Earnings Call: Q3 2020

Oct 29, 2020

Good morning. My name is Andrea, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the InterContinental Exchange Third Quarter Conference Call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speakers' remarks, there will be a question and answer session. Thank you. Mr. Gardiner, you may begin your conference. Thank you. Good morning. ICE's Q3 2020 earnings release and presentation can be found in the Investors section of theice.com. These items will be archived and our call will be available for replay. Today's call may contain forward looking statements. These statements, which we undertake no obligation to update, represent our current judgment and are subject to risks, assumptions and uncertainties. For a description of the risks that could cause our results to differ materially from those described in forward looking statements, please refer to our 2019 Form 10 ks, 3rd quarter Form 10 Q and other filings with the SEC. In our earnings supplement, we refer to certain non GAAP measures, including adjusted income, EPS, operating income, operating margin, expenses, effective tax rate and debt to adjusted EBITDA. We believe our non GAAP measures are more reflective of our cash operations and core business performance. You'll find a reconciliation to the equivalent GAAP term in the earnings materials and an explanation of why we deem this information to be meaningful, as well as how management uses these measures in our Form 10 Q. When used on this call, net revenue refers to revenue net of transaction based expenses and adjusted earnings refers to adjusted diluted earnings per share. Throughout this presentation, unless otherwise indicated, references to revenue growth is on a constant currency basis. Please see the explanatory notes on the second page of the earnings supplement for additional details regarding the definition of certain items. With us on the call today are Jeff Sprecher, Chairman and CEO Scott Hill, Chief Financial Officer and Ben Jackson, our President. I'll now turn the call over to Scott. Thanks, Warren. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. I'll begin on Slide 4 with some year to date and Q3 highlights. Through the 1st 9 months of 2020, we've generated record revenues, record adjusted operating income and record adjusted earnings per share, all of which have grown double digit over a record year in 2019. This strong business performance allowed us to return 1 point $7,000,000,000 of capital to our shareholders, 10% more than in the prior year. And importantly, our solid financial position enabled us to invest $11,000,000,000 to expand our mortgage network through the acquisition of Ellie Mae. For the Q3, we generated earnings per share of $1.03 on net revenues of $1,400,000,000 Data services revenues grew to a record $589,000,000 an increase of 6% versus the prior year. Trading and clearing revenues totaled $711,000,000 Of note, our total mortgage revenues in the 3rd quarter grew 62% on a pro form a basis versus Q3 a year ago, while ICE's total net revenues pro form a for Ellie Mae grew 7% year over year. 3rd quarter adjusted operating expenses totaled $611,000,000 including $29,000,000 related to Ellie Mae. Total expenses would have been roughly $7,000,000 higher if not for some credits we don't expect to repeat in subsequent quarters. As we move into the Q4, we expect marketing expenses to accelerate related to a robust IPO pipeline and the launch of Bakkt's mobile consumer finance app. Combined with a full quarter of LE expenses, which we expect will contribute around $105,000,000 to $110,000,000 we expect 4th quarter adjusted operating expenses in the range of $695,000,000 to $705,000,000 Now let's move to Slide 5, where I'll provide an overview of the performance of our Trading and Clearing segment. Our commodity markets, lower energy revenues were largely a result of elevated volatility across our markets in the Q3 of last year, was related to the September attack on Saudi Arabian oilfield. Importantly, however, energy open interest, which we believe is the best indicator of the long term strength of our business is currently up 9% versus a year ago. In our Active Metals complex, revenues were also lower year over year reflecting continued global trade uncertainty. Within Financial, Equity Index revenue, which is nearly half of our financial futures revenues increased year over year. This strength was mitigated by lower levels of interest rate activity due to global interest rates remaining at or near all time lows. Moving to our fixed income and credit business, revenues totaled $191,000,000 in the 3rd quarter. Results were led by ICE Mortgage Technology, which continues to benefit from the adoption of digital mortgage solutions, strong refinancing trends, and positive buyer and builder sentiment. Revenues from mortgage technology totaled $140,000,000 in the 3rd quarter, including $73,000,000 attributable to Ellie Mae. On a pro form a basis, as I mentioned previously, Mortgage Technology revenues increased 62% versus the Q3 of last year. As we continue to integrate with our new colleagues from Ellie Mae, we're evaluating the metrics and guidance that will be most helpful for investors to understand our Mortgage Technology segment. We look forward to discussing our intentions in February and to sharing new pro form a segment information in early December. For the Q4, I'll note that we currently 35% at the midpoint on a pro form a basis. In our ICE bonds business, low interest rates continue to weigh heavily on retail and muni trading activity. Importantly though, while still early days, our institutional effort is showing progress. During the Q3, we continued to see institutional interest in our portfolio trading service with 2 of the largest ETF sponsors now utilizing our offering. In addition, we continue to add new participants to the ETF hub network and have completed the integration of our ICE bonds trading protocol with ICE Fixed Income Select. Select. Of note, Lynn Martin has now taken on the additional responsibility of the ICE bonds business, which will be led by Pete Borskelman, who also leads our ETF hub initiative. We believe that next phase of integration across our unmatched fixed income franchise will lead to greater product innovation and will better position our bond execution platforms to serve the vast institutional network of our fixed income data services business. Turning next to Slide 6, I'll discuss our Data and Listing segment. 3rd quarter data services revenues increased 6% year over year and totaled a record $589,000,000 in the quarter. Growth in Pricing and Analytics was 5% and was once again driven by customer demand for our suite of pricing and reference data products as well as the strong contribution from our index business, which now has over $270,000,000,000 of ETF assets tracking our indices. Desktops and connectivity revenue grew 3% in the quarter, reflecting continued growth in our ICE global network, offset by slower trends at the NYSE. In exchange data and feeds, revenue increased 9% as continued growth in our futures exchange data and our consolidated feeds business was supplemented by the NYSE share of strong year over year growth in industry SIP revenues. Looking to the 4th quarter, we expect data services revenues to again accelerate sequentially to between $590,000,000 $595,000,000 This included the sequential decline in exchange data offset by continued acceleration in pricing and analytics. Our expectation is supported by accelerating ASV growth, which exceeded 5% entering the 4th quarter, up from 4.5% a quarter ago and 4% 2 quarters ago. As a result, full year data services revenues are now expected to total $2,320,000,000 above the midpoint of our original guidance and roughly 5% higher than in 2019. While the quality of our data products and the breadth of our offering are important drivers of this strong performance, it would not have been possible without the resilience and commitment of our sales team. Despite the challenges of the global pandemic, our team maintained their productivity and focus on serving our customers. Their performance has been critical not only to our success in 2020, but perhaps more importantly has established significant momentum entering 2021. Shifting to our listings business, 3rd quarter revenues totaled $111,000,000 The NYSE helped raise $57,000,000,000 of total capital in the Q3, including $35,000,000,000 in IPO proceeds. During the quarter, the NYSE welcomed Palantir and Snowflake and extended our success in the technology sector, where we've raised nearly 70% of all technology related IPO proceeds since acquiring the New York Stock Exchange in 2013. I'll note in closing that our focus remains on serving our customers and delivering value to our shareholders. The value of our business strategy is once again reflected in open interest growth across our commodities business, the continued and compounding growth of our data offering and the strength of our mortgage technology business. This diverse and resilient business model has delivered record revenues, operating income, adjusted EPS and capital returns through the 1st 9 months of 2020. It also enabled us to invest in expanding our mortgage network with the acquisition of Ellie Mae, which was accretive in its 1st month and should continue to add top and bottom line accretion in the 4th quarter in 2021 beyond. I'll be happy to take your questions during Q and A, but for now I'll hand it to Jeff. Thank you, Scott, and good morning to everyone on the call. As I begin, I'd like to welcome the Ellie Mae team to their first ICE earnings call. While it's been less than 2 months since we closed on the acquisition in early September, I've been impressed by the collaboration between our teams during this short time. And I'm confident that the integration of Ellie Mae is off to a very strong start. I believe this is a testament to the talent of our respective employee populations and our shared entrepreneurial cultures. Similar to our exchanges and fixed income businesses, Ellie Mae integrated into ICE Mortgage Technology is a network, a network that thrives by offering a value proposition that aligns growth with efficiency gains that we bring to our customers. As we've seen across our network in futures, equities and fixed income, these efficiency gains are best achieved through harnessing unstructured data to create mission critical information, seamlessly linking participants to that information and ensuring that the network technology underpinnings are of the highest quality and security. It is the execution of this value proposition that often propels an analog to digital conversion of an industry and it's a blueprint that we've applied across all of our businesses for over 2 decades. Turning now to Slide 7, open interest in our global energy business is currently up 9% year over year. And with average daily volume in our flagship Brent crude oil contract up 4% through September, energy revenues in total are up 15%. This growth further contributed to our average annual revenue growth of over 7% since 2015, growth that is a direct result of staying close to our customers, understanding their evolving risk management needs and expanding the breadth of the content that we offer across our energy network. In our global natural gas markets, revenues were up 27 percent through the 1st 9 months of 2020, led by the continued growth of LNG and in particular our European TTF natural gas benchmark, which continues to emerge as the breadth of natural gas. In addition, our environmental markets continue to grow with revenues up 12% year to date and up 7% in the 3rd quarter. The globalization of natural gas and the growing adoption of environmental markets are trends that we began investing in over a decade ago. With our Brent Crude Oil contract serving as the cornerstone of our energy network, we've expanded the range of content that we offer to our customers. And today as a result of organic and inorganic investments, trading on our network is not tied to any one product or any one region. Instead, we have an energy network that delivers comprehensive risk management solutions, provides capital efficiencies and is positioned to grow alongside the continued evolution of global markets. Turning you to Slide 8. Like what we saw in the commodity markets 20 years ago, there's an analog conversion occurring in the U. S. Residential mortgage industry. Amid record levels of mortgage applications, many lenders are finding themselves capacity constrained and in some cases are even offering artificially high interest rates in order to curtail origination volume. From these capacity constraints, the social distancing guidelines, this year has revealed many of the pain points and inefficiencies that exist across mortgage origination workflows. And ICE mortgage technology is uniquely positioned to address these pain points. We estimate that automating the U. S. Residential mortgage workflow is a $10,000,000,000 a year addressable market. Critical to our ability to execute on this opportunity is our network, one that in combination with Ellie Mae now spans from customer acquisition all the way through to the secondary market. Like our network across fixed income, equities and futures, solving for inefficiency requires comprehensive workflow tools, richer data sets, robust analytics and leading technology. As an early example, our ICE Data Services and our ICE Mortgage Technology teams are collaborating to bring to market our 1st mortgage data product. By combining ICE Data Services expertise in cleansing and packaging structured data sets with the wealth of data that sits in our MERS mortgage database, our customers will soon be able to track and analyze mortgage production trends on a more granular level. Turning now to Slide 9 please. Servicing data which ranges from organizing raw and unstructured data such as with this MERS database example through our analytics, indices and connectivity solutions across asset classes, these are a core competency at ICE, a competency that we apply across all of our businesses. The types of data, information and analytics that we're creating helps our customers transact, manage risk and become more efficient. Coupling the high quality of our data, our technology and the productivity of our sales force, this expertise has been core to building a track record of consistent and compounding growth. Through an array of challenging economic conditions, our data business has proven to be resilient. And at a time when some of our peers have understandably guided to revenue erosion, our platform is seeing an acceleration having registered its 43rd consecutive quarter, nearly 11 straight years of year over year revenue growth. Turning to Slide 10, through the 1st 9 months of 2020, we've delivered double digit revenue growth, double digit operating income growth and double digit adjusted earnings per share growth. As I mentioned last quarter, we have a vision for ICE to deliver growth in all economic environments. So far, 2020 has been an excellent example of that. It's this vision that distinguishes us not only from our peers, but also from numerous other companies that operate outside of the financial services industry. Each individual asset class that we service, whether it's more mature or in the early stages of digital conversion like our mortgage and fixed income businesses, offer unique insights that can be applied to help improve our responses across each of our other asset classes. And we've been As we have expanded over the last 2 decades, we've become more knowledgeable and we're continuously applying that knowledge to our networks to enhance the value proposition to our customers. It's this approach that has enabled us to grow in each of our 14 years as a public company. We're excited about the growth opportunities that lie ahead for the balance of this year and excited to extend our track record of earnings growth in 2021 as we continue to work closely with our customers and key industry participants to help them navigate these times while creating value for all of our stakeholders. So I'd like to thank our customers for their business and their trust in this quarter. I'd also like to thank my colleagues at ICE for their contributions to the strong Q3 results. And again, I'd like to welcome our new colleagues from Ellie Mae. I'll now turn our call back to our moderator, Andrea, to conduct a question and answer session until 9:30 Eastern Time. And our first question comes from the line of Rich Repetto of Piper Sandler. Your line is now open. Good morning, Jeff, and good morning, Scott. I guess given your acquisition of Ellie Mae, you got much more diverse business as you grow in fixed income. And I guess on a sum of the parts basis, the stock looks inexpensive to us anyway. I guess, so my questions are, why haven't you chosen to break it out? And I guess, Scott did sort of address that you're still looking at how to report the segment results. But I guess, more importantly, are you concerned over the valuation versus the sum of the parts? And how patient will you be over time? I know you just acquired Ellie Mae, but how you're thinking about the sum of the parts given your diversity here now? Thanks for the question, Rich. So the first thing we're thinking as Scott mentioned and you alluded to, we're going to do a better job now of presentation so that you and our investors have visibility into how we're thinking about and running our business. Basically, as I think you know, since you've covered us for many years, we run network businesses and we run businesses and look for opportunities where the next customer or the next product on that network becomes additive to everyone on the network and continues to compound revenue and earnings growth across that network as a result. And so we're feeling really good right now. If you look at our commodity business, futures business, we're up open interest is up 9% year over year when the markets are in contango. That's normally a signal or a precursor to volume and revenue growth in the future. So we're very, very happy with the way that business is performing. If you look at our fixed income and data business, you see that ASV, which is the future indicator of business is accelerating and compounding. And as we've indicated to you, if you look at our new mortgage network, which we're still combining with our other assets, it's double digit both in subscription and in transaction revenue growth and earnings growth for us in those businesses. So all of the segments that we're going to be showing you beginning in the Q1 are well positioned for 2021. And the reason that I like to end my prepared remarks on this graph that shows the long term earnings growth of the company is that that's how we're running it. And as a result of that mentality that this management team has, a mentality that our job is to deliver EPS growth, I've normally found that the stock will catch up to that growth. And we appreciate that many of the competitors in futures are interest rate and financial oriented competitors and they're struggling due to the interest rate environment. Many people in the data space don't have the global footprint that we have to find growth around the world And many people that are in the mortgage space don't have the market share gains that we've been able to gain, including just in the 2 months since we've acquired Ellie that is continuing to accelerate that business. So we're all those networks are very well positioned relative to our peer group. And I think that will become apparent over time as this management team delivers bottom line results. And Jeff, I think that price eventually catches value as demonstrated. Every share we've ever bought back in our repurchase program a year later has been worth 20% more and 2 years later has been worth 40% to 50% more. And so it does catch up. I do think that the new segments will help. And as I mentioned in my prepared remarks, we intend in early December to give you all some history with regards to how those segments will look back from 2018 2019 year to date, so that you'll have that information in early December. And as Jeff said, we'll present the company that way in the Q4. Your next question comes from the line of Alex Kramm of UBS. Your line is open. Hey, good morning, everyone. Just I guess quick one on the mortgage side. First of all, I think Ali came in better than your initial expectations. I know it's a small number. It was only a month, but also 4Q looks pretty robust. So just curious about the near term outlook what you're seeing. But related to that, I think the Mortgage Bankers Association recently revised their forecast for activity for next year. So just curious if you're starting to get more comfortable or bullish on the outlook for next year that you've laid out. I know it's early days, but just curious about your latest thoughts. Hey, Alex, it's Ben. I'll take that. So a couple of things I'll share with you. It's only been a couple of months since we've closed on the business, but a couple of interesting things to share with the group are number 1, I'll share just on the integration front. We've made a ton of progress on pulling together our mortgage assets. So the Simplifile business, the Merge business and Ellie Mae, we've been able to pull those businesses together to operate as one very, very quickly. And what enabled us to do that is we knew the Ellie Mae business very well prior to doing this transaction because we had a long term partnership with them with SimpleFile. So we had a good view on what we were going to do. We got into a room quickly in September. We were able to make the decisions that needed to be made to get the business organized correctly, have made all those decisions, announced them to all the employees, and now we're executing against a single vision and a single strategy. Two other evidence points I'll give you is so it's well publicized that volumes are strong. Rates are low, millennials are buying, seeing people purchasing new homes to get more space, to get a pool, transitioning out of cities into suburbs. We're seeing all that kind of mix. One of the interesting things that not many people appreciate around Ellie Mae is we also have a bit of a forward view on what's happening in that space because we're in the origination space and we see all the way up front of the original application process when somebody is applying for a refinance or for the purchase of a new home, we see that 60 plus days earlier than the rest of the market. So we see those trends. And I can say from what we see on the platforms that that volumetric aspect of the business continues to be strong and it just firms our view that we had going into this transaction, what the opportunity is with this business. The third thing I'd point to and the most important thing, and Jeff just touched on it in an answer that he just had, that I think is the most important thing to look at is our their artificial intelligence engine called AIQ that's going after the analytics TAM that we have identified in this space. We had a view of where subscription sales would end the year. And I can say that in the last couple of weeks, the business has already hit in subscription sales numbers where we thought they would end the year. The reason that that's important is that as we're hitting those sales results, it helps to firm our view on what we assumed market share growth would be. So they're continuing to gain market share. They're continuing to gain more customers, more users. There's more recurring revenue coming onto the platform. It's a stronger network and all of this pulls through additional volume. So net net is we've everything that we've seen in the 2 months of owning the business has really firmed our original views. Your next question comes from the line of Mike Carrillo of Bank of America. Your line is open. Hi, good morning and thanks for taking the question. Maybe just one more on LA Mae, given that it closed and doing more work in the area, can you just provide maybe an update on when you think about the growth opportunities and more importantly, probably the different components of the revenue growth, meaning you have obviously the volume component, but also the adoption and given the latter, you kind of get more credit in terms of valuation over time it's a little bit more important. And then any other factors or opportunities that you're seeing as you do more work in that area in the market? Hi, Mike. It's Ben. I'll take this one as well. So there's thank you for the question. There's a whole bunch of different opportunities for growth in this business, which is what gave us conviction that this business can grow really through any volume environment that we see. And we touched when we announced the deal on our ability to capture that $1,000,000,000 TAM in the closing and post close space. So that's where we're tying together and creating a new closing room for the underwriter to digitally connect to the settlement agents of the network that we have across mortgage. So I won't go into a lot more detail on that one, but I figured because we went into a lot last time, I figured I'd go into a couple of others that we're capturing that I think are underappreciated. So first, we identified that there's a $4,000,000,000 TAM in front of us in just origination and processing. And we're obviously very well positioned there. The business is touching almost 50% of U. S. Mortgages that are coming through the process, refi and purchases. And as I just mentioned, the sales results that we've just seen has just firmed our view on the ability to continue to gain market share in that space. The second thing that is in that origination and processing TAM is really about our network. And I don't know that people really appreciate the fact that the business, our business here has the largest mortgage network in the U. S. So we interconnect hundreds and hundreds of service providers to lenders. And this network is very well established. All that connectivity exists and there are significant benefits that the lenders themselves can receive from utilizing and buying services from those 3rd party providers over our network, yet it's underutilized. So the types of benefits that lenders get from ordering services off of our network is that it's a As we know in the workflow when you're going to order a credit report, when you're going to order a flood report, all of that is automated. And more importantly, all of the content that comes from that 3rd party is digitally sent to you so that you can consume it, you can easily move it around, you can analyze it, you can actually do things with it. The other way of ordering these services outside of the network is you'd have to manually go out and select vendors, you have to manually procure the information, you're going to get back, scan documents, PDFs with data that you can't really do anything with. You have to have extra steps of manually re keying information. So today, vendors are really starting to see the benefits of ordering services off of our network and for the benefit that we're providing the lenders as well as the benefit that we're providing all these third party data providers, we receive a revenue share for that and we're seeing this part, this opportunity in front of us that we're starting to capture it and that part is accelerating substantially. The other piece that I'll touch on is the data and analytics side. We've had a few questions since we announced this deal on this. And the one I want to focus on is really analytics and what we're executing against today here against another what we've identified as a $4,000,000,000 TAM. So we've identified that an average origination fee costs around $8,000 Of that, time studies that we've done estimate that at least $5,200 of that $8,000 is just manual processing and technology costs are well less than $500 In the year 2020, you'd think that that would almost be the reverse, that manual processing would be a lot less and technology somewhat more. Our time studies have shown that at least half, so call it 2,600 of that manual processing could and should be automated with simple tools to be able to analyze and take away a lot of the stare and compare work that happens. Well, this isn't just a dream. We're actually executing on this. This is a TAM that we're accomplishing and capturing when we talk about that AIQ business, a business called Capsuleon that Ellie Mae acquired in the last couple of years. This business goes through for our customers today and captures documents, it recognizes the data on those documents, extracts it, and most importantly, we apply analyzers to that data. Analyzers that today for our lenders can go through and automate the process of when you're looking at a credit report to make sure that the Social Security numbers match, the date of birth matches, the date of the credit report is within the window that the lender was expecting that credit report to be to approve the loan. The score that the individual had on that credit report matches the qualification criteria for the product that that consumer is applying for. All of this is happening today and we're capturing this opportunity and it's a significant growth opportunity in that data and analytics space. And we see it already coming through in terms of AIQ sales that have happened this year on the platform and just in the last 2 months of owning the business, we're seeing these analyzers getting picked up from our existing customer base. So those are 2 new areas that I'd say to focus on going forward as other areas of growth for this business. Your next question comes from the line of Ken Worthington of JPMorgan. Your line is open. Hi, good morning and thank you for taking my question. It looks like we're seeing further pressure to migrate away from LIBOR in the U. S. Maybe first, can you remind us if there's any impact on this transition away from LIBOR in terms of data revenue, benchmark service revenue? I don't think there's much. But really, can you talk about the transition to Sonya in terms of trading in Europe? And if there's any opportunities in this transition to either grow trading or grow data or should we really expect this just to be a swap from your EIBOR? Thanks. Yes, it's a good question. We're right. We're in the middle of a transition. So there's a bit of fog, if you will, as to the timing of this transition. Obviously, regulators are pushing, but there are a lot of underlying business issues that have to get dealt with in the transition. So it's hard to know a final date other than order to pick up legacy business that just couldn't be transitioned over. So LIBOR may exist for some time and it's hard to know what that time is because it's so pervasive around the world. And there are many there are other IBORs by the way, LIBOR being dollar, LIBOR, but there are a lot of other IBORs, many of which were the calculation agent, all of which have the same issues, LIBOR based futures. And so we feel very, very comfortable and confident with where we've positioned our trading activities to be able to provide a bridge. And if the 2 beneficiary of that as well. But ultimately, it's a straight swap from one to the other. There's not anything anywhere to really grow this grow from this transition. Well, the one area that is really under discussion is the small and midsized regional banks and a whole range of products that are not necessarily covered by is the swaps or hedged with swaps. And so what you're seeing is that having worked with the industry to come up with a common rule set on how the transition can go and you see that sort of institutional market coming up with game plans. But in the small and widely dispersed market, they're not in the swaps business and they've got there are many people who have 30 year agreements that have the word LIBOR in it. And so we have been developing an alternative to LIBOR called the Bank Yield Index, which we published. We've been publishing it weekly and people have been doing academics have been doing white papers on it to see how it tracks a credit based environment. And we've now accelerated the publishing of that daily to create more data points by the way for analysis. And it's very possible that there could be a transition away from LIBOR or the credit based part of the industry that is not Sonya or and if so, we have a very, very good benchmark that we're working on. That will be up to regulators and a broad industry adoption if that happens, but there certainly is a lot of work going on underneath to try to at least have a viable alternative should that need arise. And Ken, you've seen historically as you transition from one contract definition to a similar but different one, The impact tends to be as you near that transition point, you see a decline in the trading of the old and everyone's not quite moved into the new. The good news for us is interest rates only make up about 4% of our revenue. So it's a relatively small impact regardless. Your next question comes from the line of Jeremy Campbell of Barclays. Your line is open. Hey, thanks. Maybe just a follow-up to Mike's question a little earlier around the mortgage TAM and the growth. Ben, you gave some really good color around the opportunity to capture TAM from your end to end suite of solutions now that Ellie is in the fold. Just wondering, as you guys look at your solutions right now, are there any additional white spaces you'd ideally like to fill in, in mortgage land either to build organically or bolt on inorganically that might make the holistic solution a little more compelling to the originator with whom you don't currently have a partnership or to augment the data and analytics product for Lundin team to sell? There just seems to be some additional properties out there that could be available, but not sure if any of that fits within your vision. Thanks, Jeremy. What I can say there is that we feel good about the position that we're at with the assets that we have. I mean we literally our network touches every single part and aspect of a loan all the way from you as the consumer are thinking about it, you're going out and doing your research and you're touching the point of sale systems to engagement between that individual customer and the lender that they've chosen to do that loan with, the digitization of all the documents and helping to automate that origination process, now interconnecting the originator to the settlement agent and electronifying the close. So we have all the right pieces. As I mentioned, we focused very, very early on on just making sure that we got the integration of these businesses nailed and executing on that, and we did very, very quickly to get the team all operating as one. And the other thing I'd point out is that a lot of the work we're talking about of pulling the networks together, of creating a digital e closing room, That didn't just start now. It started in the partnership that we forged with Ellie Mae back when we bought Simplifile and Simplifile also had relationships with them that predated that. So a lot of this work is already underway. All that said, as I had mentioned in an answer earlier, I think it's underappreciated a little bit about how strong that network is that we have having the largest network in the U. S. Mortgage origination space. So with that position, we also see what are all the 3rd party vendors doing, what are the quality of the services that they provide. And we're in a position that if there is bolt on opportunities that we think we can accelerate growth for entities by having them more directly part of our business as a bolt on opportunity for us, we would evaluate those. Your next question comes from the line of Dan Shannon of Jefferies. Please go ahead. Hey, good morning. My question is on the data business. It came in above your guidance. You talked about some of the trends in your prepared remarks, Scott, but I was hoping you could kind of expand upon where the strength is coming from. And you've historically talked about it on longer dated time periods in terms of the outlook. So maybe if you could give us a look into next year, how that business is trending? Sure. Thanks for the question, Dan. Yes, so look, the beat in the quarter was a couple of things. Clearly, as I mentioned in my prepared remarks, the SIP revenues related to the significant retail activity in the cash equities markets contributed to that. But the one that I've just been really happy with this year has been the pricing and analytics business. That's in a world where our sales team has been limited just like everyone else in terms of travel, ability to meet face to face, they're still crushing it. They've held productivity levels versus the prior year. They're on track to achieve, I think it's like 98% or 9% of their signings objective. And that business, which you'll remember, I said we grow 5% to 6 percent coming into the year, which was in February before I even knew what COVID was, is going to grow 5% this year. And the growth has accelerated each quarter and it's going to grow again in the Q4 and likely will be around 6% growth in the Q4. So that business is doing phenomenally well And it's a lot of factors. People continue to consume more of our prices. As consolidation of vendors happen, We can be a one stop shop for people and their data needs, whether it's our data or feeds or network or all of that, we can tell. Our index business, I mentioned in my prepared remarks, we're now up to $270,000,000,000 worth of assets that track our largely fixed income indices. So it's that pricing and analytics business that I'm so happy with. And then you asked about 2021 and while I won't give you a dollar guide, I will point you to an ASV that was 4% 2 quarters ago and is above 5% now and will trend higher in the Q4. And so to me that's I mean, again, as you know, today that's 90% of our future revenue. As we roll into the new segment review, that ASC will effectively be 100% of the forward revenue. And so if you've got an ASC number today that's sitting between 5% 6%, that says you're set up very well to deliver that type of revenue growth next year. So we feel very good about the execution of that business, very good about how the sales team has performed. I also mentioned coming into the year the fact that we were hiring into the growth opportunities we saw. And we've done that hiring, but in a world where people aren't in the office, getting those that part of the team up to speed has been more of a challenge. The good news though is that means we've had a good year this year without really a lot of productivity from the new folks. And as we move into next year, they'll join us at the high productivity level that I think can give us an added boost. So that business right now is hitting on all cylinders and we feel very good about not just the Q4, but about 2021. Thank you. Your next question comes from the line of Ari Ghosh of Credit Suisse. Your line is open. Hey, good morning, everyone. Ben, I guess just another one on the mortgage tech business. And again, appreciate all the color thus far. So the deal failure makes a lot of sense just given the growth profile and structural tailwinds, already seeing really nice contributions from it from day 1. But some of the larger competitors in the space have also been talking about the strength of their digital capabilities and the network effect of that they see as well. So I was just hoping you could talk a little bit about specific areas where you're the most differentiated versus some of the larger players. Is it more on the unstructured data side, your digitization efforts on the workflow or your network effect or is there something else? Just looking to see areas that you most differentiate? Thanks. Sure. Thank you for that. I'd say the major areas where we're different is, I mean, if you just look at industry assessments of market shares and those market shares reflect the strength of the network that you have, The businesses that we have, have by far the largest network that stretches all the way from the inception of the origination all the way through to closing. And I can't stress that enough that you need to think about that entire ecosystem from the inception of your thinking about a loan all the way through to documents get filed at a county courthouse to consummate a transaction between a buyer and the seller. So the strength of that network is 1st and foremost, one of the major differentiators that we have underneath that network. So not only on the origination side do we have by far a very big market lead in terms of the loans that we touch in the U. S. Trending getting up to close to 50%. But also in the closing and post close space with assets like Simplifile and MERS, Simplifile, we've used the phrase that they went out and paved the dirt road. So they went out and literally did the hard work of digitizing and digitally connecting thousands and thousands of counties around the U. S. To thousands and thousands of attorneys settlement agents that are in the middle of closing real estate transactions. The reason that Ellie Mae with such a strong network came and did a partnership with Simplifile a few years ago is they acknowledged and realized that the piece of the network that Ellie Mae did not have and the only entity that really had a digital highway and a digital network to electronically close transactions was Simplifiable. So that's a lot of the real differentiator. The other piece I'd say is underneath the network that's underappreciated is the data sets that we have that are very unique within that business. So one of the things that Simplifile has by digitizing that network of all these settlement agents in all these counties, it is the only real repository in the U. S. That knows exactly what the settlement fees are, what the settlement requirements are for every real estate, just about every real estate transaction that happens in the U. S. With that type of information, you can use that information, pull it forward into the origination process and reduce a substantial amount of errors in the processing of loans by sharing that information very early on, digitally sharing it and then also including it with the analyzers that I was speaking about earlier to be able to compare what are the requirements that this county has on closing a particular transaction versus what's getting pulled together and consummated in the origination package of that loan. So those are 2 of the main areas I would highlight as just substantial head starts and differentiators that we have that are very difficult for others to replicate. This is Jeff. And one of the things that we really liked about the business when we started to think about putting together our network, our existing network and the Ellie Mae network was that we've opened that network. And so many of these companies that you may view as competitors use parts of our network in order to offer their services because our network is so comprehensive and because it's open and you can pick off you can join the network at the very beginning or all along the chain that we to a certain degree benefit from the entire growth in the industry as partners, coopetition, if you will, with many others in the industry. So that model is very compelling in that our goal is really as I've said on the final slide that we land on is to really just grow our earnings per share not necessarily to completely crush every competitor. Your next question comes from Brian Bedell of Deutsche Bank. Your line is open. Great. Thanks. Good morning, folks. Thanks for taking my question. Just one quick cleanup on the tax rate outlook for 4Q. I don't know if I missed that one. But the bigger question is on another one on the mortgage business, of course. Just I guess, first of all, Scott, if you can just reiterate the 8% to 10% growth on the Ele. Me business that you've stated in the past for 2021 even with the refi headwinds? And then I guess, more importantly, in thinking about the organic growth of that business from obviously the large TAMs in the processing side, but also the organic growth from existing customers using the network? And how should we sort of think about those 2 different elements contributing? I do think using that organic growth data or as you talk about this segment and you carve it out into next year that that would definitely be something that would be helpful for the valuation so we could isolate that. And then the ability to scale that on that cost base that you've outlined for 4Q, if you think of 'twenty one, not to give expense guidance specifically right now on that, but how should we think about scaling the growth of the mortgage business on that existing cost base? I'm just writing down, so I think that was 3 questions. So the tax rate will be in the 22% to 24% guide. So that's been consistent for the year other than the Q3 as we had to revert the UK back to 19%. So that we would expect the 4th quarter will go back to kind of where we started the year. Obviously, as we roll Ellie in, that's a U. S.-based business, that will cool upward pressure on the tax rate and be subject to whatever happens in the election. But even that if you're modeling, I don't see a reason right now to move away from the 22 to 24. I'm going to take the expense first. I think one of the things we like about this mortgage business is similar to our other businesses. It is scalable in the sense of the incremental dollars generate good incremental margins. That notwithstanding, we are in a place where we are making a number of investments as Ben alluded to and his answers with regards to building out an e closing room as one really good example. And so if you're looking at the Q4, I think you need to take a couple of things into account if you want to use that as run rate. Number 1, for purchase accounting, we have to rebuild the CapEx and cap labor. And so with that run rate, you should probably throw another 20 on top of that. And then I would throw another 20 to 25 of investments we're going to be making to not only grow the business next year, but more importantly, 2 months ago on the deal call, we said we thought it was a business that could grow 8% to 10% for a decade. And so we'll make some investments. Again, and I would say that you do that math and you'll see that it will still be very accretive to the bottom line. I think in the 4th quarter alone, it's going to be 7% accretive. So that's kind of on the expense side. I don't know that today is the day we'd say a whole lot more in terms of our guide on the revenue line. You have to still feel good about the 8% to 10%. We do for all the reasons Ben alluded to. As we move forward, we mentioned going in that we expected refi to go back. Someone in an earlier question said that the industry assessments were improving, but they're really just improving closer to where we already were. Those estimates tend to be a little bit pessimistic. So again, we're only 2 months away from closing the deal and having the call with you all. Ben has given a lot of color on why we love this business and why we believe it absolutely was the absolutely was the right investment. And so as I sit here today 2 months later, I'm absolutely 100% still confident that it can grow the way we've talked about. Your next Your next question comes from Alex Blostein of Goldman Sachs. Your line is open. Great. Thanks. Good morning, everybody. Maybe shifting gears a little bit, I was hoping we can touch on you guys' credit trading business. I believe towards the end of the year, you guys talked about maybe some sort of full integration between ETF Hub and some of the training venues that you've acquired. So maybe talk a little bit about what's the kind of overall revenue contribution from those businesses today? How do you think about that evolving over the next 12 months or so because I think you guys made some investments there over the last 12 months? Thanks, Alex. This is Ben. And as Scott had mentioned in the question earlier around the resegmentation of the business that will come in, in the first half of December, that's when we're going to start giving more color on the revenue aspect of this. That answers one part of your question. On the other side of it, just to give you some flavor of continued strides that we're making on the institutional space, The strategy really has 3 legs to it. So first is the automation of extremely complicated manual workflows in a space that's growing like crazy, which we've talked about a lot, which is that primary trading area of ETF creation redemption. That's our ETF hub project. The second leg of the strategy I talked about on our last earnings call was the launch of iSelect. And what iSelect is, is it's an aggregation engine that we've created that pulls together all of our protocols. So click to trade protocols, our auction protocols and our RFQ protocols all into 1. And more importantly, it also added all of our institutional analytics and pricing content that all the buy side, all the sell side customers utilize today for understanding what the fair valuation of the instruments are that they're trading. And Scott had mentioned that as part of this realignment, we're really pulling together our execution venues and fixed income very closely aligned to our fixed income data business under LINP. The last piece is we also I also mentioned on the last earnings call that we've now connected iSelect to ETF hub and we've also connected iSelect to 3rd party OMS systems such as Aladdin. The progress that we've made since that last earnings call has been significant. So we've added another AP in Citigroup onto our ETF hub network. We've added 4 more market makers, significant market makers. We now have a total of 7 market makers in there that we just announced in the last couple of days. We now have 6 issuers that are part of our advisory committee on ETF hub. So that the number of issuers is expanding that are helping to give us their requirements that we would need to cover to be able to add them onto the ETF hub in addition to BlackRock. And we've had market makers not only testing, but now they're executing going into the secondary market to procure bonds via iSelect. In the last couple of weeks, we've had some market makers going and using our secondary platforms in iSelect to go out and procure bonds to procure the basket that then may negotiate in our primary trading menu being ETF hub to swap that basket of bonds for a share of an ETF. And the last bit of progress that we've made is that we have had multiple portfolio auctions executed on our platform by 2 of the largest issuers, 2 of the largest asset managers in the space in just the past couple of weeks. So a lot of the last you've heard me talk on a number of these earnings calls and a lot of it's been putting all the infrastructure in place, laying a lot of all the rails and groundwork that's needed to be done to pull all this together. It's together and we're starting to see signs that some green shoots are starting to develop here. There are no further questions at this time. Mr. Sprecher, I turn the call back over to you. Thank you, Andrea, for moderating, and thank all of you for joining us this morning. We look forward to speaking to you again soon. And in the meantime, I guess I hope that you and your loved ones stay safe and stay healthy. And with that, I hope you'll have a great day. Thank you. This concludes today's conference call. You may now disconnect.