CME Group Inc. (NASDAQ:CME) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

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It’s important that we focus on the totality of the risk management capabilities. Myself and the team look forward to engaging with all of you in the other parts of our business to better understand and showcase things like repo and BrokerTec quote, which is now up to an impressive $45 billion to $50 billion per day. When we look at the interest rate swap, that business here at CME, still having a very strong quarter here in Q1, so seeing all near record levels in the major three Latin American currencies that we clear. That is a growth story, and it’s really important, to Terry’s earlier comments. These are all pieces of how we approach the totality of managing risk for the interest rate complex and the needs of our clients. These things go together, and it’s important than when we look at what we’ve been able to achieve in OTC markets, what we’ve been able to do in providing continued risk management for BrokerTec, that’s alongside record futurization in the treasury complex, where our futures and options at CME remain the leading center of price discovery and risk management.

With treasury futures now at a record 113% of the cash market in terms of the value being traded every day, they really have to look at all of the pieces of the puzzle together to understand the breadth of the offering here at CME for rate.

Terrence Duffy: Thanks Tim. You said what I was going to say, so that was very good – not all of it, I didn’t have all that, so thank you. Michael, hopefully that addressed your question as it relates to BrokerTec and what we’re doing and where we look at it from the percentages with others.

Michael Cyprys: Thank you.

Operator: Our next question now is from Simon Clinch with Redburn Atlantic. Your line is open.

Simon Clinch: Hi everyone. Thanks for taking my question. Most of my questions have been answered already, but I was wondering if you could just walk through sort of where we are in the long term progress with the Google cloud migration. I’m curious if you could talk about the sort of innovations that you are coming up with in partnership with Google to deal with the back end aims of that migration in terms of moving the rest of the business to the cloud, dealing with your co-location clients and things like that. Quite longer term stuff, but interested nonetheless.

Terrence Duffy: I’m going to turn it to Sunil, Simon; but on the back end of your question, we are obviously, and I’ve said this from the beginning, we will wait until the work is complete. I’m assuming the back end, you’re referring to the markets going into the cloud – is that where you were going?

Simon Clinch: Yes, that’s right. Yes.

Terrence Duffy: Okay, so again, that is yet to be finalized, and the data center is yet to be finalized. We’re working on all those things, but again as I’ve said from the very beginning of this transaction, I will not put CME’s markets into the cloud or any other platform unless it’s better than, more efficient than what CME offers today to its clients. When we get that, we’ll make that final decision, but we have not seen that product yet. They’re working on it, and Sunil and his team are working on it, so we can’t answer the back part of that question just yet. Sunil can answer the beginning part.

Sunil Cutinho: I’ll answer two aspects of that question. One is related to migration of the non-market workloads, and there we are making very good progress. We intend to migrate our clearing regulatory services and business intelligence services this year, subject to regulatory approval, of course. Then the second aspect of it is the data platform, we spoke a little bit about it. What we have done is we stood up our data platform. We have over 26 petabytes of rich historical information that includes our market data, instantaneous order book, so this information will be available for monetization in the future. We are adding to it risk information as we are migrating our clearing workloads, and the risk information will be risk scenarios, and I spoke to that later as far as monetization of those in future cycles.

Terrence Duffy: Does that answer your question, Simon? Okay, I think we lost Simon. Simon, thank you very much for your question.

Operator: Our next question is from Benjamin Budish with Barclays. Your line is now open.

Benjamin Budish: Hi, good morning, and thanks for taking the question. Maybe just following up on that last point on the market data side, can you maybe talk about how you think about the longer term growth potential of that offering? It sounds like there’s plenty of other opportunities to kind of increasingly add value to the package there. What about in terms of the client base? How do you think about the penetration of potential subscribers versus opportunities to kind of enhance what you’re adding? Thank you.

Terrence Duffy: Thanks Ben, good question. I’ll turn it over to Ms. Winkler for a response.

Julie Winkler: All right, I think I will start where Sunil was talking. I mean, I think as it relates to being able to have our consolidated data sets [indiscernible] so as we think about easing on-boarding to those tools and [indiscernible] analytics, able to offer [indiscernible], these are new opportunities that we otherwise did not have, and I think the ability to really facilitate access to customers to our data, we’re seeing a lot of interest from customers as well for the risk management capabilities, more explainability into our margin model, and this is towards our business. We’re here to manage risk, and our ability to be able to provide them data and insights much faster, we believe will not just help our data business but also be additive to our SaaS-based business.

But we continue to see strong demand on the professional subscriber side. The [indiscernible] data, as we talked about earlier, putting the one-time activity aside from Q1, we’re still seeing strong demand, and that is really a product [indiscernible] benchmark and that price discovery that we’re offering to our customer base. I’d say the participation regionally has also been extremely strong, and so I think collectively we’re looking at the business as not just you have to continue to provide data sets, new offerings [indiscernible] access to it, but how are we leveraging our [indiscernible] that more attractive, that part of the package. We had record cross-sell across our [indiscernible] so that’s been an initiative over the last couple [indiscernible] really making sure we are selling data and those services alongside our existing [indiscernible] product [indiscernible] be a result of that as well, so feel very positive [indiscernible].

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