Intercontinental Exchange, Inc. (NYSE:ICE) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

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We also see, just looking out into the future that there’s a lot of large banks, large — a lot of large home lending banks that have legacy infrastructure in-house systems that they’ve been running for years that are looking to upgrade and replace that. We think our funnel reflects that, and we feel really good about the prospects that those companies are looking to continue to make investments here in 2023, which will lead to growth factors for us going into the future. So that’s a little bit of color of what happened in the fourth quarter as well as why we feel good about our prospects going forward.

Jeff Sprecher: And I think if you step back — this is Jeff. If you step back, what we’re talking to the industry about is a fundamental shift in the way they assemble and manufacture mortgages to take costs out of the system, to move the industry to more of a SaaS model, subscription-based model instead of a model where every single mortgage is put together a la carte with services and the cost of a first-time homebuyers mortgage versus the cost of a $1 million mortgage are essentially the same in the current system. And it just makes sense to us that if we can give the industry a more predictable way of operating their businesses, they can be more responsive to their customers and allocate costs proportionately across their business, which is the way business is done in most other digital markets or markets that have moved from analog to digital.

Operator: Our next question comes from Alex Kramm of UBS. Alex, your line is now open.

Alex Kramm: Good morning, everyone. Just wanted to ask about pricing holistically across the business. When you look at the data services space, some of your peers, maybe some of them in the desktop space that you’re not in, but we’re seeing price increases because of inflation. Your primary peer in the futures trading side also seems to have been taken a bigger price increase than usual this year. So when you put this all together and you look at your business, it seems like you’re leaving some money on the table and you’re a little bit afraid to kind of like turn that lever a little bit more. So just wondering if you’re thinking, is it all evolving given the higher inflationary environment that’s obviously driving your cost higher as well?

Warren Gardiner: Alex, this is Warren. It’s a good question. We’ve certainly seen some of the peers out there and what they’ve done on the pricing front. It’s always been our philosophy that, when we’re going to increase price, it will come with value added to the particular product that we’re increasing that price on. And that hasn’t changed, and that’s not going to change this year. I think from our perspective, the better long-term strategy is to operate that way, and that’s what we’re going to be doing this year. And we mentioned a little bit earlier on the Fixed Income and Data Services side, there really wasn’t much difference in terms of how we’re approaching that this year. We do have a small amount of contracts, it’s pretty immaterial at the end of the day, that are benchmarked to inflation.

But I don’t think you’d really notice that at the end of the day, depending on how much that will fluctuate. So on that front, I would say it’s pretty consistent. On the futures side, we’re always looking at that as an option. But again, it’s something we haven’t really pulled lever on up until this point, and there certainly have been instances in the past where we’ve done it. But something we are thinking about and always thinking about, frankly. So I wouldn’t necessary that’s much of a change. But yes, that’s something that’s out there and certainly on what some of the others have been doing.

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