Intercontinental Exchange, Inc. (NYSE:ICE) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

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Customers don’t just want to trade big benchmark contracts, but they want to trade those in parallel to deep liquid markets that are at the point of production and consumption of where they’re concerned about and have to actually buy the product. And there’s no – questionably, the last trend would be a move towards greener energy. And we’ve built our business with a very long lens towards helping our customers manage risk through all of these. We have a deep liquid set of contracts, hundreds of them around the world. We have a lot of different pricing points across each of those sectors, whether it’s commodities, energy, cleaner fuels, environmental markets, gas, power, you name it. We built our business with that diversification and with our customers’ needs in mind.

And we see the setup is great for us. You look at just the results that we’ve had. We’re at or near an average daily volume market share high in crude oil and across our global oil complex. We’re adding open interest market share high in North American gas and global gas. We’re at or near an all-time revenue share high in June across energy. We’ve had record active market participation in multiple products such as TTF gas and continuing to grow rapidly in the environmental space. And our futures markets continue to set records in terms of market data subscribers on to our platform. So overall, we feel great about all those underlying trends. And then to cap it off, you look at what’s been going on with Brent, and that being from a futures and options standpoint the largest oil benchmark in the world.

A lot of the products that we have are very complementary to that. And with some of the significant changes that are happening were dated Brent, our contract now has Midland TI oil coming into it. The fact that we saw that coming launched our Midland WTI, our ICE Midland WTI contract known as HOU, that contract continues to grow very well. And since Midland TI was introduced into the Brent complex this summer, we’ve seen that contract continue to grow rapidly. And we’ve had over 50 million barrels of oil that has now been delivered against that contract. So we feel great about the prospects of where we’re positioned, both for the balance of this year and into the future.

Operator: Thank you. The next question today comes from the line of Alexander Blostein from Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead, Alexander. Your line is now open.

Aditya Soman: Hi. Good morning. This is actually Aditya filling in for Alex. Thanks for taking the question. Another question within fixed income on the execution side. We’ve seen continued progress in fixed income execution, although from a small base. You’ve been adding capabilities here with the recent launch of the Sweeps Protocol. Can you provide more KPIs for this business? What are your electronic markets like in IG and high yield? Where do you see it going over the next 12 months? And lastly, how does price compare to incumbent platforms and protocols that you compete in? Thanks.

Lynn Martin: Yes. This is Lynn. Thanks for the question. So traditionally, on the execution side, we’ve operated in the – our core market’s really been the muni market. Now I think what’s really encouraging about this quarter is you saw strong growth from us even though the muni markets have had muted volatility, muted activity this quarter. And I think that’s really been attributable to the fact that we really have spent the last couple of years building out our distribution framework and focusing on building our distribution framework and getting access to the institutional users, but also continuing to gain share in retail and wealth. So despite the fact that the muni markets have been quieter in Q2 than over the last year, we were able to gain share, continue to gain share in the retail and wealth side of the business.

Now importantly, because we had done the development efforts and the integration efforts into the institutional side of the business, the treasury markets, which had a much more attractive yield profile, were able to have outsized results, which drove the growth in this quarter, which you saw that coming from not just retail and wealth segments, but also the institutional side of the business. And as you noted, we have made significant investments in the technology because the distribution has been there into the institutional side of the business in addition to the traditional wealth and retail side of the business. When we upgraded the technology to perform our sweeps as we announced earlier this week, we’ve been able to start to gain a bit of share on the corporate side of the business, U.S. corporates in particular, particularly investment-grade over the last few months.

Now that’s still very early days, but we’re optimistic because of the investments that we have made in the platform not just on the technology side, but also building the distribution over the last couple of months and doing it on a market-by-market basis.

Operator: Thank you. There were no additional questions waiting at this time. So I’d like to pass the call back over to Jeff Sprecher for any closing remarks. Please go ahead.

Jeffrey Sprecher: Well, thank you, Bailey. Thank you all for joining us this morning. And I’d also like to again thank my colleagues for delivering the best first half in our company’s history. And I’d also like to thank our customers for their continued business and for their trust. We look forward to updating you again soon as we continue to innovate and build on this all-weather business model that generates growth on top of growth. And with that, I hope you all have a great day.

Operator: This concludes today’s conference call. Thank you all for your participation. You may now disconnect.

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