage trading- Yes ... living capital markets, and you guys know quite a bit about trading. Yes. The second one being the consumer data that comes off on the back of this. Yeah. I know it's not next year, that and maybe not the year after either, but as you said, think about new businesses that could come out for ICE on the back of this, either one of those avenues. What does that look like? It's both. We have teams working on both. You know what's amazing- It is a 2024, isn't it? Well, I mean, you know, these- Yeah ... these AI models now, we have a bunch of them running internally, and we're doing all kinds of things with them and testing them and what have you. It's amazing how quickly the... I mean, you read about it, but we see it internally. Like, our people show up, and they say, "Hey, look at this thing we just did last week." And you're like, "Oh, my gosh!" You know? On the consumer side, there's no reason the velocity of mortgages should go up. There's no if we can underwrite you in real time, if we have a digital file and your lender knows who you are, and we know who you are, and you're current on your house, we do all the house valuations. We provide the kind of data- ... that goes to Zillow and what have you. We have the best information that you can have. If mortgages tick down by 25 basis points, why can't you click a button and refi? You know, the lender takes some fees, you refi, you go down. On a declining, right now, you know, right now, the average consumer has to say, "I wonder what my house is worth, and how much do I have left on my mortgage, and where are interest rates today? And I better go Google something and see. And then I found a website that has a calculator." And, you know- Yeah ... I mean, what if we just, in real time, said, "You can save, hey, you know, lender, consumer, you can, you can save money," boom, boom, boom? And so I think it will fundamentally change the capital markets, because what goes into MBS will have duration, you know, in one environment that's different than another environment. So it's gonna need to be hedged completely different. First of all, the whole TBA, you know, it right now, it takes about a little less than two months to underwrite a mortgage. Like, there's no reason we shouldn't be able to do that as you're filling out the application. So what, why do we need this TBA market? What, you know... I I again, I think the opportunity to completely reshape those capital markets, which is why we got into this, by the way- Yeah ... it really is our domain. And we are a major provider to the MBS market. We do the valuations of MBS every day. We have 3 million instruments that we value every day, and people use to mark to market, so we have connectivity to those people. The other weird thing, which I never knew until we started messing around with this, is that a lot of what goes into an MBS is just somebody said, "I'll take your next 100 loans." And it's like, you have, you know, 60 days to give me 100 loans, and boom, they go in a box. It's like there's no discretion. So what if we, what if we said we're gonna have, like, a green bond that's gonna target some low-income cohort, and that'll go into an MBS? Or what if, what if we say we're gonna design MBS the way we design ETFs? They're gonna have all kinds of flavors. I don't see any reason why that won't happen, but you'll need the data and the specificity and the access, transparency, all of which I think is coming quickly. I mean, we're definitely stripping all this stuff apart, saying, "Wow, look what we found in the corner here. Yeah. Great, Those are the adjacencies. That's. I really think it's increased velocity and much more data and information that will restructure the capital markets. Yeah, no, super interesting. All right, let's switch gears a little bit. Let's talk about your original business, the energy trading business- Yes ... which continues to grow at a really impressive clip, and it's really coming from a number of different sort of subverticals- Yes ... which I would love to hit with you on. Sure. So let's start with oil first... look, generally on track for another record year. And interestingly enough, not only driven by Brent, which is, I think, what we've all learned to kind of know about ICE- Yeah. but a lot of other flavors. Yeah. Particularly, the one notable this year is WTI complex market share. Yep ... against CME, has really picked up. So maybe help unpack what's been driving WTI performance this year, and of course, the runway you see for the rest of your oil complex. Yeah, sure. So, we acquired the International Petroleum Exchange in the year 2001. It was the very first deal I did. Had Brent Crude Oil as its flagship. I didn't know anything about Brent, really. It was tiny on a relative basis. The world sort of revolved around WTI, West Texas Intermediate crude, and that has really fundamentally changed. You know, the world globalized on a commerce basis. It's de-globalizing right now, and maybe on a commerce basis, but energy has, has so much more globalized, and it's shipborne. And, Brent Crude is a grade of crude that comes out of the North Sea and, and never goes to land. It goes right from the derrick onto a ship, and so it's become the marker for, oil at sea. Then we worked with some interests in the UAE, and we've launched a Murban Crude, which is Middle East crude, high-grade Middle East crude on a ship, you know, in the Straits of Hormuz. And more recently, we've launched a contract we call HOU, Houston- ... which is WTI on a ship leaving the Gulf. And now you've got, you know, essentially Europe, U.S., and Middle East, there's grades of crude on boats. And, and it's really... You know, the notion of, "Hey, WTI at, Cushing, Oklahoma, in a pipe," or whatever, is, is less relevant. Fracking changed that. The fact that the margin, that the price of a, barrel of oil is the marginal sale, and the marginal sale is probably going to somewhere, some place outside the U.S., and probably delivered on a ship. And similarly, and you're probably gonna ask me this- ... the same thing has happened to natural gas. You know, we ended up with a lot of natural gas in the U.S. Europe had issues, supply issues as a result of the Ukraine war. And suddenly, you know, any capacity to take liquefied natural gas to Europe went into play. And now the marginal, you know, molecule is probably an at-sea molecule. That oddly... You know, I think, I tell people this all the time, if you know, if you want to go buy a fishing rod, you go into some sporting goods store, they'll tell you, "Oh, yeah, we don't have that model. We have supply chain issues." And still, this far after COVID, there are all these, like, supply chain issues, from stuff that's getting built. The energy supply chain is turning on a dime. I mean, people were projecting that Europe was going—like, people were gonna die in their homes because they were gonna not have any heating. And Europe just navigated that like nothing. Now, prices moved around- ... but the supply chain for energy is unbelievably efficient, and partly because it is a commodity, it's the same thing to everybody, and it's at sea, and people have ports. And it's just been fascinating. All of that is inured to the benefit of our platform. People are hedging. The new entrants, it's both new entrants, new products. I don't know, it's kind of a virtuous cycle. And it doesn't feel like, particularly, you know, as we're trying to become, most Western economies are trying to become less carbon-based, there's a whole renewable element going on. 40% of our energy business today is either natural gas or carbon trading- Yeah ... which, you know, was tiny, you know, 15 years ago. Probably will. You know, we—everybody talks about oil because it's in the mind's eye, it's the flagship energy product in the world, but it may not be in another 15 years. So- Right. Anyway, it just feels like the whole, the whole ecosystem, we're kind of right place, right time, right tools. Yeah. Let's talk about nat gas for a second. Yeah. As you predicted, I definitely want to spend a minute here. TTF- Yeah ... huge success for you guys. Took a little bit of a breather last year for a lot of kind of near-term margin issues, et cetera. Yeah. Back at, I don't know, up 100% year-over-year growth- Yeah ... volumes or something like that, so big numbers. How has the customer base changed? We hear that there's more financial users starting to come into that contract now- Yeah ... which increases velocity. If so, how do you view the revenue TAM for TTF? Right. It's... So first of all, if you haven't heard of TTF, it's European natural gas, and it's a contract that we found and worked with the Dutch to make into an index and make it more transparent. And it's really- it was growing because the energy transition, you know, roadmap sort of moves through natural gas, and in most economies, so it was growing. But then, when they had the Russia pipeline shut down, suddenly there was a shortage of natural gas, and it started to be filled, as I mentioned, by moving gas from around the world. When it gets to Europe, they call it TTF. If you're gonna hedge it there, you call it TTF. And so it's really a price that's sort of representative of Asia and Europe is really committed to energy transition. I mean, you know, they were on a roadmap to shut down those coal plants and if you spend time there, it's serious. It's not like a top-down government thing. This isn't like a top-down government thing. The population itself is behind this. And so I think it. In other words, I think it's durable. And I just feel like that TTF marker. Also, we have one in Japan, too, by the way, that's similarly growing. I feel like those two markers, an Asian marker and a European marker of natural gas, is just gonna keep growing. I don't know how big the TAM is, but I know their energy transition is serious. And I don't think the population's not gonna allow politicians to back away from it. That's my instinct anyway. Yeah. Gotcha. All right, great. Why don't we switch gears? I want to hit on data and fixed-income data in particular. So that part of the business has grown, especially around data and analytics, has been growing a little bit slower for you guys over the last couple of quarters. I think ASV has been essentially range-bound, and, you know, I'm sure there are some cyclical factors to that. Yeah. But maybe try to separate the cyclical versus the more structural- Yeah ... What are you guys doing there to reinvigorate growth in fixed-income data? Yeah. So, we sell a lot of bond and MBS data that I mentioned. And those asset managers the last couple of years were struggling a little bit. We grew, but not as much as we had hoped, because our customer base was feeling some pain. More recently, things feel like they're going back to normal again for us, number one. Secondly, what's been interesting is that market segment that Alex covers has grown for us because actually the networking, the data itself is in demand, but the ability to take it on our cloud was in demand. And so much like, I suppose, some of the cloud providers that have really seen extreme growth, we saw growth in that segment. The distribution was more valuable than the data. ... I guess, is maybe the way to say it. I think that trend continues. We've really, you know, we use a lot of cloud, not a lot, but we try to manage our cloud as best we can from third parties, and these guys keep hitting us with these double-digit price increases, and we've been much more sanguine with our customers on our proprietary cloud. But yet it's still driven growth. And so I'm kind of thinking of it as two levers, which is when our customers are doing well, and they want more data, we're gonna make money there. If they're not, if it's not as in demand... The last thing I would just say to you is that the over macro trend there is really the, you know, securitization of fixed-income securities. In other words, putting them into ETFs. There seems to be, you know, real demand to buy bonds in the form of tradable equities. The innovation going on there is huge. The big asset managers that are driving ETF growth there are leaning into it. We own—not only do we own underlying data, reference data, we own a lot of the indices that we license. It's kind of a... Obviously, we own the New York Stock Exchange, where we list a lot of those, so it's kind of a virtuous circle for us that I think is a macro trend that's gonna keep fixed income growing. I don't know what percentage it grows, but you just feel like it's got a trajectory behind it. Yeah, I gotcha. Staying on fixed income for a second, you guys own a couple of trading platforms. They're- Yeah ... relatively small in the context of ICE, but- ... they've been growing really nicely, Yeah ... over the last couple of years now. Can you talk a little bit through the progress you're making on expanding institutional reach for these platforms and sort of how you envision this business continuing to grow going forward? Yeah, so, you know, we were late to get into fixed-income trading. Chris Concannon's company, if you were here in the session before, was in very, very early as was Tradeweb. So my company's not a company that wants to be number three at something. We tend to actually be the high price, you know, deliver better service at a higher price, is kind of our attitude anyway. Yeah. And so we looked for niches that we could exploit, that our competitors were not, or potential competitors were not. And so we went into the muni bond space. They were very focused on govies and corporate, and so we went into munis. The muni bond space is very retail-oriented. It's people that want to avoid, you know, own fixed income that's tax-advantaged. And so we have a lot of platforms that are used by lots of wealth managers and are distributed there. What you're referring to is, more recently, we've seen institutional investors, they actually wanna interact with that order flow. That... As more creative ETFs are being developed with different kinds of fixed income instruments in them and people, you know, developing different fixed income funds, suddenly we're seeing much more institutional interest in the municipal bond space. Similarly, you know, going to your earlier question, we develop a lot of data and analytics that our data division does around that space. Because we have that trading platform. ... and that natural constituency, we also think about what are the tools we can give them to get them to do more business or to help them do the business that they're gonna do. We've been doing a lot of climate data. People that buy, that are gonna, you know, buy a municipal bond to finance a dam, you know, want to know about what's going on with the water in that area, those kinds of things. So, transmission lines in the west, are they in a fire area? So, that kind of environmental data is becoming allowing people to be more precise in the way they price them, and we're exploiting that with the platform itself. Gotcha. Great. I had a question on pricing. It doesn't come up that frequently with ICE- Yeah ... but you guys did increase pricing earlier this year on a handful of products. What's the broad approach to pricing from here? Any other enhancements you're thinking about into 2024? Yeah, I mean, to put a point on it, I don't think we've ever touched pricing on many of our products in 20 years. And so it really was, I think, this inflationary environment that we were in. Everything that we were buying from third parties was being inflated, and so we started to think, you know, are we missing something? We started going through our own businesses, and in some cases, our costs went up, personnel costs, other things due to inflation, and so we just adopted a new mindset, which is, we may be in a higher-for-longer interest rate environment, where we've got to pay more attention to the top-line pricing. So we raised some prices on a few things. They were very targeted. That went well. Our customers, you know, appreciated that the, the communication that we did and then the way we tried to target it. I suspect if we're gonna be higher for longer, that that's gonna be more of, of what we do. We try to, we try to deliver more value. I just feel like if you are asking your customers to pay more, you should, you should deliver more. So we try to do it in the form of better bundling of certain services. Or, you know, you led me to talk about all the new products we're doing in energy, so if we've, if we've given you a bigger portfolio for the same, cost, you're really- your per unit cost has gone down. So we're looking to be strategic and targeted in the way we do it, but it is now in our mindset, and as you know, a lot of our peers are doing the same thing. It's kind of an industry right now that's trying to find its water mark, its water level. Yeah. And so I think we're all kind of watching each other as well, to figure out, you know, what, what is the right value for what we provide. Great. All right, fair enough. We have a couple of minutes left on the clock, so if anybody has a question, just raise your hand and we'll get the mic over. I see one in the middle there. Second row. Mic, yep. Jeff, can you give us a sense what percentage of your revenue today is annuity or subscription-based- Yeah ... and strategically, where you hope that might be in four or five years? I think, you know, we went from damn near zero to probably above 50% now. If I could go to 100, I would. I don't think we can, but just to give you an attitude. I went to business school, and maybe that's, like, a flaw that I have, but... And I've never done what you guys do, so, you know, take it with a grain of salt. But I would pay more for a company with compounding, growing subscription revenues than I would for something that is episodic on transactions. That's not always the case in financial services. I don't know why. I don't want to tell you how to do your business, but I just feel like, as a manager, if I could lock in a customer base on longer-term contracts and grow the revenue, makes it an easier business to run, and I would think it's more valuable. I'm a shareholder. I'm, because I'm a founder, I'm a large shareholder. It's more valuable to me, as a shareholder, so maybe I am in your shoes in that regard. But I don't know if that answered your question. You know, is it possible that someday you all will have a subscription to the New York Stock Exchange, and you can trade all you can eat? Probably, I don't know that the SEC would allow us to do that today, but I don't know why, at some point, that that shouldn't happen. Because everything you do... You know, we all walk around with these mobile devices, and everything we're doing is subscription, and we sort of all, as society, move past this, pay per transaction. It's kind of annoying when you get your phone bill, and you say, "I used 32 minutes, and 4 of them were international." And, you know, just kind of wanna, like, you know, let me use the phone whenever I want to use it, and tell me what it costs. And so that's where I'm trying to drive the business. I hope you guys will look at that. I know Alex and I talk a lot about it, that that's a better business, and it's been intentional on our part to drive it there. Great. Well, well, that's perfect. I think we'll leave it there. Jeff, thank you so much. Thank you, Alex.