Hello? Okay. I think we'll get started here in this session. Good afternoon, everyone. Thanks for joining for our next session here with Intercontinental Exchange. I'm delighted to welcome yet again to the conference Jeff Sprecher, Founder, Chairman, and CEO of ICE. I believe this is the eighth time in a row he's attending the conference, so thank you. Hoping to make it 10 in a couple of years. Appreciate you attending the conference. Thank you. It's a really good conference, so I appreciate the invitation to be back here after a year. Fantastic. As always, as a reminder, you could ask Jeff a question through the Pigeonhole system. There should be some QR code on one of the screens that you can use, and I'll try to get that to him towards the end of the conversation. So Jeff, let's, you know, let's just start with, what's been the, the strength of the business over the last couple of years, actually, which has been the energy business. Revenues there have almost doubled over the last three years. And, you know, there's been a lot of tailwinds. You know, feels like we've seen some sort of slowdown, if you like, since, since May as we move past the volatility around Liberation Day. Just curious what you're seeing, in that end market and what gives you confidence for continued robust growth. I, you know, it may have slowed from the high volatility of the tariff conversations, but I think month to date we're still, our volumes are up 18% year over year, like still a very healthy double-digit growth against a very good last year, as you've pointed out. We feel really good about that business. It just, we're well positioned. There's a lot of change in the energy market right now, partly due to trade, partly due to new policy, with the U.S. wanting to drill more and export more. The Middle East, somewhat getting away from the OPEC plus commitments. Europe trying to figure out its long-term energy strategy. People speculating about what may happen with the Russia conflict and whether Russia will be able to re-enter the energy markets in the West. All of that is just kind of, and there's an energy transition that still exists today. I mean, you know, as you're hearing about all these data center constructions, the people that are, it's just almost endemic in the conversation that whatever energy powers that is going to be clean. All of that just seems, feels very healthy as a backdrop to risk management around the energy space. Okay. Let, let's dig into a couple of those topics. You mentioned AI, Russia, Ukraine. May, maybe start with Russia, Ukraine. That was clearly a tailwind for your markets. Supply chains have shifted. To the extent we see any sort of normalization of European-Russian relations, how do you think about growth in your businesses, whether it be nat gas and tailwinds around TTF or any other sort of businesses? If you recall what happened, right after the conflict started, Europe very quickly said, "We wanna disconnect from Russian gas, and, and Russia energy broadly." They didn't actually do it immediately. They announced they wanted to do it and they actually announced a transition, and some countries haven't ever transitioned off. It's been a bit of a, I don't know, a gradient and a mixed bag, with respect to Russia. What it caused the market to do is we had all these Western clients that were trading or hedging or taking delivery of commodity products that said, "We don't want Russia." The indices, the delivery specifications, and what have you were all sort of reoriented to be ex-Russia. It took a while for that to happen. It actually depressed some of our trading markets while we were in that transition. Now the market today has, you know, developed infrastructure that has some that has Russia involvement and some that has no Russia involvement. I feel like regardless of how the war ends, hopefully ends, and the conflict ends, and determinations are made by the West on how it wants to deal with Russia, the risk management framework that exists already today can accommodate, you know, a range of outcomes to the positive. Okay. Fair. The other topic you mentioned was AI and sort of power demand there as we see a surge in electricity demand. Are you seeing that in your markets in terms of incremental user demand for your risk management products? Maybe what type of products are these players using? Yeah, absolutely. As I mentioned, it, it's definitely clean. I mean, you know, we're all hearing these conversations about this, this need for more processing capacity, to the point that you hear the hyperscalers saying, "We need to build nuclear power plants," but you do not hear anyone saying, "We need to build a coal-fired power plant," at least in the West, to power these. Even, as a result of some of the recent meetings in the Middle East, you see, "Okay, we're gonna build, you know, massive centers that have the hyperscalers involved, and they're gonna be in the Middle East closer to some of the Middle Eastern fuels." So for us, it still feels like it's a natural gas transition. There will be some renewables around that, aspirationally nuclear. I just, you know, I just do not think you're gonna see coal in the West. Let me mention one other thing that we're seeing, which is we run a massive financial services network. Like our network, probably because the New York Stock Exchange is an anchor tenant, is widely dispersed around the world in financial services. We have a network and a data center infrastructure that we run. We are not on the cloud. We're hooked to the cloud so all of our customers can take our products via the cloud if they want to, but that's kind of the last mile. We really run the network and the data centers. As you probably see in our data, when you look at it, we're seeing an uptick in the demand for access to our data centers, which we think is, you know, driven partly by AI. When I will tell you that we sell colocation space in the data center next to the New York Stock Exchange, next to our energy markets and commodity markets. Latency-sensitive traders, you know, have that colocation space. We have not really seen the market put the AI models in the data center. It feels to us like people that are using AI models are taking the data out of the data center, running their models, coming up with investment decisions, and then bringing them back into the data center. Right now, we do not see AI as being latency-sensitive. We have partly seen it in other businesses, including our own. People do not fully trust the answers that are coming out of the AI model. The AI model may, may give you an answer, but human beings are then sort of checking and calibrating that answer and not letting the model itself make, make the investment decisions. One would think that over time, as the models get better, as the confidence factors grow, that the models themselves will be colocated and will become latency-sensitive. We are building out our infrastructure as if that will happen, because we have had enough conversations with our clients to realize, like, this is a likely outcome. One last one on energy. Clearly, ICE has been a winner both from just the growth in energy risk management and relative to peers. Given just all the changes that are happening, whether it's, you know, changing LNG trade routes, OPEC plus volatility, benchmarks moving back and forth, you mentioned AI, and generally ICE's focus around the commercial customer base. Anything you see around changes in sort of the energy ecosystem that could impact ICE's business long-term? Yeah, two things, touching on both the, both the items that I heard you say. One is, you know, I'm, you mentioned I'm the founder of this company. When we started this company, we didn't know how big the energy market could grow. We didn't think it could grow. We thought it would grow because there was an analog to digital conversion, and just giving people more information faster will make more decisions. We thought it would be easy to cover the entire universe of people that would hedge energy. Like, you know, I doubt anyone in this room here that we will ever buy a barrel of WTI or Brent Crude. We kinda thought, you know, we'll reach 100% market share quickly. The reality is we keep expanding, like new players and participants keep wanting to hedge energy. This is 20 years later after digitization, you know. I was wrong, thinking that we would hit a terminal value. I don't know where it is, but I know, you know, every year we're surprised by the continued growth in access to people, including many people like you now who are taking energy pricing into decisions that you may be making about correlated asset classes and sort of the computer power that is grabbing energy prices and using that input to make some other decision. That, and so the distribution keeps growing. The other thing, which is a little bit esoteric, was that the flagship product that we had in year 2001, it was called Brent Crude Oil. Brent was an oil field in the North Sea off of the coast of the U.K. That oil field, both due to the geology and public policy in the U.K., is no longer in existence. We trade this contract called Brent, but there is no Brent crude in Brent. We have had to evolve the contract, and we did that by adding other grades of crude, esoteric things, a thing called Ekofisk and Forties, Ossenberg. These are other oil fields that were around the North Sea that were premium grades of oil. Most recently, as you know, Christian, we have added U.S. West Texas Intermediate crude into that index. Today, about 50% of the time, the Brent index price is U.S. crude that is largely exported, largely out of Texas, largely, you know, West Texas fracking oil that makes its way to Houston and then out to sea and is being exported. A very interesting thing is that this contract that used to be in the North Sea has now sort of moved its center of gravity, and has evolved to becoming the global price of oil. It was always used to hedge global oil, but it is truly the global price of oil. Where WTI, which we also trade that marker, is oil in pipelines in Cushing, Oklahoma, the oil pipeline system in the U.S. is, I don't know, a little more stagnant in terms of its. It will probably always be the marker that we'll read about, you know, here at the news. Like, sounds like the Dow Jones Industrial Average gets talked about. I think we'll always talk about WTI as the oil price. The global marker really has become Brent, and you can see its outsized performance relative to its peers. That's simply because it's been reconstituted over time by us to be something that it wasn't when we acquired it. Yeah. Maybe just to follow up, it's very clear that ICE is a very global business, and you've benefited from a lot of global trends. I mean, to your point, Brent essentially is now exported WTI. In a world where potentially there's deglobalization, much more localization, is there a risk to sort of your business model around being global? Yeah, let me tell you something that I've seen from my vantage point that is weird to me. For whatever reason, when we started this business, commodities around the world are traded in US dollars. The price of oil, whether it came from Russia or the North Sea or anywhere else, was always in barrels per dollar, you know, dollar per barrel. Most commodities, corn, soybeans, and I don't know, natural gas, you name it, most commodities, physical commodities, are actually traded in dollars. As I mentioned, the distribution is getting bigger, not smaller, and it's becoming more global, not regional. Dollar business is making its way all over the place. What's more interesting to me is, you know, we own the New York Stock Exchange, and the volume of trading, particularly since COVID, has asymptotically taken off. In April, we were doing 1.3 trillion transactions a day. 1.3 trillion transactions a day on the New York Stock Exchange. The systems have scaled to places we never thought they could go. You say, what, why is that? Something has happened. There was obviously a price war over free trading commission. There have been Reddit and Facebook groups and other people that are talking about stocks. There's a younger generation, but there was also the explosion of crypto, which is global. You have, you know, let's say a young person in Korea wanted to buy Bitcoin. In order to buy Bitcoin, they were maybe buying, circled USDC or Tether, which is a dollar proxy, right? You had people, young people in Korea were figuring out how to take, you know, the Korean won and convert it to, to some dollar equivalent. A lot of those crypto brokers became securities brokers because these people wanted to own the Magnificent Seven. You now have this kind of global equity and commodity business that is all dollar denominated and is ubiquitous around the world. I think about, you know, these regional exchanges around the world that are listing, trying to list commodities or securities in their local currency. It is like, okay, that is kind of interesting, but your addressable market is tiny compared to how we have dollarized, U.S. dollarized the business. I can guarantee you after hearing me, you're gonna go read an article the next day or two or three that says the U.S. dollar is at risk of losing its reserve currency status. I hear that, and then I look at our own business and it's like, really? I don't know anybody that wants to buy oil in Korean won or even in euro or in pounds or, you know, it's, I just, like, what is the alternative when the velocity of commerce, including during a period when we're pulling back on trade and having these trade conversations, the financial markets have just been dollarizing the world. I don't see that. I think that all endures to our benefit. You know, we're fortunate. We're headquartered in the U.S. and our product suite is largely dollar-based and largely globally distributed. I just feel like that tailwind is partly what's been driving us and will continue to drive us. Okay. Let's switch over to the mortgage business. It's one where you've obviously made, you know, a significant bet with the LME and the Black Knight deals. You know, by some measures, that market is half the size it was when you did those acquisitions. Is the addressable opportunity that you thought when you bought those deals still, still there today? Or do you see some need to scale back ambitions? Actual volume of new loans is down, is what you're talking to about, largely due to current interest rates and supply issues. We don't, we haven't seen the TAM. We don't think the TAM has shrunk. In fact, we've probably grown our TAM because we've acquired Black Knight and entered deeper into the business in terms of servicing mortgages. Our business has done well. It's outperformed, you know, the number, those kind of numbers because increasing, you know, we had, I think we signed up in the first quarter, 20 new clients who want our underwriting platforms. We have 100 clients that were on our systems that we cross-sold to other businesses. We do see this adoption of a digital end-to-end ecosystem, and moving away from wet signatures on paper documents in the mortgage space and digitizing and standardizing the data sets and storing the data in digital vaults, in transacting with the marketplace digitally as opposed to sending boxes with barcodes on them. That trend, if you will, is real. We see it, and it's not necessarily related to the underlying transactions. I think we're spring-loaded when, you know, we still look at the demographics of this millennial population in the U.S. that is, that is family formation is going on and wealth has been created and people want, you know, in a work-from-home environment, they wanna live where you can't, unless you work on Wall Street. They wanna live where you can and have an extra room that you can use as an office, that kind of thing. We still see the pressures that are there, that are just kind of waiting for an equilibration of mortgage rates and supply. Okay. You know, to your point, you've gotten a couple of very marquee clients, whether it's JP Morgan, Fifth Third, and recently United Wholesale Mortgage onto the platform. Can you talk about what the adoption curve for these clients look like? You know, what do they typically start with? Ultimately, what are they going for? How do you think about timeline to scale monetization? Are we talking about quarters, years? Kind of love your view. Yeah. It's interesting because senior management says, hey, we've gotta digitize and we've gotta take costs out. You know, it could cost up to $10,000 for the infrastructure to create a new mortgage. It's probably no less than $6,000 and maybe more than $10,000, depends on the company. If you could automate that, and largely that's a lot of manual labor. If you could automate that, you can take those costs out. Senior management is very interested in doing that. What we see though is it takes time. These are heart and lung transplants for major lenders. It takes time to put the system in because it talks to a lot of other systems, often in a lender. It takes time to train people. It takes time. What is fascinating to me is it takes time for the people that are using the new systems to feel confident in using the new system. For example, one of the neat things about this space, mortgage, is that it's very regulated, right? There is federal home regulation, there is state regulation, there is county regulation. There are all kinds of regulations, locally about permitting and construction and what have you. They are all regulations that are written down. We have been able to take AI models and, unlike trying to learn the English language and figure out, you know, George Washington's race or what does a teacher look like because it depends on what country you're in. In this space, it's kind of a defined language. The model has learned the language. We can tell an underwriter, for example, or somebody working on a mortgage, we say to our clients, you know, we can take an hour's worth of work that you used to do manually and we can have that automated and do it, let's say in 15 minutes. We deploy this and we go back into the company and the senior manager says, wait a minute, we thought we were gonna be doing this in 15 minutes down from an hour and it's actually taken an hour and 15 minutes. Why is that? They do the 15-minute AI model and then people do not trust AI models, just like I was saying before. Then they go do all the manual work and then they compare the manual work to the AI model. I feel like one of the things that's happening, and maybe this is the AA use of AI broadly, is, it's gonna take a while before you have enough use cases that you build confidence that you're gonna actually let that make a decision where you have your own money at risk. I feel like you guys all pick stocks and research stocks and what have you. I've heard people say, oh, you're all gonna be out of business. The reality is like, I don't think any of your companies are gonna let a model pick a stock and put the money, put the capital at risk, right? You're gonna use the model, maybe help you come up with some ideas and then go validate those ideas yourself. I don't know at what point and maybe never. Right now. I hope. Yeah. Right now, the confidence level in AI, I hear these people say, oh, you're never gonna hire another computer programmer. I got, I have, we have just under 3,000 engineers working on this, this mortgage infrastructure. Like it's a massive, scalable, huge network infrastructure that we're building. And we use code, we use AI to write code and then we have a human being goes line by line through the damn code before we would ever deploy it, you know? And, and so is it helpful? Yes. Are we ignoring it? No. Has it given us these benefits where 3,000 engineers are not coming to work tomorrow? No. And will it ever? I don't know. You know, that's, so that's a long-winded way of saying the deployment is, is gonna be gradual. Yeah. It's gonna have to build confidence. Yeah. Okay. I would say like your strategy, you talked about building sort of an end-to-end platform, vertically integrated across the entire mortgage ecosystem. It feels like Rocket Mortgage is doing something similar, particularly post their recent acquisitions of Black Knight, Mr. Cooper. Maybe just talk about how you view Rocket as a competitor. What do you see as your greatest differentiation to that company? I think if anyone looks at what we're building and says we have an end-to-end software package, then they're missing what we're trying to do. We're actually building a network. It happens to have software on it. The New York Stock Exchange is a software. Like, you know, when you're interfacing with NYSE, you're interfacing with the software. When you're buying this Brent crude oil, you're interfacing with a piece of software. The value of the New York Stock Exchange is that thousands of counterparties are also attached to it and are using the software simultaneously to develop a bid-offer spread. What we envision with mortgage is we're simply building a consumer interest rate marketplace. Its value will be on the thousands of other mortgage counterparties that are there. Yes, they're gonna be using the software to underwrite and manage mortgages. The reality is, is they also need to work with each other. This is not a, the industry in the U.S. has a lot of counterparties and mortgages change hands and servicing rights change hands. If nothing more than Fannie and Freddie buy the mortgage and package them into mortgage-backed securities. Those data files, which used to be sent around in boxes, do not need to be sent any. All the digital record is in the network and the permissioning is changed to have access to it. The overlay, to look at the entire industry, these models that I'm talking about, which can now just scan an entire industry, are more valuable the bigger the number of market participants. I think, you know, we will have clients that'll wanna have their part of their own tech stack to run part of their proprietary business. If you wanna be a part of the market, then I think you're gonna join our network. And that's great, you know? I think then the value, what ICE will have, I'm hoping a few years from now we'll be talking about the mortgage network and not the individual components, which, just like we don't talk about, you know, there's 20 software packages running around the New York Stock Exchange, pre-opening auction packages and limit up, limit down packages and all kinds of software that we just take for granted that that's how a market works. That's where I'm hoping we'll get to in mortgage. It's, it'll, it's the network effect that will make it valuable, not the software. Okay. Just back to your point around, ICE's business has outperformed the overall market decline. Part of that has been, it feels like, incremental. You'll be making more money per loan, per closed loan. Just think about it. Can you talk about pricing power of the business as you sort of build this network over time? If we take as a pro forma, given that it costs $10,000 to write a mortgage, to the extent we can automate all that, or the bulk of it, and then network it so that the person providing a flood report, the title insurance company, the credit reporting agency, the employer that may send a W-2 to the borrower, the condo association documents, you know, everything that goes into people thinking about an underwriting, to the extent that's all networked, we're gonna take those costs way down. Our view is that people will pay us a portion of that savings in order to do that. That, that's the, but the reason that we think they'll come to us to do it is that all the counterparties that I just mentioned and anybody in the industry will be on that network. I think we have 75,000 notary publics on the network. You know, I mean, at some point, just, it's kind of just, you know, a ubiquitous thing that will have saved everybody money, but, you know, will have made money for our shareholders because we were the ones that took all that cost out on their behalf. Okay. And then on the mortgage business, obviously a lot of the capabilities you've acquired them so far. Do you think there are still major parts that you need to do more acquisitions to further the network or are we talking more about a organic strategy going forward? You know, it's hard to say. First of all, we have all the major pieces, and that's the good news. We also have, you know, thousands of third parties that are using our network. Why do they use our network? Once a major bank, once we're inside the mortgage operation of a major bank, a new market participant who wants to digitally send something around mortgage or take something around mortgage from that major bank, the bank doesn't really want them showing up and talking to their network people and trying to figure out how to get through the firewall. They just say, hook to the ICE network. There's a level of trust, a cyber overlay over us. We're a trusted vendor. We can manage that to and fro from them. I tell you that because it means we see sort of every new startup, we see every change that's going on in terms of what's being digitized and who the preferred vendors are, and all those people that are using our network pay us a fee to have access to it. There may be bolt-on things where it would be better if we owned it on behalf of the industry and made it an industry utility. We have those conversations every day, but it, you know, those are kind of nice to have other than must have. I also think, you know, we have about 5,000 clients that use us to price their mortgage-backed securities. So we're very deep into a lot of you in the audience, you know, your companies that to the extent you have fixed income platforms. I, and that audience is looking also for help in organizing and pricing mortgage-backed, you know, securities and structures and things that can evolve. There's a big movement, or at least a conversation with major lenders to have offer a portable mortgage where you and I as mortgage holders could take our mortgage when we sold the house if we liked the lender and we liked the price. That means you've gotta change the mortgage-backed security that it comes out of. How do you do that? Do you substitute collateral? Is there an economic deal with the MBS holder? Like what, but none of that can be done if we're just shooting boxes around. I do think, you know, there are solutions that people are talking about and building, entrepreneurs are building, and others have in that whole secondary market ecosystem that are interesting that could be acquisition candidates. Good stuff. Let me pivot to audience questions 'cause there's quite a, quite a few that's come in. Maybe the first one is, some of your peers have made a big push into retail trading. Is this a priority for ICE? It's a good question because when Sam Bankman-Fried was around, I got very worried that FTX was going to roll up the market from a retail standpoint and was gonna digitize and tokenize the trading of everything and that we were gonna look like a legacy company. And under, by law, under U.S. law, we're not allowed to create, for example, NYSE direct. It's not that we're idiots. We have, you know, an unbelievable, like we're known as being financial services technology, but, you know, we're not allowed to be a broker-dealer, for example. It was unclear to us whether crypto was, were securities or not and whether, and, and, and so we were prohibited from doing that. There was a period in time when I was very nervous about it. You may recall we were flirting with eBay. We were looking for who has a retail footprint that the regulators would allow us to own. Interestingly enough, our shareholders did not want us to own it. We abandoned it. What we have now, we have kind of solved the problem. What we have now is, you know, 3,000 lenders that have apps where consumers are making their mortgage payments or putting out their information to write a home loan. We are the white label behind all that. That is all one system. It is one database that we see. We have visibility now into the consumer. They are not our client. We are a B2B company, but we feel much better because we feel like we control the technology. If there are innovative things that need to be done to help the lender, we'll just go build them and we'll push them out. We won't be disadvantaged. That is actually a more natural fit for us. We really are a B2B company. We're really a network infrastructure company. We do not have balance sheet risk or, you know, lending direct balance sheet. We do not have those retail customer relationships, but our clients do. What we have decided to do is really do better at empowering our clients. We can do that actually as a result of the mortgage. Like I say, none of you care about having an app that you can buy Brent Crude Oil, but you will care about having an app where you can make your mortgage payment. Okay. Another question. ICE has talked about being late to the analog to digital conversion happening in fixed income trading. Is that still an ambition today? We were late. I mean, I'm trying to be transparent as to why we're doing what we're doing, and we were late. Also, the problem with securities trading, including the New York Stock Exchange, is that we do not own the intellectual property. I spent a fair amount of time talking about the Brent situation. We own that IP. We controlled it. We navigated it. We have invested in it, and it has paid big dividends. The weird thing about stocks and bonds is that you all, that my in the audience here create these things and entrepreneurs create them, and then we just are a listing venue. There are multiple listing venues around. Over time, since you do not control anything, the IP, it is hard to have any pricing power and prices tend to collapse. We make our money at the New York Stock Exchange because we have listings and because we have data, because we have indices, because we have services that we provide to ETF providers. Like, we make money around the ecosystem, but trading, no. We were late, but also not particularly ambitious to try to just bust our way in there because we would be, you know, number four in a list of three really good, well-known competitors. The only thing we'd be able to compete on likely is price. That's just not who we are. We view ourselves as a premium brand, not a discounter. I will tell you that if you look at, you know, our peers, the bond trading business of our peers in the first quarter are generally flat. A lot of our peers did well because there was a lot of rates trading, interest rate trading, but bonds themselves were generally flat, but our bond business grew 30%. Why is that? It was not because we discounted. It was because we have built a whole bunch of other, and by the way, it grew 30% off a small base. I do not want to oversell it, but we built an ecosystem around that. That is a pretty high value ecosystem where we are growing and compounding revenues, and building, taking in, you know, client relationships and market share. It is sort of backhanding us into a trading business. I think we found the right place. I think there was a natural place that we would fit and I think we found it. Okay. So you would've been interested in getting bigger in that, say by acquisition? Never say never, but we like to buy things where we think if you put 'em on our network or put 'em into our tech stack, they would grow. And, you know, we, the New York Stock Exchange, as I mentioned, the ecosystem in there, it's multiple times bigger than it was when we bought it in 2013, but it's a completely new tech stack. When we bought New York Stock Exchange, it had 5,000 employees and 1,000 contractors. Today it has 830. I mean, it's a very different business. So, you know, if you say to me, are there businesses out there where you could do a similar, you know, put technology in, take costs out, maybe it's gonna be a GDP grower, but it's gonna, you know, the bottom line's gonna grow much faster than that. Maybe, but I don't know. Those don't fall off of trees, you know? I mean, you got a moment in time kind of thing. I miss a banker and not happy. Can you talk about? We've done like, I literally think we've done 50 M&A or capital markets or disposition transactions. There's no banker that we know in our space that doesn't feel like they should hang around our net, you know? All right. Can you talk, there's another question from the audience, by the way. Can you talk about the pipeline for new mortgage deals with large banks? How much of the mortgage market from big banks? How much of the mortgage market is from big banks with, I guess, with internal systems? Yeah. There's sort of two things going on. One is we saw the rise of non-bank lending over the last, you know, decade or so, and some of that was constrained by Basel rules. There's a pretty big conversation about potential changes or relief to those Basel rules to put more lending back into the big banks or at least give them an opportunity to compete for that lending. That's a good thing because those big banks that aren't on our platform are thinking about, okay, you know, maybe there's gonna be a different environment here for us and maybe we should invest ahead of it. Those are the kind of conversations we're having with people not on our platform. Also, for the non-banks, they tend to be pretty tech-savvy or marketing-savvy to build their position. They wanna make sure that they stay ahead of the curve. A lot, we're having a lot of conversation about, you know, I mean, I mentioned that we had 100 cross-sells, of people that were already on our network that decided to take more services from us. It feels like there's a brewing competition, between new versus old and big versus small and entrepreneurs versus legacy that is fueling an investment cycle that that's what you see in our numbers. Okay. I think, one more, I think you've already answered on M&A. I guess the question is, do you intend to continue with M&A as a future growth strategy or do you have a desire and intention to expand your existing businesses? So we, when we bought our latest acquisition, Black Knight, we levered up and we worked with the rating agencies and said, you know, we would wanna get back to three times leverage before we, felt like, you know, we were back to a normal environment. We announced on our last earnings call a few weeks ago that we're at 3.2 times leverage. We are weaning our way through that leverage, and we announced that we have excess capital now as a result, even being at 3.2. We started our share buybacks. We tend to do, you know, our own analysis on what's the best use of capital for our shareholders. If we can deploy it to some business that has a high return on invested capital, we would do it. If we can't, we also look at our own stock price and say if we're undervalued in our own mind to our, against our own models, we should be buying our own company. Generally speaking, you see us do a lot of share buybacks with free cash flow. We only really think about doing M&A when we think that we can get you a higher return on capital through that transaction. We've been pretty disciplined. Our share buy, I mean, I think we have pretty much perfect record on share buybacks. We've grown earnings every single year since we've been a public company. Any share buyback we did in the past looks good. It looks like, you know, we didn't screw up. As long as we have that track record there, you're gonna see us, we'd like to grow the dividend, but you're gonna see us, you know, lean more into share buybacks, I suspect, unless and until something comes along that was really sexy that we think we could get you a better return. Okay. Just quickly, a couple of questions on your data, your data business. Just given all the macro and policy uncertainty out there, are you seeing any, I don't know, hesitation in the end markets, any slowing of sales cycles? Yeah. No, just the opposite actually. We, a couple of years ago, maybe eight, 18 months, two years ago, there was a lot of trepidation. Our data business broadly was growing around 5%. I think, you know, last quarter it was like 7%. So we've actually seen more confidence. We've had more signatures, new signatures. We've had people that we had, we could see like two years ago, people were interested and they would get a contract, but they would kind of drag the execution signature out, like waiting for another quarter, a lot of wait and see attitude. We do not feel that now. We feel like we're engaged with people who want data, information, networking services, access to our markets, and they're in real time talking to us about, you know, we need this information. I don't know if it's the AI overlay. I mean, look, we have a lot of proprietary data to feed models and to do valuations and a lot of strategic data that underpin these markets that are foundational. I don't know, it just feels pretty good. Like, we have a very nice pipeline and not a lot of hesitation as might be suggested by the question. Okay. It feels like within data, connectivity has been a really, and you alluded to this earlier on, has been a really, sort of strong growth. You have a ton of connectivity products, the network, chat, voice. Is there an opportunity to unify these platforms and build other broader communications business over time? Yeah. What we're seeing and we're putting pieces in place. What we're seeing is a demand for unstructured data to be organized. So things, you know, like, you know, we all learned to write cursive in school and, you know, there's a whole generation now that is never gonna write cursive. I mean, and they type on their phones. I think the generation behind them is not gonna even learn to type on their phones. They're gonna talk to their phones. All that voice data is gonna, that unstructured voice data is gonna need to be organized, discerned, and put in buckets that can be searched and contribute to some kind of cognitive outcome. We have been making a lot of investments in kind of esoteric things so that we do not, you know, we stay at the forefront of, of the way, you know, behavior around financial markets is. We have some joint ventures around, you know, Turret phones, voice phones, you know, a lot of chat functionality that has robots and AI built into the, to make, to, to suggestions. Same thing, you know, our help desk has become very automated with AI tools for customer support. We just see that as a, as a evolution of the way the markets are going, partly because of what you, we think your children are gonna be doing. Anyway, I, I am very proud of the team. Working with unstructured data at scale is a real skill. It is a database skill that we really have. I mean, if you ask what, you know, if I'm buying ICE, what am I buying? You're really buying database expertise coupled with high velocity networking, secure high velocity networking. That's what we do, whether it's a mortgage or the New York Stock Exchange or Brent Crude Oil or what have you. It's all the underpinnings to the people that built all this is just high velocity database at scale. All right. As we round out the clock here, maybe just a longer term question here. You know, the company celebrates its 25th anniversary. Maybe what's your vision for the next decade? And then obviously done a great job as founder and CEO, but I'm curious how you're thinking about planning for leadership succession over the next. Yeah. Let me start with that. I do think, you know, my successors, somebody in the company, I mean, that's our goal is that we're training the next generation. We've made a lot of, you may have seen if you follow my company closely, Stuart Williams, who ran our energy business out of Europe, is now in headquarters as the Chief Operating Officer. Ben Jackson, who's our President, who was really overseeing a lot of our business as the Chief Operating Officer as well, was running mortgage. Lynn Martin, who ran our data business, is now running equities. Chris Edmonds, who ran our clearing business, is now running data. You know, the head, our General Counsel of the New York Stock Exchange, is now running our clearing business. We have moved a lot of people around in order to give them expertise, to keep them engaged 'cause we don't wanna lose anyone, give them new, you know, hills to climb, but also to help build a team that can work together to succeed me. That's my hope, is that we would never, that you will know that you already know the person who will replace me is our goal. Also, I don't know, I just, I feel like the business is telling us where to go and the business is, you know, still better, faster, cheaper, more widely distributed, more networked, more connectivity with people, more demand for information, more automation in the way information is handled. Like that's just what we do. It just, I don't know, it's like a magnet just keeps pulling us. Fortunately, it's been, of all the businesses that you've asked me about, it's pulled all the, our businesses in that direction. Great. I think with that, we'll end it there. Thank you very much, Jeff, as always. Great. Thank you, Christian. Thank you.