Okay, I think we'll get started here. Good afternoon, everyone, and thanks for joining this session with ICE. I'm once again delighted to have Jeff Sprecher, the founder, chairman, and CEO of ICE. I believe, Jeff, it's the seventh year in a row coming to this conference, so we're grateful for your time, and thanks again for participating in the conference. Thank you. It's an important conference for us. You draw quite a storied crowd, so thank you for continuing to invite us. Fantastic. Before we get started, as always, you can ask a question through the Pigeonhole system, get it through, and I'll try and get that to Jeff towards the end of the session. So let me just. I wanted to maybe do this in sort of three parts. Okay. Dive into your energy business first, then we'll talk about mortgage, and then, spend a bit of time on AI and innovation at ICE, given it's a topic you've, talked quite a bit about recently. But let's start with, you know, energy and your maybe exchange business, which, still the vast majority of the company today, and, actually has very good growth, high single-digit top line growth. A A lot of that is driven by your, by your energy business. That business actually has seen some acceleration in growth, certainly in 2024. But even over time, as I mentioned, it's grown, pretty nicely, particularly post, post-COVID. Maybe talk about, what you've seen in that business over the last five years that's driving sort of, stronger trends. Sure. It's funny you should phrase it that way, because probably 15 years ago, I and the rest of the management team said, "I'm not sure this energy platform can keep growing into perpetuity, so we need to diversify the firm and find new pathways for growth so that we can layer on top of that." Here, this core franchise, which is the business that we started years ago, continues to just do well. Sitting here today, to specific to your question, I feel like it's got a lot of runway to continue to do well. The globalization of the energy market is relentless, and the demand for people to manage the risk of their energy a footprint, including maybe jumping to the last topic you mentioned. You know, now, all of a sudden, we have this new AI thing that's gonna create additional energy demands, and it's causing all kinds of interest in by new kinds of players. I mentioned on a call recently that we have a new platform where we give information to people on the voluntary markets for carbon reduction. And we've signed up, like, 250 companies in the last six or eight months. You know, I mean... And so all new demand. These are people building data centers who have aspirational goals to reduce their carbon footprint. And so the business has just become more global. The energy markets are more complex, and the participants on this platform have continued to become more diverse. Do you think there's any particular change, though, post-pandemic? Is it, has the Russia situation changed how energy markets, is it more about U.S. production? There just seems to be a step function change in your sort of business growth. Yes, it's exactly that. The something coming out of COVID, we all saw how the supply chains for goods changed, and were impacted by COVID, and then have reestablished and changed post-COVID. And the same thing has happened in the energy business, with the complexity of at least two major wars that have strategic implications for either shipping routes or sourcing of energy. And there's been a massive rewiring of the supply chain. In other words, who's buying what kind of energy from who? And the amazing thing really is how quickly it was able, for such a complex ecosystem, how quickly it was able to reestablish itself, energy being just like a foundational need for a society. Amazingly, you know, all the parts and pieces sort of, sort of have shifted, and, and as a result, there's just different risks in the world and new people that are facing risks of energy delivery, that, that are, that are using the capital markets to, to finance and hedge those activities. And it, it feels like, you know, it's permanent and, and gonna continue to grow. Partly because some of those supply chains really involve international shipping of energy, and, and that's—you're always gonna have acts of God in shipping lanes, labor problems, shipping problems, delivery problems, ports, paperwork, customs, everything that goes along with with moving by ship that, that feels like it's gonna have to be managed for a long time. What's particularly interesting, at least to me, is, it doesn't feel like the growth is across the industry. If I look at sort of your energy business versus your main competitor, whether it's volume or open interest, you seem to be growing a lot, a lot faster than CME, by the way, in case you were- Yeah. You were confused. So just curious what you're doing differently or why your, why your business is seeing market share gains, if you want to call it that, relative to, relative to your peers? I think the two things, and some of it was the hand that we were dealt. We got into the energy business by buying the International Petroleum Exchange of London. So we started out with a non-US footprint, and that was quite tiny, and that was the first acquisition that I did, and it was in year 2001. And that footprint was tiny relative to the needs and demands and production of the United States, which is where the dominant trading and indices were developed. But what's happened over time is real globalization of energy. Even as we're de-globalizing some goods and services right now, energy just feels like it's become more globalized. There are places that have energy and places that don't, and those places that don't have native energy just seem to be the growth areas of the world right now. And we sort of rode the international globalization of energy. Separately, a lot of what we do is trading and data and information based on indices, and we've continued to evolve those indices, reconstitute them. And so our product suite has become increasingly more relevant to the demands of the world. Whereas, you know, largely the U.S. indices, and we trade those, and the U.S. products, we trade those as well, but they've kind of been the same through the last 20 years. They haven't really. There hasn't been a lot of change. They haven't really reconstituted. And the U.S. business of both natural gas, oil, and gasoline was very much a pipeline business. So it was a business that it was designed to serve the needs of the U.S. And, you know, the growth really is the U.S. helping to provide the needs for the rest of the world, and we're just better positioned for that. Let me stick in on this globalization theme, and talk through nat gas, which is one- Yeah ... where it's been very obvious your investments there and how that's grown. I think a decade ago, you had really nothing than a US business, and almost a quarter of that business today is international, led by the TTF contract. Maybe talk about the investments you're making in that business- Mm-hmm ... your continued global expansion, and how should we think about the potential for more international contracts to be, as a, you know, percentage of total gas revenues? But if I think about Brent, for example- Mm-hmm ... it's bigger than WTI today in terms of volumes. Can Henry Hub- Mm-hmm ... also overtaken by, by TTF over time? It's a good question. First of all, the kind of a weird history of TTF was that when we bought the International Petroleum Exchange of London, they traded UK natural gas. There's a pipeline that goes from the UK under the English Channel to Continental Europe, and we were sitting around saying, "We should really try to have an index on the other end of that pipe," because while gas flows across that pipe, sometimes it gets constrained, and there's a breakage between the price of gas in Continental Europe and the UK. So we found this Dutch natural gas company, and we worked with them to develop this TTF contract, and it was this tiny little, you know, Dutch gas. What's happened in continental Europe, however, is the marginal molecule of gas is ship-borne and brought in in the form of liquefied natural gas. And so that marker is increasingly, you know, becoming a ship-borne natural gas marker. And to a certain degree, once you have natural gas at sea, it can go many places and trade as a basis differential to TTF. And so what started as something that we wanted at the end of a pipe, has evolved over time to really reflect seaborne natural gas. If you just step back logically and look at Europe, you know, there we run interest rate contracts for Europe, and you can see that the market is predicting that Europe is gonna start cutting interest rates and stimulating growth. At the same time, they're not gonna build any coal plants there. They're certainly not gonna build any oil-fired generation. Takes a lot of time to build a nuclear plant. And so how are they gonna meet their needs? Well, it's very likely, while they're gonna try to do renewables, any, you know, significant increase in demand is gonna be met by seaborne natural gas coming in. So you just kind of see the underpinnings of why that's going to do well. And can it overtake the US? Possibly. The natural gas in the US is increasingly coming from oil that's fracked. That oil is in West Texas. As you may recall, there have been lots of, you know, conversations about not building new pipelines in the United States, and so a lot of that gas makes its way down to Houston, through the existing pipe system. The oil goes down there, and the gas is a byproduct. And so to a certain degree, you know, we're gonna, even in a somewhat constrained drilling environment, the U.S. is producing a lot of natural gas, and we're gonna likely be the ones to serve our allies in Europe. So I think that contract's gonna do well for quite a while. ... I'm just curious if you ever get any political pushback. You guys, essentially, almost control the price, not control, but you have a big say in the price of global oil, now increasingly global gas. An American company, that you know, it's even global domination here. Do you ever get pushback when you speak to regulators in these jurisdictions about ICE's increasingly dominant position in, energy price setting? Yes and no. You know, I realized early on, like when we bought the International Petroleum Exchange of London, that I didn't know anything about London, and I didn't know anything about petroleum, and I wasn't a particularly. I grew up in the Midwest, I wasn't very international. So, surrounded that company with a European board and a European management and really, you know, try to keep me and other Americans away from it. And so, unlike a lot of people that do M&A, I felt like having a local presence was important. You know, we have a business in Amsterdam. We own the Amsterdam Exchange and Clearing House, Amsterdam board, Amsterdam management. And so, you know, the kind of day-to-day conversations that we're having are not coming from me, and so I think there's a recognition we're a big U.S.-based Fortune 500 company. But that said, they're working with local people that understand, you know, local nuances. It looks like your same playbook now is happening in Asia. Yeah. This JKM contract, Japan Korea Marker, seems to be... We can see, like, really good volumes at ICE on that contract in that gas. I guess a couple questions. Maybe talk about how you think about growth there, and over time. And then long term, the name is literally Japan, Korea, marker, but I think China is really the bigger player in natural gas. Mm-hmm. Is there a risk that is a Chinese-based contract over time, and how are you trying to sort of get ahead of that? I think it's yes, and there's kind of— Let me start with the opposite, which is the conversations that are going on that we’ve been having with very smart and connected people in Washington, D.C., are increasingly concerned about China and the potential conflict in Taiwan. And as you know, a lot of smart people are looking at that, but they're telling us that the U.S. needs to become more dominant in the region. We need to have better relationships with Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Southeast Asia. The Belt and Road initiatives have a lot of Chinese influence throughout the Southeast. And boy, you know, why don't we use our energy footprint to build relationships there? We should be providing those emerging economies with the energy they need, and one way to do that is to stage it in Japan and then use that as an offloading point to various Southeast Asian countries. And by the way, that gets a lot of shipping transportation in that area that the US would be right to defend, and have a presence there, and so on and so forth. So I oddly see, you know, the US potentially being a bigger player in Asia with energy, which would continue to drive that JKM trading. It continue to create an opportunity for people to manage risk there. The flip side of your question is: What about China? China is a net importer of energy, and so to the extent that there is a Chinese contract, even if they create one, and it's a native contract, it will be a basis trade. It'll be a delta shipping price to the world's shipborne price of natural gas, in other words. So it will... Our view is it will ultimately price off of whatever we're doing. It'll be a niche contract as opposed to an outright marker. And by the way, we jawbone that a lot so that we make sure that we create our own destiny in that regard. Yeah. Good stuff. Let's go back to oil. Again, we're seeing really strong volume trends in your oil contracts. Seems to be a lot of it is the refined products. Yes ... as opposed to maybe the more mature- Mm-hmm ... Brent, Brent contract. What, what are you seeing there? What are you hearing from end markets that's driving growth? Yeah. Again, the supply chain, where gasoline is refined has changed post-COVID and post conflict. You know, India is refining Russian oil, and those products are making their way into the international market. A lot of the European distillate products were based on Russian oil, and the Europeans no longer want any Russian oil, and have boycotts plus sanctions on them. And so there's been a kind of a rewiring of where distillates are made and how they're shipped and moved. And again, it's just brought new players into the market and new risks into the market that have to be managed. And again, they look like permanent. I'm not sure any of this changes post-conflict or, you know, if there's a change of administration in various countries. It just feels like it's foundational change that's going to continue to compound on itself. ... the Brent contract, again, your foundational contract a bit more mature, but did have a fundamental change in terms of WTI added to that index- Yeah. I think about a year ago. Can you speak to how that's changing the oil ecosystem or, if that was beneficial? Yeah, it's for those that don't follow this, Brent was a oil area in the North Sea, off between Norway and the UK. And then the index was created from the trading of that oil. And the Brent, there's not even any oil derricks in the Brent oil field anymore, so there is no Brent in the Brent Index. Over time, we have just reconstituted that index. And if you think about it as being the utopian grade of oil, like, you know, what is the... If you could buy a barrel of oil that exists in the world today, what is the least sulfur, you know, most pure, easiest to refine oil? And let's make sure that's the index, and then everything else that comes out of a barrel, can be traded as a differential to that. And so, as Christian mentioned, we added, as part of the index, WTI, West Texas Intermediate crude oil. And it's a cheapest to deliver contract, so you can basically deliver WTI, on a boat somewhere, and it, it's called Brent, and it's in the Brent Index. And that happens maybe 30%-40% of the time. It would be a U.S. oil, would be the driver of that index, and maybe, you know, 50, 60, 70% of the time, it's other grades. So it's a flexible, utopian contract, if you will, and the market has really gravitated to it. It just works for so many people around the world as a way of trying to hedge their you know, shipping geopolitical and discovery risk. And so it was a long time in coming to put US oil in what used to be the European oil contract. But increasingly, you know, again, if you think about the US, where's the next new oil well going to be drilled? It's probably fracking. It's probably West Texas. Those are the cheapest, easiest, fastest wells to put in. And that oil, the easiest place for that oil to flow is down to Houston, and once it's in Houston, it's easy to put on a boat. So marginal, you know, oil production in the US is making its way into that index. It's just been a virtuous reconstitution over 20 years that we, that we've, we've been working on that, and it really feels like, I don't know, it just kind of found a sweet spot. It's grown every year for the entire time we've owned it, but just feels now like it has stature. It feels like, you know, suddenly you have the S&P 500 or the FTSE or something. It feels like the index just is the one that everybody feels like, "Okay, that's representative for my needs. Let me try to wrap up the energy conversation around how does all translate financially? We've obviously seen the volume- Mm-hmm. So it is translating, but how do you think about, maybe capturing more value? Mm. Right? We've talked about strong secular trends. We see good volumes. There's clearly some sort of go-to business. How, how do you think about maybe using pricing of the contract to capture more, more value for, for shareholders? Yeah. It's a—you use a good word, value. We think about, and it's really been a more recent thought inside the company, which is, have we created value? And if so, are we proportionally sharing the value with our customers and ourselves? And, it's only been the last few years that we've had that kind of insight and conversations with our customers, and selectively have said, "You know, we really create a lot of value, for example, in that Brent Index, and we should, you know, and people appreciate it. We should change the pricing on that." And so it's not a formulaic view, it's more of a holistic view of, do we feel like we've really done something creative, and if we raise prices, it would be accepted? And I will tell you, you know, we've raised, we raise prices, touch things all the time. Never extreme, always in the mindset of sharing value with our customers. And we've had, like, no pushback, which is partly why, you know, you and others ask the question, which is, well, you know, maybe you should keep doing more of it until you find the level where there is pushback. But the way we run our business is really just, let's compound the growth, let's take a long-term view, and let's make sure that we're providing value to our customers, and then we can think about, you know, making sure that we participate. Okay. Let's switch over to mortgage. Yeah. Maybe a tougher, tougher backdrop for that one. So I think your mortgage revenue targets are to grow high single digits? Yes. It's just kind of where you're trying to get to. Can you talk about how, again, given the context where we are now- Yeah ... rates are probably higher than we've seen it for a while, you know, we're past the low rate environment. How do you—what, what's the algorithm of how you get to high single digits? Yeah. Yeah. The real algorithm is that there's a millennial population that is, like, massive, that is in their prime earning years and is under-housed, you know, creating families and with rising needs. And part of this is just a bet on that demographic, you know, for the rest of their lives, that the U.S. housing stock and structure of mortgages to support it is got to evolve, and we want to be at the middle of it, and have, to a certain degree, positioned ourselves at the middle of it. So then it becomes, okay, what is the formula for the timing of how that manifests itself? Right now, with this bad mortgage backdrop, you know, which is probably as bad as it's been in 25 years, we've been surprised that the major market participants in the mortgage space are following our lead to make new investments to prepare for that demographic shift that everybody sees coming. And so, you know, we're selling a lot of services and software and infrastructure to the mortgage industry, even though volumes are way down. I think there's an appreciation that everybody kind of ate at from a fat trough in a low interest rate environment, and you could just throw bodies at the business to get more business. But that headcount is down now, and when and if that demographic is starting to push back and push volume through lenders and the housing stock, technology should be the thing that scales, not humans. And so a long-winded way of saying we're really selling a lot of new clients on this vision that we have. You know, we signed up 20 in the first quarter of major lending companies that are not shying away from spending money to position themselves. So the good news is that, you know, these people view themselves as having a long-term future in this business, and they're not retreating, and they're investing right now. A lot of our high single-digit growth that you talk about is transaction-based. We have subscription-based and transaction-based revenues for that business, and the subscriptions are doing phenomenal. The transactions are very low right now. There's almost no refinancing going on. I mean, it's pretty close to zero. So all work in the housing market are just new mortgages that are being put in, most likely somebody moving. And as you know, you know, and you can read about, people are only moving when they need to move for, you know, lifestyle purposes. If they can avoid it, they will. So I think the business is spring-loaded for a delivery of more housing stock and any kind of interest rate cut. But are you confident that even in a world where there's no refinance, it's all purchase, you can still... you have enough products to get you to high single digits from? Yeah. Yeah, I really do. It's just phenomenal how the industry is rallying around this platform that we've built. We're probably in conversation with every major player in the industry that is in some way, shape, or form, talking to us about how to touch that platform. Or if they are not able to right now, how they can, you know, use what we have in relation to what they've already got. And it's, you know, it's amazing because that industry is not shying away from figuring out the, you know, its next level up. I think there needs to be either... My own sense, this is just me, vetting, but I think either an interest rate cut that then demonstrates, like, the peak may have happened, or just, you know, we have high interest rates for a long time and people say: "Okay, that's- I just got to get on with my life. I've avoided too long," and that, you know, and, and, and people of my generation know that interest rates, you can buy houses at high interest rates because people in my generation did that. So you did mention, you know, you have a lot of conversations with lots of companies. There was an interesting stat where you touched 85% of U.S. mortgages. I think we do, yeah. Um, which- May even be getting higher now. So I guess you can look at it from two angles. One is, does that mean there's a maturity business that we need to think about from a growth perspective? Or two, at that level of dominance, is there a way to maybe do more for- Yeah ... clients to, to capture more value? Yeah. So while we touch them, that's, in our view, that's at least touching a mortgage one time. And the goal is so we have, like, a CRM tool, the leading CRM tool for lead generation, for people that are banks and lenders that are looking for clients. We have the underwriting tools. We have the registration tools. We have the closing tools. We have the servicing tools. We have the mortgage-backed security data tools and valuation tools, and so it runs the gamut. And somewhere in there, every mortgage we suspect, or the vast majority of mortgages, touch that at least once. The goal is for every mortgage to touch every part of that. In other words, cross-sell all of those different services so that... Our goal, honestly, is that the mortgage would never leave the platform. That starting with the CRM tool, the lead generation, everything would be in the platform, and the mortgage would be underwritten and executed by the borrower, and the file never leave the network. It would, the permissioning would change.... depending upon who, at what point in time, owned the mortgage or owned the servicing rights or had other vested interest in that mortgage, but that the file itself wouldn't move. Today, you know, wet signature paper mortgages that are moving in PDF and in boxes and FedEx and everything else. The goal is, and the mindset is that this mortgage document moves, and we're trying to change the mindset, which is now just the permissioning moves, the file never changes. That will cut a lot of costs out of the errors and costs out of the system, if you can just get everybody pointed out at the golden record. How do you what do you need to get there? Is that a we need- Yeah. You talked about wet signatures. Do we need more legislation, local regulation to change that? Is it an investment from your point of view, from a tax standpoint, to be able to get that life of loan, stock on your platform? Is it just customer behavior? How do you think about what needs to happen to- Mm-hmm ... I guess, fully digitize that mortgage process within ICE? Yeah. Well, what we've put together is so unique, that, you know, prior to COVID, I don't know that we would have been able to pull this off. You know, people that were buying homes during COVID and having to show up somewhere and with a mask on and sign paper documents, started to push back and states and counties started to change their routines so that you could have a digital mortgage. So we have all the infrastructure right now to do that, and it's a single-digit% of mortgages that are really using an eMortgage, if you will, an eNote. And so there's a lot of upside growth potential for more people to adopt it. The people that are really using eNotes are early adopters that are tech-savvy lenders, and those guys are putting pressure on the more legacy companies that are starting to hear about the fact that their competitors are, have a streamlined, you know, better, faster, cheaper model, more convenient for the home buyer and the real estate agent and the loan officer. And so, and so I think there'll be a natural progression. What gets people there is they have to be trained, they have to, they have to change the workflow inside their company, you know. The whole way the compliance team will look over that mortgage when it's, when it's digital versus paper will change. But there, you know, people are doing it. And we do these training seminars, and they're widely attended by people. There's people that have time on their hands, and they're trying to get ready for the next, the next leg up in the business. So I can see it happening. It's hard to know exactly the, the pace, but the people that are doing it now are the, are exactly the people you would want in the industry because they're the, they're the thought leaders that, that will drive the rest of the industry, to doing digital closings. you mentioned, you know, signing up quite a lot of customers- Yes ... and seems like a pretty impressive list. Yeah ... Citizens, M&T. Yeah. How should we think about revenue contribution from these clients? Do we need to see volumes pick up in the refi, or do you think in the next year or so? Mm-hmm ... we'll start to get rev acceleration? Yeah. Two things. First of all, these are major upgrades by the firms you just mentioned and others that are ripping out their entire legacy infrastructure and replacing it with the new ICE-based network that exists in the ICE Cloud. So it's. And these mortgage platforms, particularly in the big lenders, they touch lots of other systems. They're the mortgage industry is actually very highly regulated. There's a lot of compliance needs. And so the implementation of any new ripping out the old and putting in the new and then implementing it is. It takes time, and we won't recognize the revenue until it's really been implemented. So there's a lag between these announcements that we're making and actual revenue recognition. Beyond that, what we've been moving is the industry, when it was a paper-based industry, was very transaction-oriented. Everything had a price. You paid for FedEx, for the, you know, for that mortgage, and that went on your closing statement. You ordered a title report and a flood report and a this and a that, and it's all, you know, transaction based. Now that we've got everything end-to-end, largely on a network, we're trying to move the industry to essentially a mobile phone plan. So, you know, buy on a subscription, multi-year subscription basis, a number of minutes, if you will, or a number of mortgages, that you can operate within that band. And if you go over, if you go under, we don't give you any money back. You didn't use all your minutes. And if you go over, we have a per loan or per minute type fee, like a cell phone plan would. And so what you're seeing right now in our revenue is largely, you know, these subscription revenues, and they're compounding as we put new people on. What will really accelerate the growth, the earnings growth of the company and the single-digit growth expectations, is when those volumes start coming through, and people, you know, are buying additional minutes, if you will, like on a cell phone plan. Okay. Let's talk about your servicing business. Yeah ... which was acquired from Black Knight. It's not one that should be particularly transactional, affected, but we're seeing some declines in the revenues there. Yeah. Just talk about what you see there and what's driving the business. Yeah. So we have a very large position in servicing most U.S. mortgages. So in other words, calculating the payments, monthly payments, and the association fees, if there are any, and the sales property tax fees and other assorted fees. Two things have happened. One is there were some M&A activity where some companies combined. Those activities actually happened before we even acquired the platform from Black Knight, but are just now making its way through the year-over-year comps. And then separately, there was, you know, a very, very large client of ours that had all of their mortgages on our platform that decided to get out of the servicing business and sell their servicing rights. And so when that happens, in this case, because it was 100% on us, and now it goes out to the ecosystem where we don't have 100% market share, you'll see year-over-year. It was kind of a one-off in the sense that normally servicing rights companies are coming and going and, merging and servicing rights are being sold and, you know, you sort of win some, lose some, and it all tends to net out. But what you're seeing is, you know, sort of a unique set of circumstances for two large companies. Gotcha. Maybe on tailwinds for mortgages, Yeah Which again, not many, but one interesting proposal from the FHA is to, I guess, allow second mortgages to be purchased. Yeah. Maybe thoughts on this proposal and any sort of tailwinds that you think you can see for your business? Yeah. I mean, publicly, we're staying neutral on it because, because within the current mortgage ecosystem, there will be potential winners and losers in our client base for... if that were to happen. But overall, you know, we expect the volumes to go up, and our platform and the underwriting tools that we have handle those particular transactions. So we would see- for us personally, we would see it as a benefit. But we're not advocating for it because we're not advocating for our own benefit right now. We're trying to work with the regulators on behalf of the industry. Not that the housing industry needs a lot of extra lobbying help, but, boy, do they have lobbyists. So it's hard to know if these proposals will make it or not. You know, the president in the State of the Union talked about housing, actually had a number of ideas to try to stimulate additional housing, and those are also making their way through, you know, the politics of Washington. Just from a financial perspective, secondly, mortgage versus first- Yeah Do they have any different pricing economics to you, or? Not specifically. The good news there is that it's another essential underwriting. And so all the functionality that is needed is there. What we're actually trying to build, which we have built, and what we're trying to launch for the consumer in the next wave of housing is, you know, real-time calculation of the value of your house, your outstanding liability as a consumer, and the current interest rate, with a button that would allow you to just say, do you wanna refinance? Instead of everybody that owns a home trying to calculate, go to a computer and spend an evening trying to figure out if they should refinance. We're gonna give people the data. The goal is that we give them the data. They have it every month when they're paying their bill. And we've wired up with their lender, and they can just refi it on the fly. I think it'll fundamentally change the capital markets because in a falling interest rate environment, you'll see the duration of outstanding mortgages could potentially be much shorter than it has in the past because the friction will come out. And in a rising interest rate environment, the opposite will happen. And so we're gonna need different kind of hedging tools for the fixed income buyers of those mortgages, and different ways of constructing mortgage-backed securities, different ways that mortgages will make their way into a fixed income fund, and ETFs and other things. I think it, you know, it will unlock a lot of innovation in my mind. Okay. If you don't mind, let's switch to AI, simply because you made a lot of comments on the last quarter call, which they were interesting. I didn't make a lot of comments. I made very scripted comments, my lawyers went over. Right. Well, I'm gonna drill down some of them. I guess you created an AI Center of Excellence, which I thought was interesting, just 'cause you're in Atlanta, doesn't strike me as like, and I just could be, you know- Kind of hometown bias here. Right. Right. It doesn't strike me as a hub for AI talent- Yeah ... and even Tesla struggles to keep, Yeah the AI talent. So can you just speak to your ability really to attract and retain just world-class Yeah -talents at the ICE? Yeah. So I got... You know, my company got lucky in that through all the acquisitions that we've done, we acquired two AI groups before AI was cool. One group we acquired was around the New York Stock Exchange, which we own, and we decided. The growth in the U.S. equity market has been, the volume growth has been phenomenal, as many of you in the audience probably have seen. Particularly when Robinhood went to free trading and drove commissions down for retail, and you know, meme stocks took off and I don't know, just there's just a lot of interest now across the globe in the U.S. equities market. So we needed to increase our compliance tools. Compliance in—we do 350 billion transactions a day, and so compliance is massive data pattern recognition. And so we started with a team there that was looking at different models that could learn patterns and identify new patterns. And so we have an AI team that is very versed in data AI, not language AI. And then separately, when we bought a company called Ellie Mae from private equity, private equity had owned that company, and they had done a number of other acquisitions around it. And so we bought the package when we bought Ellie Mae, and we bought a company called AIQ, and it was essentially a large language model AI company. It was taking the language of a mortgage, the forms and format of how you, you know, apply and underwrite and manufacture a mortgage, and it was learning those models. So we've ended up with these two groups, that one that has data expertise and one that has language expertise. We've now had them going across the company just looking for opportunity. We have so many people in the company that are interested in this topic because we're largely a tech company full of developers that are writing code. And so we just said, "Okay, we got to marry these groups, and then allow people across the company to come to them with ideas so that they can help source the right models for us." Because we run our own data centers, we've had the ability to run a lot of different models in a controlled environment. We've also done some with the Big Three cloud providers, and try different things and then see what is the cost of that query? How much does it cost for us to do that? And some of it's very cool, but very expensive. You have to ask yourself, you know, "Is the juice worth the squeeze?" So, you know, part of that expertise we have is just like, hey, you know, I know this would be fun and cool, but the reality is, it's not gonna work financially, so let's find a higher use for these models. Just to follow up on that, you know, your whole infrastructure strategy is to build your own data centers- Yes. Own your own infrastructure, which, you know, I, I think to your point, is giving you some revenue and security advantages. On the flip side, one could argue you're not getting leverage in terms of intellectual capacity as the hyperscalers- Yeah or their large language models. Yeah. How do you sort of balance between those, those two points? And is there any disadvantage to not having that access to those large language models that, No, because we're... So we have the ICE Cloud, which is our network that we run, and then we also have the other big clouds that are attached to us, and we're cloud agnostic. So our customers can use our services however they see fit, and it's a different, you know, wink and nod is whatever they wanna pay for. So if they can get a good deal with a third-party cloud provider, you know, great. But having that access, we're using all those clouds ourselves. We look for, you know, value in using their scalability. And with our data set, our cloud is hooked to pretty much every major financial institution, probably most of the people that are here in the room with us. And, and so, you know, people that have models, people that have, that have chips, what have you, would like to have access to this cohort here, and, and we can give them that. So oddly, it's almost the opposite, where we're- they're coming to us saying: Can we joint venture with you and put things in your data center so that we can get access to some of your client base that, that, that otherwise wouldn't use our cloud? Okay. Speaking about that infrastructure, I think you mentioned your capacity booked out for the next couple of years- Yeah ... to 2026. I I thought was interesting. Yeah. Have you ever spoken to how meaningful your, you know, that business is, infrastructure from a revenue standpoint? And then, I think you were speaking to this just now, but what are the competitive advantages that are driving that amount of demand, for your infrastructure? Yeah. So, as you know, from, from looking at our, our reporting numbers, we have a data division, and within that data division is both the sale of data, but also the network that the data is sold over. And, and people are really always interested in, you know, how much more data did you sell? And what's the growth of the data sales? And, and what we've been trying to highlight is, hey, you know, don't just look at the data sales, look at, look at the network sale, because, because with these AI models now, people are, are demanding more and more information and more security of that information. And because, you know, we have intellectual property rights in that data, we, we don't wanna necessarily just let it, let it, flow, you know, flow out of our data center and, and have derivative products built on it that we lose control over. So we encourage people to come into our data center, or come onto our network so that we can control that from an intellectual property and, accountability standpoint on how that data gets used. Just so happens, we have, like, I don't know, over a dozen data, data centers and, some of the data center. This is largely from acquisitions that we've done and, and some of the data centers, as we've consolidated on our own footprint after doing, acquisitions, we have, we have excess capacity in them. These are built-out data centers that already have access to electric power and... And so, and, you know, and here they're full of data and information that, financial services industry is interested in. And so people are coming to us saying: Can I put my models, can I put my boxes in your data center, get access to, to your stuff? It'll give me an immediacy, it'll give me security. I can move quickly. We're a trusted source because we're already connected through cy- with the cyber overlay. And, and so we've been, been really promoting that. We, as you mentioned, we've already sold out our capacity for 2025 and 2026, and we're in conversations with people all the way through 2030, on, on, you know, the growth there. Great. I have more questions, but we're out of time here, Jeff. As always, fascinating conversation. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you very much, Christian. Thank you. Thank you all.