So while small contributors to the overall bottom line, products like CEP, best execution that we’ve talked about in the past, there continues to be strong demand for those products as fixed income markets continue to electronify. You’ve seen that manifest itself in a shortening sales cycle, which has been a – which has really benefited us in terms of the pipeline contribution, the pipeline conversion rates in the short term. Additionally, as we’ve continued to see money flow into fixed income ETFs, as is evidenced by 30% growth year-on-year at the end of Q3 into our index AUM, we’ve continued to see that manifest itself in terms of demand for the data, demand for our indices, demand for services around our indices. So we continue to be optimistic that we’re uniquely positioned to capitalize on the trend of fixed income electronification and the optimization of workflows in fixed income.
Dan Fannon: Great. Thank you.
Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from Kyle Voigt from KBW. Kyle, please go ahead.
Kyle Voigt: Hi. Good morning. So there have been some headlines over the past couple of days around the NAR lawsuit being decided in favor of the plaintiffs. And there’s some pressure around what that means down the road for the number of buy side real estate agents needed to serve that US mortgage market and the percentage of home sales that will even have a buy-side agent involved in a transaction. I believe buy-side agents are the largest referral pipeline of deal flow for loan officers, which are core Encompass clients. I guess if we see less buy-side agents being used in the market, and loan officers lose their largest referral pipeline, I guess do you foresee any material share shifts for who is originating loans within the mortgage ecosystem? And if so, how do you believe that could impact Encompass, if at all?
Benjamin Jackson: Hi, Kyle. This is Ben. It actually – those types of trends play into our overall thesis and hypothesis in this space is that there is opportunity to create more efficiency around the transactions. For us, we’re neutral in that space. We don’t have a business of selling leads to real estate brokers and the like. For us, our core businesses are all in and around the origination transaction itself, making sure that we’re matching the client to the ideal product that meets their needs at the lowest cost to improve access to homeownership as well as clients that have an existing home, identifying based on data and analytics the best product to cross-sell to that client, the best time for clients to have a servicing book as well as an origination book.
So when we talk about that whole front-to-back offering, that’s really our sweet spot. So we don’t see an impact to us negative. If anything, all of the data and analytics offerings that we have that underpin this overall platform front to back, both between ICE Mortgage Technology assets that we’ve had historically as well as the data assets that have come with the Black Knight business, all position us very well in that space going forward.
Kyle Voigt: Thank you.
Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from Alex Blostein from Goldman Sachs. Alex, please go ahead.
Alex Blostein: Hi. Good morning. Thank you for the question. I was hoping we can maybe build a little bit more specificity around the fixed income data and analytics business. If we look at the revenue trends that obviously been sort of challenged here, we know the reasons why around the sales cycle and pricing pressure on fixed income assets. But if you look at the ASV, it’s been kind of flat for the last couple of quarters. So maybe just kind of help contextualize what does the improvement sales pipeline and shortening cease mean for revenue growth over the near term, maybe early thoughts into ’24?
Lynn Martin: Yes, Alex, this is Lynn. Thanks so much for the question. So if you look at the Fixed Income and Data Services segment as a whole, I talked about some of the all-weather nature that attributed really to the fixed income data and analytics line and the executions line in just a bit ago. But the one area that we’ve continued to see as a really strong contributor to the bottom line, top line is the other data services business and the acceleration of that business throughout the year. And that’s really been fueled by a couple of different areas. Number one is our multiyear investment and the modernization of the tech stack associated with our distribution platforms. And on the macro side, is the continued strong demand for our products and services fueled by the broader adoption of automation across the industry in a variety of different areas, which feels like we’re still in the early stages of.
So we’re seeing the confluence of these items benefit the top line growth in this area, and that causes us to be optimistic for continued growth in this area, in particular, for the medium term. We’ve been very deliberate, as Jeff mentioned on his call to be cloud agnostic and really invest in our own data centers. One of the reasons that we did that was really in response to customer demand as increased automation tends to be a data-heavy area as well as fueling demand for things such as data center space and customers asking us to grow their data center footprint. As a result, and what we’ve seen more recently, our connectivity sales in Q3 were the second highest in our history. Now those are going to take some time to implement, obviously, before we see the benefits of that in terms of revenue.
And our desktop sales last quarter matched our historical high. So we continue to be optimistic that the trends are going to be positive for this area given the pipeline that we have in this area and given the more recent sales that we’ve been able to achieve. On our feeds business, which we talked a little bit about in our prepared remarks, we benefit from the automation trend as workflows continue to become more automated and customers continue to value the modernization efforts we’ve undertaken to streamline our technology. So we’ve been able to attain a variety of new [logos] more recently and then also benefit from historical Tier 1 logos and their increased adoption of our services. And then finally, the area that continues to drive growth in this area, and we think it’s the early stages, is the adoption of our large language model, our proprietary large language models in our chat platform.
Our chat user growth is up 13% year-to-date, and the increased usage in the models has driven not only revenue benefits here, but also activity generated within our energy markets which activity generated through large language models in our energy markets was up 90% quarter-on-quarter compared to last year and 70% year-to-date. So, there’s a variety of trends that we see as tailwinds for this line, in particular, to continue to drive compound and growth for the medium to long-term.
Alex Blostein: All right. Thank you.
Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from Brian Bedell from Deutsche Bank. Brian, please go ahead.
Brian Bedell: Great. Thanks so much. Good morning folks. Maybe just to talk about the synergy – the revenue synergy targets for the Black Knight, the $125 million over five years. And then what you mentioned, Ben, on the Black Knight update call at the end of September, the $300 million of opportunity that you can see now. And then cross-referencing that with some of the examples you’ve already cited. Maybe if you can just reconcile the difference between those two numbers. And I realize there’s still six to 18 month types of implementation time frames, so they take a while to get into the revenue stream. But it would seem like you’re certainly on track to easily beat that $125 million ahead of time. So maybe just to talk about your outlook on revenue synergies over the next, say, couple of years?
