Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Kelly Loeffler, Senior Vice President, Investor Relations, Corporate Communications and Marketing, Intercontinental Exchange.
Welcome to Intercontinental Exchange's Investor Day. Thank you all for joining us. Today's meeting will be webcast, and the presentation is available on our website at theice.com. As you can see on slide three, we have a full agenda. You'll hear from members of our management team, and you'll find the speaker biographies in the appendix of the presentation. After the formal presentations, we'll hold a Q&A session. For those in the room, a few quick notes. The Wi-Fi codes are printed on the table cards in front of you. We would ask that you please silence your digital devices, even for those with really awesome ringtones. Our very capable events team is standing by if you need anything at all, and they can be identified by their badges. Let's turn to slide four for details on the forward-looking statements included in today's meeting.
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 our risks, please refer to our 2016 Form 10-K. With that, we'll move to slide five. ICE was formed in the year 2000 to solve problems and to build value for our customers. This expanded to building shareholder value with our IPO here on the New York Stock Exchange in 2005. This commitment continues today in 2017, where we're on track to deliver our 12th consecutive year of record results. We're always focused on delivering value and growth on top of growth for our customers and shareholders. How do we do this? For more on our approach, please turn your attention to the video.
How do we create the information that people need in order to make rational risk management decisions? ICE is a very global company. We're trying to solve our customers' problems around the world. Changes in regulation are making global markets more bifurcated and fractured. As a result, we're investing in technology to try to make it easy for customers to do business, but yet respect local regulation and market structures. We're looking at new products, for example, to list, trade, and clear, to sit in one location, but to access markets around the world. We do everything in our power to try to stay close to our customers, to look at the issues that they're having. By doing that over and over every day, you'll find that your company grows and that your value to your customer grows.
That's really the ethos that we have within our firm.
Great. I'm now pleased to introduce Scott Hill, ICE's Chief Financial Officer. Thank you.
All right. Thanks, Kelly. Thanks everyone for being here today, particularly on the first Friday in June on what was a really nice day. I was here for Memorial Day weekend with my family, the weather is certainly a lot better today than it was this past weekend. Thanks for coming out today. You all get an opportunity to hear from Jeff and me a lot, and you're going to hear from us a little bit today. You get an opportunity to hear a lot about 2017. Today's really about hearing from our broader management team. The guys and gals who are out executing every single day and delivering the types of results that you've gotten used to. 2017, nothing that we're going to say today changes anything we've said about 2017. You can find our guidance back on page 78 of the deck.
It's consistent with what we've said thus far. What I want to do today is set a little bit of context in the beginning, and then really set the stage to talk about why we're very confident with the business we've built and our opportunity for success as we move forward. Let me start with a little bit of history. On slide seven of the deck, what you see here is the evolution of ICE over the past decade, a decade of strategic diversification and significant value creation. Back in 2006, ICE was in two asset classes. Today, we're in 10. Back in 2006, we generated $300 million of revenue, with roughly 10, 11% of that revenue in data. Today, in 2016, we generated $4.5 billion of revenue.
As you can see on here, that revenue is pretty evenly balanced between our trading and clearing business and our data revenues, which now represent about 45% of the revenues that we have. If you look at our earnings per share, our earnings per share on average have grown about 19% every single year, and our free cash flow has grown 30% a year on average every single year over the past decade. We became a public company late in 2005, every single year since then, we've delivered a record revenue and a record earnings per share performance in each year. As I move ahead to slide eight, the emphasis here is to reflect that we've not just gotten bigger, but we've got significantly more diversified. If you look on this chart, back in 2006, $300 million was largely oil, U.S. natural gas, and power.
Commodities at $1.1 billion is still a very significant part of what we do, you can see that we've also made a significant investment in financials on the derivatives side. A business that was $300 million now has derivatives in 2016 that totaled $1.7 billion. In addition to that, we've always had exchange data. That was give or take, as I said earlier, 10%, 11% of our revenues back in 2006, still about 11%, 12% of our revenue today. We've also significantly diversified what that data business is. A great amount of growth, but also significant diversity in terms of the asset classes we're in. As you can see on the right-hand side of Slide 8, we're also a very diverse geographic business, with roughly 40% of our revenues coming from outside the U.S. and 60% of our revenues coming from inside the U.S.
Finally, at the bottom of the slide, you can see the diversity of the customers that we serve. Across our trading, our clearing, our data, and our listings products, we touch any number of commercial customers, investment banks, hedge funds, accounting firms, you name it, a very diverse set of customers. Over the decade, great diversification product-wise, geographically, and customer-wise. Slide 9 shows you how that revenue growth trend and the earnings per share growth trend has happened over the last 10 years. As you can see on the left-hand side, as I said, each single year we've set a new record for revenue. More importantly, on the right-hand side of the slide, you see that we've delivered on average 19% earnings growth every single year on average.
The thing I like about the right-hand side of the slide, though, is every one of the bars on the right is bigger than every one of the bars on the left. That's been consistently the case. It'll be consistently the case again in 2017. We believe, as I'll show you a little bit later, we've got a financial model that continues to be able to deliver that type of growth. Moving on to Slide 10, what does that growth do? As we grow revenue and as we grow earnings, how does that translate into cash? Where I want to start is on the left side, where I've already noted our cash flows, on average, have grown 30% a year every single year since 2006.
I think more importantly on this slide, if you look at the upper right-hand section, we've efficiently generated that cash flow. Roughly $0.37 of every dollar of revenue in the last five years has turned into cash. That's 2 times our peer group and 4 times the S&P 500. Let me pause here and define that peer group, because I'm going to talk about it a couple of times as I move through. The peer group is Deutsche Börse, LSE, CME, and Nasdaq. It's S&P, it's TR, it's MSCI, and it's Markit. We had to construct the peer group because there's not a single peer who's got the breadth and diversity of business that we have.
The last thing I'll mention on Slide 10 is if you look down to the bottom right, over the last three years, we returned 60% of our free cash flow to our investors through share repurchases and through dividends, even as we acquired the IDC business back at the end of 2015. Good revenue growth translates to good earnings growth, translates to great cash flow generation. We as a management team are committed to allocating that capital in a very disciplined manner and in a very consistent manner. The first thing we look to do is to invest in our business organically, I'll talk to you about some of the successes that we've had in our organic investments in just a bit. The second thing that we look to do is to invest our business in M&A that enables our continued ability to grow.
My colleague, Ben Jackson, will come up behind me and take you through in a little bit more detail the strategic framework for our M&A and how we think about integration and how we've successfully integrated the execution in over 20 deals in the past decade. As we go through, we consistently focus on making sure that we maintain our investment-grade rating. That's important because what it allows us to do is to access capital markets quickly, efficiently, and inexpensively, which means that we don't have to hesitate to return cash flow as we generate it in fear of missing out on a strategic opportunity. That leverage ratio, our investment-grade rating, allows us to get into capital markets and to leverage those capital markets to make our strategic investments.
When we've done all of our organic investing, when we've invested in the M&A we think is important to enable our strategic growth, the next thing we've committed to do is to grow our dividend as we grow. We instituted that dividend at the end of 2013, in every single year since then, 2014, 2015, 2016, and then again in 2017, that dividend has grown double digits. You can see that on the lower left-hand side of the slide. We paid about $300 million in dividends in 2014, that's nearly $500 million that we'll pay out in 2017. As we grow the dividend, as we invest in M&A, because of the strong cash generation that I talked about, we're still left with ample free cash flow to manage. How do we think about what we do with that cash flow?
As you know, historically, and as again you can see on the slide, we've really focused on share repurchases as a primary means of returning capital. We get the question every once in a while, why is that the right thing to do? Why is buying your shares back the better investment? The lower right corner of this slide answers that question. We've consistently been of the view, as we've grown our business, whether it was subject to volatility of oil back in 2006, or we're not quite sure about the Creditex business that led to us being the only CDS clearing house, or the NYSE acquisition helped us understand that, we believe our prices consistently chase values, true value. That's led us to allocate our money to our share repurchases.
What this lower right-hand side of the slide shows you is that one year after every share repurchase dollar we ever spent, our stock was 22% higher. Two years after every single dollar we've spent, our stock was nearly 50% higher. There's no question that share repurchases has been the right way to return capital, and it's the way we will continue to focus because, again, we believe that price continues to chase the true value of our company. All that adds up, revenue growth, profit growth, free cash flow, disciplined allocation of cash flow to investor returns. What you see here is the investor returns over the last 10 years. ICE has generated 172% returns over that period. That's about three times our peers and about two times the S&P 500. We've done it while building a synergistic, diversified business model.
We've done it by levering ourselves to volatility trends on the trading side, to important data growth trends that my colleague Lynn Martin will talk about a little bit later. We've done it by deeply embedding ourselves across our customer infrastructure, trading and clearing and data, and we'll talk about how those feed each other. The trading creates the data, the data informs the trading. We've done it in a business model where we've consistently been able to expand our margins, and this is a point that I think is particularly important as you think about our ability to continue to generate these types of returns going forward. We have best-in-breed operating margins in the trading space. We have best-in-breed operating margins in the data space.
Every single dollar of revenue growth generates significant incremental margins that, coupled with our synergies, will continue to provide significant operating margin expansion opportunity, which means more earnings growth and more free cash flow generation, that we then allocate in a disciplined manner, and again, use to leverage in a very disciplined, very repeatable acquisition strategy that Ben will talk to you about in a little bit. As I move to slide 13, you sit in the audience, you think, "Okay, that's great. It's been a good 10-year run, but what have you guys done for me lately? What do the last five years look like?" What slide 13 does is it starts with all 500 companies in the S&P 500. Then it says, okay, how many of those companies have generated over 140% total shareholder returns in the past five years?
That knocks out about 70% of the S&P 500. We then look at. That's a pretty good job by those companies in terms of generating return. How many of those companies have consistently grown their earnings double digits every single year on average? That knocks that group down in half to about 84. We then look at it. Are people being disciplined about how they allocate their capital? Are they handing back cash to shareholders even while they generate growth and strong returns? Again, that knocks us down to a little more than 10% of the S&P 500. The last thing, just to kind of, again, sanity check, that's great. You generated returns, you grew earnings, you allocated your free cash flow in a disciplined manner. How are you positioned for the future? Where are your operating margins?
There are exactly five companies out of 500 that meet all these filter tests. Oh, by the way, if you look at the companies on this chart, the median PE is 26 times. Ours is 19 times. Price chases value. That's why we continue to look at returning capital to shareholders through free cash flow and investing in the fantastic businesses that my colleagues are going to talk to you about today. I move to slide 14. I mentioned our organic investments. Right? I'm not going to go through everything on this slide, but I'll talk about a few. The Brent business that we started when we bought the Liffe back in 2001, it and related products last year drove over $300 million of revenue. We launched ICE Clear Europe in the year 2008.
That captured hundreds of millions of dollars of clearing revenues that used to go to a third party. We've launched over 1,000 new products in energy since 2008. Last year, those products generated over $200 million of revenue. We built a CDS clearing business where CDS clearing didn't exist eight years ago. That business drove over $100 million of revenue just last year. We built the ICE benchmark business, a business that will grow 50% this year to nearly $50 million. When I talk about our company and our commitment to organic investments, it's backed up with returns, because if you walk through and add up the numbers that I just gave you, that was significant contribution to our revenues last year, highly profitable revenues that helped generate our free cash flow.
From time to time, we make a determination that an investment organically is not the most expeditious manner to get to market. Sometimes we buy versus build. When we do it, we do it in an extremely disciplined manner. Every deal that we take to our board has to meet a minimum target of at least a 10% return on investment. We've committed to you that we'll grow earnings double digits. We believe it's equally important to commit to you that the investments we make can similarly return at least 10%. In addition to that, we work on deals that will generate the synergies within the first three years of doing those deals, 90% of the synergies in the first three years.
What you see on the lower right-hand side of slide 15 is not only the significant synergies that we've committed to, that we've delivered early, but in each of the cases, we've actually increased those synergies. Ben will talk to you a little bit about how we're able to do that. Finally, while we're committed to the returns on investment of the deals we do being greater than 10% for the deal, we know that you're not going to wait 10 years to get that return. Our expectation is that in every instance, within a year of doing the deal, you start to see our returns on investment getting better. It's unrealistic to think in year one after a $5 billion deal, you're going to see the denominator and the numerator average out to the 10%.
As you can see here, a year after doing the NYSE, 6%, best versus any of the exchanges, still above our cost of capital, then grew to 8% and trended to 9% without IDC in 2016. You can see where directionally that's headed, taking us right back towards the 10% objective. You ought to expect, and we intend to deliver, a similar trend with IDC as we move to the future. How does this business that we've built, this diversity that we've built, all come together in terms of a financial model? I want to share with you a little bit about how we think about it, and I'm going to start on the upper left-hand side of slide 16. All right?
That starts with our data business, a data business that grew 7% last year, a data business that'll grow at least 6% this year, and a data business that we're confident can grow mid to high single digits in the future. Now, how is that going to happen? What we've laid out in the pie chart is our idea or our estimate of how that mid to high single digits revenue growth will occur. It will certainly include an element of pricing. About 30% of that growth, we think, will come from pricing. The fact is, we provide mission-critical proprietary data that customers need. We constantly improve the value of that data. Lynn Martin will talk to you more about that. We constantly improve the efficiency with which we deliver it. Ben Jackson will talk to you about that.
We've got an integrated sales force Tim Noble will talk to you about that can efficiently deliver those products to you. There absolutely is the opportunity for us to see price improvement contribute to growth. In addition to that, we think there's significant opportunity to bring new customers to our products and particularly to expand geographically. Lynn will show you that EMEA is our fastest-growing geography and one where there's significant opportunity for us to grow faster than the geography overall. She'll also show you additional opportunities in Asia Pacific to grow that. Geographic expansion, new customer expansion, we think can generate about 20% of that growth.
In addition to that, we know that our existing customers need more data in order to run their businesses, whether it's shift to passive investments, whether it's enabling reductions in headcount in the back office by consuming more data more efficiently. We've seen it last year. We're seeing it again this year. Lynn will show you how this revenue breaks down as we move through 2017. We believe that will also contribute about 20% in terms of revenue. Finally, new products. Lynn will talk to you about Continuous Evaluated Pricing, [InvestX], and other new products that we've innovated. We think there's significant opportunity to create more new products. You saw an announcement from us yesterday with the ICE BofAML Indices that we've acquired that we think will help us continue to create new products that our customers need.
Look, to be very clear, it's not going to be that every year pricing is 30% and every year new products is 20%, we think this is a rough guide for how we can generate this mid to high single-digit revenue growth. Again, Lynn will show you how this picture looks for 2017 here in a little bit. On the right-hand slide, we're very confident about the trading and clearing business that we've built. Open interest matters to growth in that space. Open interest levels are at record levels in many of our asset classes. We continue to see customer growth, right? Volatility comes and goes, and there's not a lot we can manage. Assuming that we get a relatively normal volatility environment, we're very confident in our trading and clearing business. I'll give you a great example.
You look at our energy business on a quarter-to-date basis, volumes are up significantly. Revenue's going to grow in the second quarter, which is an acceleration from the first quarter, and that's happening because we are seeing volatility. Open interest levels are at record levels, and we continue to see more customers. That trend, combined with data, we think will generate a continued ability to generate strong top-line growth. You then move to an expense base that we don't expect will need to grow more than low single digits. By the way, with a compensation expense that makes up about half of that's very tied to our pay-for-performance culture, which means that it will regulate itself depending on how the business is doing. Solid top line, low single-digit revenue growth, we believe can continue to yield double-digit earnings growth.
You've seen before that as we generate that double-digit earnings growth, it very efficiently generates a lot of free cash flow to reinvest in our business, to do strategic M&A, to grow our dividend as we grow, and to buy our shares back as price chases value. We're very confident in the business model we built. We're very confident in the financial model it can drive. I want to hand it to my colleagues and let you get to meet the people that are actually out there making it happen every day. I'm going to start with Ben Jackson. You guys have to take it a little easy on Ben. He's still reeling a bit from his Cavaliers' first-game performance last night. I'll hand it to Ben. How have your Longhorns football team done, by the way?
Thanks, Scott. Scott went through with all of you the financial side of our discipline around M&A. I thought what I would focus on for all of you today and the comments that I was going to make is what is the strategy around M&A that we have? What is the platform that we've built across ICE through all the acquisitions that we've done throughout history? What's the platform we've built that's enabled us that very unique way, go out, acquire new assets-
You won't be able to get my detailed notes
create new value for our customers in each and every transaction that we do. I thought I'd start with a quick story. For any of you from the Northeast knows that the weather was awful this past weekend, for Memorial Day weekend. I have a small boat out on the border of Rhode Island and Connecticut. This past weekend on Saturday, there was a little break in the weather.
Scott's talking about a small boat on the border of Rhode Island and Connecticut right now.
I decided to take my two sons and my daughter.
Making a business analogy here.
Out on our boat. What do I do before I go out, Andy, every single time? I go and I check the weather. Make sure from a risk perspective, things are going to be safe. We'll have a fun day on the water.
These things are such a fucking waste of time.
I was thinking back just a couple years ago, how did I do this? Anybody that's familiar with boating, common way to do it is you would take a VHF radio, classical VHF radio, you get that wonky electronic voice that updates every 30 minutes that gives you forecast updates. You go to the newspaper, go to the TV, you see general forecast data around what the weather patterns are going to be in Southern New England. You go on a computer, you can gather even more information. What did I do? What have I been doing for the last couple years? Just grab a simple phone. Any phone. iPhone, iPad. Google phone, you name it. On these devices, you can get an incredible amount of information, an incredible amount of data in a single place.
Take it even further, there's tons of proprietary data, high-value data that you can get for our weather, that gives you a much better level of precision of what exactly is happening. Even further example is that in particular in boating, there's private companies that drop weather buoys into the Long Island Sound, the Fishers Island Sound, the Block Island Sound, you name it. On a real-time basis, they're broadcasting data to applications these phones and iPads pick up that tells you real time, very specifically, what the wave height is, what the water temperature is, what the air pressure is at all these locations. Very cool. Unprecedented amount of data that you can get to help manage the risk of going out on the water. I share that story because to me, it's interlinked with the strategy of what ICE has been since the foundation of our company.
What's the problems we help solve for our customers? The problems that we help solve are we help risk managers, traders, compliance people gather that vast amount of information, we provide a ton of proprietary high-value content to those risk managers, to those traders, and we do it through a distribution mechanism that's as efficient and secure as you're going to get anywhere. That you know you're getting reliable data, reliable content of high value that's proprietary, that's being delivered to you through an ultra-secure mechanism, that's being served up on the application of your choice. We're not talking about being a terminal, locking you into a terminal type of relationship. What we're talking about is that the consumers nowadays, of all the information, of all this high-value proprietary information, require customized ways to view that data. They want to feed it to artificial intelligence.
Is there a little tag in there?
They want to be able to view it the exact way they want to. The way we see our value proposition to our customers, to be able to gather all that content, to be able to collect it, combine it, and be able to deliver it to our customers in the most efficient and secure way. If you go forward to slide 18, this is a bunch of the transactions that Scott had mentioned we've done since the inception of the company. You'll see that they fall into two areas, in the big Venn diagram here. They're either content, they're distribution, or it's both, and the vast majority fit into both. Let me describe further what I mean. You go back to the transaction of the IPE, well more than a decade ago. What was that transaction about?
That transaction was about getting highly valued proprietary content that oil traders needed, for risk management-
Under the, if you go to the back,
-by trade-
spread board thing, you lift it up, it's in there
global benchmarks like Brent. It's not just about the content, though. What else did we get through that? We got a connectivity. We got a network in the oil trading community. Fast-forward just a few years with the acquisition of the New York Board of Trade. What did we get with the New York Board of Trade? We got a set of content that's highly valued by food companies, people that trade sugar around the world, for soft commodities. It gives them information, proprietary information, high-valued information that helps them manage risk. What also came along with that, products like the Dollar Index, which helps traders, risk managers understand the relative value of the U.S. dollar versus a basket of currencies. It also gave us connectivity into all of those people that utilize those products every day. Fast-forward a few more years, New York Stock Exchange Liffe.
With that, obviously, came very large equities, proprietary data set, as well as with Liffe, more softs, soft commodity-related data, as well as European rates. Not just the data that's highly valued for people to manage those risk positions on a day in, day out basis, but also connectivity into that community. Now go even further to some of the more content-oriented companies.
You have 10 minutes.
think about an acquisition like SuperDerivatives. What's SuperDerivatives all about, is providing people highly valued proprietary information on how to value very difficult to value derivative instruments.
you're working remote.
Also, FX. Also, rates. Connectivity into the networks through people that care about them. Connectivity to people that care about pricing that risk on a day in, day out basis. Fast-forward just a little bit further to the IDC acquisition. With IDC, what's their value proposition? They help customers price and understand risk of fixed income. Not only are they the standard for pricing fixed income instruments in the world, but you also have a connectivity network, connections into that global fixed income trading and risk community. Fast-forward even further to the announcement that Scott had mentioned that happened yesterday with the Bank of America Merrill Lynch indices. We now have a global set of fixed income and commodities indices that, in the fixed income side, is the second largest one in the world.
We have assets now to help people price, manage risk, and connectivity into the fixed income space. what I talked about is high-valued, proprietary, interesting content coupled with distribution. One of the interesting things that Jeff has mentioned on several of the investor calls over the past year has been an asset called SFTI. I highlight that because the SFTI Connectivity Network, think of it as an ultra-secure highway, an ultra-secure delivery mechanism for us to deliver our content as well as third-party content in an ultra-secure way to the device, to the application of choice to the end consumer. We've leveraged that asset to tie together this entire content set, this entire unique content set, to be our ultra-secure delivery mechanism of this content to the application of choice that a customer has. they can analyze, slice and dice that data however they want.
They have data from a trusted source, extremely unique, extremely proprietary, and the transportation mechanism by which it's getting to them is done in an ultra-secure way. They know the quality of the content that they're getting. This has created a platform for us that when we're thinking about M&A, we're thinking about what is the new ways that we can expand our distribution, what are the new, interesting, unique content that we can put on and mix it so we can plug it in right away, and we can distribute it out to any of those customers that I had mentioned that are consuming our data around the world. Go forward to slide 19. Let's talk about our strategy around M&A, what are the types of companies that we look for from an M&A perspective. How do we do our homework?
It's pretty simple how we do our homework. First, we know what we're good at. We know what our DNA is. We understand the exchange space, we understand the clearing space, we understand risk management. We understand all the information and the importance of that information that flows around exchanges, clearing, and risk. We stay within our wheelhouse. We stay where we know we have subject matter expertise. Second, really most importantly, is we spend a ton of time with our customers. Every person that you're going to hear from today, from the ICE management team, spends more time out of the office than in. When we're spending time out of the office, it's in front of customers.
Understanding what are the issues they're trying to solve, what's the content they're trying to pull together from disparate sources, what's the information that they're missing that would help them manage risk and do their jobs better on a day-in and day-out basis. Third, we do our own homework. We do a ton of research. We gather data from a ton of different sources. We leverage our own networks. We leverage assets like the New York Stock Exchange, where we all are today, the connectivity we have into startup companies. We leverage that entire network to gather information around content and distribution candidates that would be great for us to combine with the other assets onto our platform and to deliver to our customers. If you think about it, stay close to the DNA. We do our own homework. We stay close to customers.
That's what enables us to succeed and to get this out in front of our customers in the most efficient way. Once we do all that, what we think about on every targeted transaction is how is this business going to integrate into our overall footprint, into our overall business? At the end of the day, if we can't have a hypothesis and a theory on how that business, the content it provides, the distribution it provides, coupled with the other content distribution that we have, it has to provide more value to the end customer combined, and that we have to be able to deliver it in a more efficient and effective way to our customers to be able to realize synergies.
That's what drives the cost synergies at the end of the day, is the efficiency that we can get that information out and broadcast out to our customer base. Also combining that content asset with other content assets provides something new to our customers, provides something new of value to our customers. Once we do that, once we go through that waterfall that I just mentioned, we then apply a lot of the financial discipline that Scott had mentioned in his section to the transactions to make sure that every dollar of investment that we're going to apply towards an M&A transaction is going to generate that north of 10% return on invested capital.
We apply that discipline every single time to make sure that that dollar, if it's going to go towards M&A, is better served going there than being returned to the shareholders through dividends and buybacks. When we do this correct, which Scott mentioned several examples in the history of the company, where repeatedly we do this correct over and over again, the benefits naturally flow. We deepen moats. We gain more intellectual property, providing more value to our customers. By providing more value to your customers, you gain more wallet share with that customer base. [inaudible] , we'll go through it. There's our strategic approach to M&A. Talked about how we research and do our homework. If you flip forward to slide 20, this is how we integrate companies.
Basically, the game plan that we use and the playbook that we use over and over again in each acquisition that we have. It starts with due diligence.
No words spoken at all
the first part, as part of that waterfall process of identifying candidates. One of the key elements, well before a transaction is done, is we have an integration plan done. We know how that business is going to come in. We know what assets it's going to be combined with. We know what content assets it's going to get combined with. We know how it's going to get aligned in the organization. The other thing I'd highlight is early on in that phase, we may identify that there's assets within that company that may not be the greatest fit, that may not naturally have unique, proprietary, high-value content for the audience that we serve. When we identify those, we're not afraid to put a model together and execute against that model on how to carve that business out, and how to sell it. We've done it multiple times.
Anybody that's been involved in carve-outs knows that they're extraordinarily difficult. We've done it time and time again successfully. On this slide in the bottom right, there's multiple examples here of 4 businesses that were part of the New York Stock Exchange. NYFIX, [inaudible], [inaudible], Wombat, and most recently, closed on a transaction to sell an [inaudible] governance services business. There's also an example from IDC, a company called Interactive Data Management Solutions. That business, we also just closed on in the last couple of months. Was part of the IDC business that basically built bespoke websites for wealth managers, primarily in Germany. Didn't really have unique intellectual property or content as part of that platform. It was also a platform where you're building it very bespoke and customized each time for a customer.
You're not building it once and selling it multiple times to provide value to a wide audience. We decided to divest it very early on, executed the past year and completed it just a couple of months ago. Once the deal is closed, we align the company into the appropriate area of overall ICE. In this case, as IDC for an example, we aligned that business into Lynn's data business. We very quickly then look at, spend time with customers and understand what are the things in that portfolio, what are the ways that we're providing those services to our customers, how can we get it onto our platform, our distribution and content platform, in an efficient, effective way so the customers can consume that information as easily as possible. It also simplified the way it is to buy.
One of the initial pieces of feedback we got on IDC in particular is that it's extraordinarily complicated to buy from you. By just simplifying the order form, simplifying the number of flavors, we actually improved the customer experience and a ton of cost came out of the organization. Sales, account management, product management, support functions, all that cost came out of the organization very quickly towards the end of the first year, realized in the second year. Next stage, in year two and year three, is really about the systems, network, technology consolidation, real estate consolidation, executing those in the second year, realizing the benefits in the third year. This is the game plan we use on every single transaction that we execute.
It's what enables us, on almost every transaction that we do, to not only raise synergy targets, but also accelerate the realization of them in our transactions. On slide 21.
On slide 21.
I like to think of this, when you think about that platform and that network that we have.
I'll leave something here.
to be able to distribute all this content. I want to focus here a little bit.
Slide 65.
at highly valued
What the fuck makes a 65?
that we have. In fact, the underpinning of that.
Are you waiting to hear? Literally, I can tell you right now, nothing will come out. Zero.
Providing to our customers. When you take those ingredients, similar to.
We're going to make a product. We're going to make absolutely.
Last night, our team had the pleasure of going to a new.
Three hours of literally fucking verbal abuse.
When you go to a nice restaurant, what are the things they do? They have a.
Fucking-
culinary touch.
yesterday's platform
as they're putting together, the creations they're putting together, and these extremely high-quality ingredients.
Which is-
I use that analogy because-
blessing in the church.
Things through here. I'm not going to steal a thunder from my colleagues, but I'll just touch on a few of them. When you take high-quality ingredients like our-
I'd rather it be this. Where it just-
combine it together-
on events.
you get incredible outcomes. The first one here is ICE Index Solutions. We talked about Bank of America Merrill Lynch.
Okay.
Fixed income indices and commodities indices, testing well. Lynn's going to talk about how the combination of this with our equities indices, our other fixed income indices that IDC had, the BondEdge business as part of IDC had, how combined has created an incredible index solution for us to provide to our customers. In the fixed income space alone, outside of LIBOR, we've posted $1 trillion of assets under management benchmark for our fixed income. Next, she's going to talk about our ICE data evaluations business, where I don't care what asset class you're trading now or how complicated the instrument is, we have pricing and reference data to be able to support the decisions you need to make.
Managing risks, pricing transactions, pricing your exposure. We can do it in any asset class around the world, and we can deliver that content to you in an efficient, effective, and secure manner. Next, Chris Edmonds, my colleague, is going to talk about ICE Bond Solutions. Where with ICE Bond Solutions, we've built dealer-to-dealer auction capability, a system that's used every day by the dealer community to trade single name bonds. We've done that by combining intellectual property and assets that we had, and expertise that we had with the Creditex business, with content that came with IDC. Skipping down to our Connect asset. What Connect's all about, and Trabue Bland's going to go through this in more detail. Connect's all about that platform that I had mentioned that includes all of this proprietary content with secure delivery mechanisms.
For areas where we have a natural nexus, where we have a lot of communication flow back and forth to our customers, it also combines our instant messaging capabilities, our order execution capabilities, and also web portals that people can consume our information, customize it in the way they want to see it, chart it, graph it, take action on it. Trabue will go through that piece. Finally on this slide, Mark Wassersug, my colleague sitting over here to my left, will speak about the ICE private cloud infrastructure. What the ICE private cloud infrastructure is all about is that information highway. Information highway that's connected into that global network of all those customers that I mentioned, from all the acquisitions that we've done. Basically how we've tied all that together and that we deliver this content out in an ultimate secure manner for our customers.
With that, I'm going to hand it over to my colleague, our SVP of Operations, Mark Wassersug, also known as Wass.
I like to stand behind the podium. I need some protection. Good afternoon. As Ben said, I'm Mark Wassersug, Senior Vice President of Operations for ICE. Senior Vice President of Operations really means that I have to take the mess that you guys buy or build and put it all together into one common infrastructure that works. They keep me very busy. I'm also responsible for keeping all of the communication between our customers, our customer systems, and all the data that flows back and forth in milliseconds and microseconds, flowing at the same time. With that backdrop, as you can imagine, I need to understand a lot about technology, but a lot about what our customers' demands are, customers' needs are, and how our technology solutions can provide vehicles for our customers to be more successful.
Ben gave you a pretty comprehensive overview of the strategic assets that we've either bought or built over the last 20 years. What binds those assets together is what I build and maintain, and allows us to seamlessly deliver our products and services, is this thing called SFTI, a secure financial transaction infrastructure. A lot of people might refer to it as ICE's proprietary private cloud. I like to call it SFTI with an I, and I think that's pretty well known and understood in the business. I would imagine most of you have heard of SFTI. You have probably connected over SFTI, either to ICE systems or through other assets within the industry. SFTI was actually built just after the 2001 9/11 terrorist attacks. We identified a need in the industry.
Actually, a big demand in the industry for highly redundant, secure, robust communications that could actually carry financial data transactions well. Today, SFTI has over 1,200 firms, different firms connecting to 120 different exchange venues, 500 different data and news sources, and 12 co-location hosting data centers globally. Over SFTI, we deliver every single ICE product that we have, that was either bought or built. That's different because any one of our products across the multiple disparate centers are able to be delivered and received by the 1,200-plus firms that connect to us every single day. What's unique about our infrastructure is that we also deliver non-ICE products across that same infrastructure. We have literally hundreds of external businesses ranging from other exchanges, news and content providers, market data services, and even third-party cloud services, connecting over SFTI to reach our audience to leverage our network.
Just like ICE products, we can actually turn on any of those services on the SFTI network, literally with the flip of a switch. The ability to provide all of the products and services over a single connection allows SFTI customers to optimize and streamline not only the network but significantly reduce costs. Because of the breadth of offerings we have, ultra-low latency microwave or wired technology, whether it's co-location hosting or high-frequency trading in data centers next to exchanges, or whether it's highly secure, reliable infrastructure for transactions, we can provide any of those services, literally customized services, to any of our customers. It's a huge opportunity for us as an exchange and a data provider. We're a truly unique industry asset and no other exchange or data system service provider offers this. There are very few, if any, telcos that offer the same thing.
Again, very key from a customer base perspective, the fact that we build end-to-end. We continue to expand the SFTI footprint through strategic acquisitions. You see this is a map showing effectively a representation of our worldwide network. Through the acquisition of 7ticks, which is an IDC property, we've expanded our footprint into Asia and Australia. We now have access centers in Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Singapore, Melbourne, and Sydney, Australia.
Our most recent acquisition, TMX Atrium. We're able to expand our footprint across North America and Canada, as well as into now within 12 months, we expect Atrium to be fully integrated into the ICE network and be able to deliver all of the products and services available on 62 entirely through customer set. One of the other interesting aspects of the TMX Atrium acquisition is the microwave technology we just developed. TMX has a microwave network between Chicago and financial centers, Toronto and New York, and we will be able to add that service to our ultra-low-latency. I think the last and the most important point that I will leave you with is how SFTI answers truly the number 1 concern by senior executives really in any industry, and that's protection from cyber threat.
You think about the headlines today, ransomware, malware, phishing, denial of service attack, hackers breaking into systems, and stealing data. The single most significant vector of all of that, the single most for attackers is the internet. When you think about being on the internet, you're immediately susceptible to cyber threats. SFTI is a very private network. There's no internet connectivity whatsoever. We don't allow internet in, and we don't publish internet out. That's a huge differentiator for somebody who owns a private network. That satisfies one side of security. The other side is we're connected to 1,200 firms who likely are on the internet, and how do we protect ourselves and our customers who are on SFTI from potential exposure from firms we connect with? This would be the inside threat.
We obviously employ some pretty sophisticated and significant controls, whether it be from third-party providers who provide us technology to our own proprietary technology that we build and design. We also have an incredibly robust squelching of bad traffic. If your data is not what we define as acceptable for the network, we drop it, we take it off, we don't allow it on the network. Ultimately, that stops a lot of the noise from happening. We also have a global network operations center and security center that monitors the network 24 by 7. They're all ICE employees spread around the world. If you have a patient globally, and these are my team that's up 24/7 making sure that network is safe and secure.
This alone, that security level, makes Safety an ICE trusted partner for our customers and our firms as they look at alternatives to the internet. Firms are going to have to mitigate risk. They're going to have to leave the internet. The likely place to go is a financial industry private security network that we build, offer, and provide that can give you roughly any product or service available through a financial services firm. We think that's a huge differentiator for us, not only for our own proprietary content and services, but for all of the third-party firms, whether competitors or just firms that actually need access to our platform. I want to thank you for your attention throughout my discussion. Now I'd like to introduce Lynn Martin, Vice President and Operating Officer of ICE Data Services.
Hi, everyone. Nice to see so many of you in the room today. Thanks for being with us today, the first Friday in June, as Scott had mentioned earlier. I unfortunately didn't have as pleasant of a weekend as Ben did on his boat. I had the unpleasant task of taking care of two small sick children, so I apologize in advance if my voice gets raspy throughout the presentation. What I'm here to talk to you about today is why we are so bullish on the prospects for ICE Data Services, why we think we are going to be able to sustain a mid-to-high single-digit growth rate, and how me and my team are going about achieving that growth rate and delivering on what we're promising to you. Moving to slide 25. A couple of things I want to point out.
Number one, ICE has a long history of growing data businesses. If you look at this chart, in the last six years, we've significantly grown our data footprint. Data previously represented about 10% of ICE group's revenue. Today, it represents more than 45% of the group's revenue, and that is continuing to grow. Another thing I want to point out to you is that that growth is not just pinned to one driver. As Scott mentioned earlier, we have a pretty balanced approach to the way we grow the business, and that's based on a variety of factors. No one factor is providing outsized growth. In 2017, we're seeing that manifest itself through a recalibration of pricing. What I mean by a recalibration of pricing is more and more data is consumed, more and more data is output.
We're pricing to value, and we're providing price points that accurately.
Hey, I'm up one of these groups out here. I'll take them out.
That is not the only way we are growing. New customers and geographies represent about 10% of our growth rate in 2017. I think that is just the forefront of how we're looking to expand the business.
The ribs.
I'm going to talk about how we're going about that through our reorganized sales force, then hand it over to my colleague, Tim Noble, who runs Global Data Sales for ICE. Increased consumption is certainly a key driver of our growth. What we mean by increased consumption is when Scott mentioned that increased automation of services by firms. How do they increase their automation footprint? They do that through consuming more and more data. That is a secular trend, the increased automation, including the increase in algorithmic trading, which has grown the data business at ICE historically and will continue to grow the data business at ICE. New products. New products is an important area where me and my team spend an awful lot of time and focus our energy.
When we create new products and services, as is consistent with the rest of the ICE culture, we do it.
Is it burning alive right now?
Our firms, our customers, trading are continuing to evolve, just as many of your needs are continuing to evolve. When we're out designing our products and services, we listen to our customers. We listen to the ways they want to consume data, the data that they used to and they need to consume, and there are a variety of secular trends that are really driving the direction of new products. I'm going to talk about what some of those are in the coming slides. Finally, last but certainly not least, mergers and acquisitions. As Ben and Scott both alluded to, we spend a deliberate amount of time looking for strategic acquisitions that further grow our proprietary services that we provide to our customers. These tend to be high-value services, which are complementary to our existing services. Moving to slide 26.
I think slide 26 shows one very important message, and that is how complementary the two businesses at ICE are, specifically the ICE360 trading business and the ICE Data Services business. If you take nothing else away from this slide, I want you to take away two items. Item number one is the breadth of services that ICE Data Services provides to the full trade life cycle, from pre-trade to trade to post-trade. Every one of those services is proprietary to ICE-
You're going to call them, right? No
The second important trend, this is more geared towards the folks who have covered our exchange group in the past, is that the market has become electronic. You know as covering exchanges that the exchange data piece is a very important portion of the growth of the exchange group. ICE Data Services has the exchange data piece as an important part of its business, ICE Data Services-
I'm not getting any.
Are more than just the exchange data business.
Bill, I can't even connect.
We use the exchange data as valuable input to create additional derived products. That is not the sole input that we use to create those products for our customers. Those services span, again, the full trade life cycle. Pre-trade, trade, and post-trade. When they.
I'm no tech guy, half of that is not exactly.
To the extent that the products that our customers use to make those trading decisions are shipped or serviced by an ICE platform, that bleeds back into the prices of those markets that are on the ICE platform. A really good example of this is what we announced in [inaudible] for ICE Bond platform, the integration of our Continuous Evaluated Pricing into our ICE Bond platform. My colleague, Chris Edmonds, is going to talk about why we are so excited about the prospects for the platform and also why we are so excited about how Continuous Evaluated Pricing can provide further automation and further grow that platform.
Yeah, I think if we get to.
Moving to slide 27. I think it's really important to define the market segment for the market data.
Fucking thing wore out literally.
As you can see from slide 27, the pie chart there is basically taken from the most recent Burton-Taylor study on the market data industry. The industry last year grew at 4.2%. However, ICE Data Services' portfolio is deliberately curated, as Ben and Scott spoke about, to focus on the high-growth areas. The portions of the market data segment that ICE Data Services plays in grew far quicker than the overall industry. Those areas grew at 7% last year. I think this is an incredibly important message as to why we are so bullish for the prospects for ICE Data Services. We are strategically curating our portfolio to focus on the high-growth areas of the market data industry. Moving to slide 28. The obvious question is, okay, what services do you have?
Tying back to the pie chart on the previous slide, I first want to redefine this slide as to the way those of you who cover our stock, the way we report guidance for this segment. Quick bit of translation. Portfolio management and analytics and pricing reference and valuation data correspond to our valuation and analytics bucket within the segment. Exchange data focuses on the exchange data bucket, and real-time and trading data focuses on the desktop and connectivity bucket within the data and listing segment. Going into more of the details. With portfolio management and analytics, we have a couple of key assets under our umbrella, which deliver high-quality services in this bucket. Our ICE Benchmark Administration group, for example, is one of the most recognized and trusted provider of benchmarks to the market.
When you think of the household names of LIBOR, the ISDA swap rate, the LBMA gold fix, those are made possible through the high-quality third-party valuations that ICE Benchmark Administration provides and the strong governance that oversees that organization. Additionally, as per the announcement yesterday, we have decided to acquire the Bank of America Merrill Lynch index business. That, coupled with our ICE Treasury Index Family and a variety of equity indices at NYSE, will lead to, upon closing, benchmarking over $1 trillion in assets under management. We're incredibly excited about the prospects for that index business, particularly as more and more money flows into fixed-income ETFs. In the exchange data bucket, you may think, well, I know exactly what exchange data is. It's pretty self-explanatory. It's bids, offers, volume information on the back of your exchanges. That's absolutely true.
What is missing from the exchange data debate in the market and the exchange data dialogue in the market is the significant amount of product innovation that actually goes into this bucket. If you look at our growth rates, a lot of that is tied to new products and services that we create with the exchange data. Firms' data needs are continuing to evolve, and as a result, that leads us to have to package data in different methods, different delivery mechanisms, and with different frequencies. An interesting stat for this bucket in particular is in the New York Stock Exchange, over the last five years, we've created more than 43% new products. That really speaks to the amount of product innovation there.
Most recently, we introduced the Integrated Feed last year for our markets, which was an order-by-order feed, again, based on customer demands and their evolving trading strategies. The real-time and trading data bucket, or the desktop and connectivity bucket, as you know from our public reporting, is an interesting area. The way I like to describe this bucket is the delivery mechanism. The way I deliver my strong, high-quality, third-party, trusted content to you. This tends to be the largest bucket at most data vendors who resell others' data. However, in my world, this is the smallest bucket in terms of revenue. Again, that shows our focus on creating the content and delivering it to customers in whatever method they want, be it a raw feed, a consolidated feed, or via the network that Mark talked about earlier. Last but certainly not least, our pricing reference and valuation data.
This is how you know the Interactive Data organization. The way I like to describe this bucket is very akin to that Capital One commercial with, "What's in your wallet?" When I go into a customer, I say, "What's in your portfolio?" Why do I ask that question? Because I can provide a high-quality valuation for pretty much anything in that portfolio, be it a fixed income security, a very bespoke, hard-to-value OTC derivative position, an index, a curve, a forward curve, or a volatility surface across multiple asset classes. By the way, I can provide you with terms and conditions or reference data for more than 10 million outputs across the globe. These are all very complementary buckets for each other, and before I leave this slide, I want to give you one example of that.
We've made significant investments in our reference data business over the last year. I think that is best demonstrated by our press release yesterday, again, on the BofAML index business. Upon closing, the $1 trillion of assets under management that are going to be benchmarked against that index family will be using not just our valuations, but also our reference data in those indices. That's a point that I think is very important because it shows how the complementary nature of each of these buckets can deliver increased value for customers. Back to one of the factors I said was a growth driver for the business, and that's our significant geographical opportunity. You can see from this chart, which shows the growth rates of the industry, not our specific growth rates in 2016, that APAC was the fastest-growing region measured by the industry.
I will tell you that That is obviously our smallest % of data revenue, but that is by far the fastest-growing portion of my business today. In fact, I am about to get on a plane to go to this region next week, cold and all, to go and visit our global customers. The reason why I am so bullish about this region is because of the demands for international data and growth in fixed income ETFs in this region. EMEA is also growing at a rate that far outpaces what the industry is growing at.
Given the % of revenue coming out of EMEA and the secular trends around increased regulation and the services that we provide to address those regulations, I am incredibly excited about the long-term prospects for this region. Before I move off of this slide, I do not want to underestimate the opportunity in the Americas.
We have high penetration in the Americas, but we still have significant room to grow as a result of efficient regulatory solutions that we're delivering to our customers as well as the investments in reference data and indices that we have made. As Ben said, one of the philosophies at ICE as a working manager, which we all are in the management team, is that we spend most of our time with our customers. I spend a lot of time with customers, and when we're listening to their requirements, we are developing new services and continuing to evolve our existing services to meet those customer demands. We list a few on slide 30, a few of the largest client requirements, some of which I'm going to go to in some subsequent slides.
Before I move off of this slide, I do want to call out something that Mark Wassersug suggested. The demand for highly secure, highly resilient network infrastructure is significantly growing. Financial firms are all worried and are all grappling with the need to be cyber secure and to protect themselves from threats. Our SFTI network is unparalleled in terms of resiliency, global reach, and levels of cybersecurity. The fact that I can say to my customers, "I can deliver you this phenomenal proprietary content via one of the most secure global networks out there" resonates, very much resonates with firms. The more and more we hear about cyber attacks in the market, the more and more that message resonates. One of the growth drivers I had from the previous slide was the increase in automation, and particularly in algorithmic trading.
I think slide 31 does a really nice job at demonstrating how automation has significantly affected the dynamics of the U.S. securities market. If you look at the one investor base that has grown over the last seven years in terms of market share of stock trading, it's the quant hedge fund space. Quant hedge funds are clearly a heavy automated strategy, heavily reliant on data, and as a result of their trading, output a lot of data. What this slide underestimates, though, is the fact that every one of those other buckets, other hedge funds, asset managers, and bank trading, all now employ some level of automation when they're making their trading decisions. It's not just from a single source. It's not just as simple as knowing what the stock did the previous day or the previous millisecond or nanosecond or microsecond.
You take outputs from multiple asset classes in order to get edge in markets today. As that trend continues to evolve, that increases the amount of data inputs required to a trading strategy for it to be successful, but it also increases the number of trading outputs, the data output from that strategy. Slide 32 is a great example of one of the key drivers of product innovation for us at the moment, and that is regulation. If you look at slide 32, there are 14 different regulations that firms are looking to comply with in the next 12 to 18 months. Ask within all of your firms. I challenge any of you to find a firm that is not grappling with complying with some form of regulation. Our products and services allow our firms to efficiently comply with each of these regulations.
Some firms will have to comply with one, some firms will have to comply with significantly more than one based on their footprint. Last but certainly not least, a question that I'm sure many of you have in your minds today, is giving you a little bit more detail about what we announced yesterday. We announced yesterday that we are acquiring 5,000 indices from Bank of America Merrill Lynch. They are the second-largest index provider in the fixed income industry. Combined with the other index businesses that I operate, the Treasury Index business, the NYSE Index business, we will have $1 trillion assets under management benchmarked against our indices come closing. As I mentioned before, they will be using our reference data and our valuations, those indices.
What that press release doesn't say is the opportunity, and it comes back to something I said a couple of slides ago. The trading business at ICE and the data business at ICE are very complementary businesses. Now that I have this breadth of index offering, it enables my trading businesses in very unique ways. For example, the trading business that Chris and his team are going to talk to you about in a bit is really focused on the commodity sector. As a result of the acquisition, we acquired a very robust suite of commodity indices. That should lead to some new and interesting trading and clearing products for us in the future as a result of this acquisition.
Additionally, you're going to hear Tom Farley, President of New York Stock Exchange, and Stacey Cunningham talk about how we service our ETF-listed companies and how we incentivize customers to list their ETFs on NYSE Arca. As a result of this acquisition, I am able to provide enhanced services to those customers who are creating and listing ETFs, be it either benchmark indices, customized indices, or IOPV calculations, intraday calculations for them. It goes back to what I've been saying, that the two core businesses of ICE are very strategic in nature and strong complements to each other. With that, I'm going to turn it over to Tim Noble. Tim is our Global Head of Sales for ICE Data Services. He's going to give you a lot of extra color of what he's hearing from the field. Thank you very much for your time.
Thank you, Lynn. Can I have the clicker? Thank you. Good afternoon, and thank you, Lynn. I'm going to start here, in fact, on slide 35. I want to focus on why we believe that there is this tremendous untapped market opportunity that Lynn has mentioned. This untapped market opportunity comes in kind of many different guises. The range of proprietary products that we offer is growing. You heard Lynn talk about the focus on product and product development and our ability to introduce these products that are responsive to whatever environment in the current environment. Geography. Scott and Lynn talked about the opportunity that we have in EMEA, the opportunity we have in Asia-Pacific, and again, the opportunity that we have in North America. Now that we're part of a global, well-resourced organization, we have the ability to make the most of that opportunity.
We have the ability to sell, to cross-sell, and to up-sell within an organization by coordinating across all the different data solutions. Whereas once we may have kind of fallen on the back office, we now go to the middle office, the front office, as I say, with all these different data assets. Finally, by leveraging and being a part of one ICE, this means we have many more touch points within our clients, within our organizations, and we have the advantage of access to much more large, comprehensive data solutions. If you look, you can imagine the market context that we're operating in. Of course, the market where there is a need for more trusted, independent data. Why? This is due to automation, it's due to the regulation that's required, and due to efficiency.
Our clients say that we need data which is flexible, it's comprehensive, and also it's proprietary. We are uniquely positioned to provide that data. What I want to spend a few minutes talking about is the transition and the integration since IDC became a part of ICE. To do that, I want to talk about some perspective of those changes and that integration. Because I joined Interactive Data shortly before the acquisition of ICE, and how we see it compared to then and how we see it compared to now. First, at Interactive Data, the company was fairly fragmented. We had multiple customer touchpoints. We weren't necessarily that coordinated between our customers, and this, in some ways, could lead to client confusion and frustration. In fact, we received many requests from our clients, and they said, "Please, can we have one point of contact?
That one point of contact, so we don't need to explain who we are every time we call you. In fact, that person can be the ambassador of our client within Interactive Data." The salespeople in the sales organization, they were subject matter experts in what it is they sold. A pricing and reference data salesperson would sell pricing and reference data. A feed salesperson would sell feeds. Then, in fact, as we joined SuperDerivatives, the SuperDerivatives salesperson, guess what? Would sell and focus on SuperDerivatives. Equally, we had many different sales, multiple sales processes. We didn't have one way of looking at the pipeline. We didn't have one compensation plan. We had many instances of Salesforce.
During the past year, we've worked hard for that integration. As you've seen, the accelerated sales that we've enjoyed in the past year that we've been together. Now, as a key reorganization, we've executed on that, and we now have a single global sales organization. We have one global sales organization. We have one management team. This means increased communication. We share opportunities. This, of course, is leading to accelerated sales. We reorganized the account management team. Ben referred to it. What was it that we asked from our clients? We now have a single touch point. This makes it much more productive. The client calls us. They don't have to explain who they are and what they're doing.
They will have whatever question they have answered. Then it gives us the ability to truly understand the requirements across the entire enterprise, and we can make the most of that opportunity. We now have one integrated sales process. We have one method of reviewing the pipeline. We have one account plan. We have a compensation plan that encourages us all to work together and cross-sell and up-sell within the various different products, and also within the various different geographies. Now we work across the entire team, we have no silos, and we can sell the entire portfolio. As a result, we're a better-integrated team. We're accelerating sales, as you have seen. Equally, we've managed to increase sales productivity in the last six months by some 18%.
Not only have we reorganized sales to make sure we can get the most of an untapped market opportunity, we continue to improve what I would call our sales effectiveness. If you look at our pricing area, then in pricing, we had many different data assets. We had the data assets from IDC, predominantly pricing and reference data. We had BIP. We had CMA. We had our securities and evaluations. We had SuperDerivatives. We had CLARA. We had all these data assets, which we've now grouped together within what we call pricing and analytics. What has that enabled us to do? It has enabled us to take these assets and build solutions for our clients. For example, best execution, liquidity indicators. We can now deliver pricing on a continuous basis, but not just at the end of the day. We have an increased geography.
We have this untapped market opportunity. We also sell to a broad customer base, which is here reflected on slide 37. We have many customer types. We have commercial firms. We have commercial organizations, asset managers, banks, corporates, funds, ETFs. There's an opportunity that not only across this broad customer base, but also the front office, the middle office, and the back office. In the front office, as an example, we will talk about best execution. Middle office, it might be regulation, therefore corporate and compliance. In the back office, it could be reference data, it could be corporate actions. I want to finish up by telling two stories of how this really happens and kind of in real life there on the front line. The first example I'm going to use is one of the largest ETF providers in Asia.
Asia, as Lynn and Ben and Scott referred to, as one of our faster-growing regions. This client was already an existing client of our real-time feed. We already provided real-time feed to this client. Based upon the relationship that we had there, we began to talk to them about our new family, our new product of the ICE Treasury Indices. On the back of those ICE Treasury Indices, of course, they launched a number of ETFs. The more ETFs they launch, then this account will continue to grow. Not only now do they subscribe to our indices, but they also needed our continuous pricing to calculate the INAV for those ETFs. This, coupled with our regular end-of-day valuations, we deliver this all from one constant platform.
This is an example of how do we take the different data assets, we cross-sell, we up-sell, we match the client needs. My final story here is a leading global investment bank, this again talks about an application in the front office. There, the requirement was to support their algo trading. What they were looking for is they were looking for accurate pricing reflective of the European bond market. They also wanted the ability to reflect any real-time changes within the European bond market. We were already the primary provider of their pricing data. Also, you heard from Mark and you heard from Lynn about the SF network. Actually, they were already a user of our SFTI network.
Due to the high coverage of the European bond market, including illiquid bonds, the caliber of our pricing, the ability to reflect a changing market in real-time, the fact that we could deliver that pricing on our FIX feed, it could directly plug into their in-house trading, mean that we won the business. This was hugely competitive, this opportunity. If we think about putting that all together. We now deliver pricing on a continuous basis to support their algo trading. We deliver it over the SFTI network, we deliver it on our fixed-fee delivery straight into their in-house trading platform. In conclusion, we continue to have this vast untapped market opportunity. We've now completely reorganized for growth. We have one ICE Data. We're cross-selling within our client base.
In collaboration with the team that you're going to hear from Chris in a minute, we have the ability to sell across the entire portfolio, this will continue to lead our accelerated growth. Thank you. That concludes our opening comments. It's now time for a break, if we could all start again at about 3:00. Thank you very much for your time.
Ooh, well you already know. Just imagine, just imagine, just imagine. Nothing I can see but you when you dance, dance. Feel a good creeping up on you, so just dance, dance, come on. All those things I shouldn't do, you dance, dance. Ain't nobody leaving soon, so keep dancing. I can't stop the feeling. Just dance, dance.
I can't stop the feeling. Keep dancing. I can't stop the feeling. Nothing I can see but you when you dance, dance. Good creeping up on you, so just dance, dance. I know all the things I shouldn't do, you dance, dance. Ain't nobody leaving soon, so keep dancing. Everybody sing. I can't stop the feeling in my body. I can't stop the feeling in my body. No, I can't stop the feeling. When I feel your body. Got this feeling in my body. Break it down. Got this feeling in my body. Can't stop the feeling. Got this feeling in my body. Come on. If you're not the one for me. How come I can bring you to your knees?
If you're not the one for me. Why do I hate the idea of being free? If I'm not the one for you. You've got to stop holding me the way you do. Oh, honey, if I'm not the one for you. Why have we been through what we have been through? It's so cold out here in your wilderness. I want you to be my keeper. Not if you are so reckless. If you're gonna let me down, let me down gently. Don't pretend that you don't want me. Our love ain't water under the bridge. If you're gonna let me down, let me down gently. Don't pretend that you don't want me. Our love ain't water under the bridge. Oh, whoa, oh, oh. Say that our love ain't water under the bridge. What are you waiting for?
You never seem to make it through the door. Who are you hiding from? It ain't no life to live like you're on the run. Have I ever asked for much? The only thing that I want is your love. If you're gonna let me down, let me down gently. Don't pretend that you don't want me. Our love ain't water under the bridge. If you're gonna let me down, let me down gently. Don't pretend that you don't want me. Our love ain't water under the bridge. Oh, whoa, oh, oh. Say that our love ain't water under the bridge. It's so cold in your wilderness. I want you to be my keeper. Not if you are so reckless. If you're gonna let me down, let me down gently. Don't pretend that you don't want me. Our love ain't water under the bridge.
If you're gonna let me down, let me down gently. Don't pretend that you don't want me. Our love ain't water under the bridge. Oh, whoa, oh, oh. Say that our love ain't water under the bridge. Oh, whoa, oh, oh. Say that our love ain't water under the bridge. Say that our love ain't water under the bridge. If you love somebody, better tell them while they're here 'cause they just may run away from you. You'll never know quite when. Then again, it just depends on how long of time is left for you. I've climbed the highest mountain. I've crossed the deepest river. You can have it all, but now keep moving. Now take it in, but don't look down. 'Cause I'm on top of the world, hey. I'm on top of the world, hey. Waited on this for a while now.
Paying my dues to the dirt. I've been waiting in line. Been holding it in for a while. Take you with me as I-
Try to take the easy way out. I kept on falling short of something. I could've gave up then but then again I couldn't have 'cause. I've traveled all this way for something. I take it in but don't look down. 'Cause I'm on top of the world, ay. I'm on top of the world, ay. Been waiting on this for a while now. Paying my dues to the dirt. I've been waiting to smile, ay. Been holding it in for a while, ay. Take you with me if I can. Been dreaming of this since a child. I'm on top of the world. Oh, oh. Oh, oh. Oh, oh. Oh, oh. 'Cause I'm on top of the world, ay. I'm on top of the world, ay. Been waiting on this for a while now. Paying my dues to the dirt.
I've been waiting to smile, ay. Been holding it in for a while, ay.
Ladies and gentlemen, please return to your seats. Our program will resume momentarily.
I'm gonna give you my heart. 'Cause you're a sky, 'cause you're a sky full of stars. 'Cause you light up the path. I don't care, go on and tear me apart. I don't care if you do. Ooh, ooh. 'Cause in a sky, 'cause in a sky full of stars. I think I saw you. Ooh, ooh. 'Cause you're a sky, 'cause you're a sky full of stars. I wanna die in your arms. Oh, oh. 'Cause you get lighter the more it gets dark. I'm gonna give you my heart.
Please direct your attention to the stage as we continue our program. Please welcome Chris Edmonds, Senior Vice President, Financial Markets, Intercontinental Exchange.
Good afternoon. Thanks again, as my colleague said before, for being here with us. I'm certainly happy to be here and share a little bit of information with you today. I'm going to spend a little bit of time talking about our DNA as it relates to client engagement and product development. Most of what you're going to see are things that we do on the trading and execution side across the firm. Our history of innovation is one that lives at the intersection of client relationships and market evolution. Our financial markets are littered with a history of products that come to market either too soon or with the wrong relationships, and we work diligently on a daily basis trying to get that right as we think about new products.
Certainly, since 2008, the constant reg reform that has happened on a global basis has presented a number of opportunities for us to serve our clients in different ways. Speaking of evolution, you've heard from Ben and Lynn and Tim of how we've collaborated together and marrying the idea of data and some of our other execution capabilities, we announced this morning ICE Credit Trade. That's a project we've been working on for a few quarters, and we've had it in the background based on client relationships, based on client feedback, trying to solve a problem our clients have. This morning, we announced and gave you a little bit of clarity on what it's done thus far. Seven consecutive quarters of growth. First quarter 2017, 52% ahead of fourth quarter of 2016. We've seen that growth trend continue.
What I want you to pay attention to the press release this morning and what's related here is it's a combination of different bits and pieces, certainly the addition of Continuous Evaluated Pricing from ICE Data Services has allowed the users of this product to focus on pricing the very large risk pieces that are in the auctions allowing an industry standard like CEP to price the smaller transactions in the auction. It's brought a level of efficiency to the trader's lifestyle that they didn't have before. Make no mistake, we're the only place that you can get this.
For the broker-dealer community, whether they're cleaning up positions from a bond ETF that they are doing a create and redeem around, or from a bond trading book that they have across the desk of their client portfolio, this gives them a very efficient way, on a scheduled frequency, to interact and collapse that risk off their books. I want to show a little bit more about that, so if I could have the video cued. This is what the platform looks like. Average trade size, $1.1 million for investment grade, $700,000 for high yield. Those are both growing numbers at this moment in time, and it was about $5.8 billion during the first quarter of 2017. The product was constructed using assets of CEP, assets of CMA, and the foundation of the execution and auction technologies available through our Creditex acquisition from 2008.
Continuing this theme of how we take different bits and pieces of technologies and services that we have within the ICE family, let's talk about our futures and options business. Certainly, this is what ICE has been known for more than a decade. We have six global exchanges and a network of that. Why do we have six? A question I get quite frequently from our customers. You're the only one that does it this way. You get to pick your regulatory regime and your time zone. We are never going to tell you how you need to manage the risk. We're going to give you the opportunity to manage the risk a way that fits you and your business each and every day.
Once you pick your regulatory regime, we understand the time zone, we have the ability to develop products that are best tailored within that offering for you to manage the complex risk that may be on your books. At a granular level. When we think about the benchmarks of Brent, WTI, natural gas here in the U.S. or in Europe, the benchmarks we're all out there for every single day. What sets us apart at the end of the day is a comprehensive data set. Locational basis in natural gas, one example. Our power franchise in a different one. Those are all correlated functions at the end of the day that you can only get in one place.
As you've heard consistently throughout the day, on a safe network, and with data in order to make sure you're making the best-informed decision when you decide to transact. You might ask, "Chris, does this work?" I want to point your attention to the right side of the slide. In the open interest of our Brent market, 54% of the open interest we hold is held by commercial players. In our natural gas market, 75% of the open interest is held by commercial players. When people need our products each and every day, and they're certainly a part of the trading community that may be less concerned about what it is, and they're there because they provide price discovery. When the commercial players need to transact, they transact on our markets. They have the best data, the best tailored products, and the best liquidity available.
Let's talk about what that scorecard looks like. That's great if we think we have them, but are we generating revenue from it? On slide 41, this is the scorecard that we look at. Regardless of business cycle that we've seen since the financial crisis that we talked about earlier in the century, we could continuously see our growth across each of those products, revenue associated with. That growth tells me that we are delivering to the commercial community and to the macro trading community an opportunity to do business each and every day. Moving forward to slide 42, I want to take a deeper look into what it looks like for the energy business. We talked a bit about the benchmarks, but look at the gray bar in 42. The gray bar in the center of the page shows all of the complementary products.
Over 400 we've developed within the crude complex. Those complementary products drive greater use of our benchmarks. The benchmarks drive greater use of those complementary products. Those products are not available anywhere else in the world. When we look at the franchise at the end of the day of why our clients choose to do business here, while we do have a lot of fights with people along the way about what market share is, there's no fight in that market share. It's here. That gives us the ability at the end of the day to make certain that there is a floor under our business from the trading and execution standpoint. Bless you. We look to continue every day of developing products based on the data and based on the client demand of how to tailor risk-based solutions.
I want to point out, you see natural gas volumes because of the shale revolution dip. That's where our location basis and that's where our European natural gas markets have picked up part of that growth and continue to provide opportunities for us to serve the market in a different way. Finally, I want to move to slide 43. In slide 43, we're going to talk about the interest rate complex. Ben mentioned it in his remarks around the acquisition of NYSE Liffe and the interest rate complex that provided us. The product mix that we have there as central banks continue to debate or evaluate what monetary policy may be in the future is playing out each and every day in our market, and you can see this on the chart here.
If you can look at the uptick of Q1 2017, you can see we're up over 30% in this complex. We're just at the beginning of the central banks beginning to take issue with what that monetary policy is going to look like on a global basis. Certainly, there are a number of macro geopolitical issues that are going to impact that, and there will be responses to that, all of which we will see in our activity there. I point that out because if you look at our recent open interest in gilts record, and you look at our ADV record, average daily volume record, when it comes to Euribor, those are key indicators that give us the confidence that trend will continue on a go-forward basis.
With that, I'd like to turn it over to my good friend and colleague, Trabue Bland, to talk a little bit about our agriculture markets.
Thank you, Chris. As you can see on slide 44, ICE has consistently grown its agricultural markets, both in OI and revenue year-over-year. We have deep liquid markets in benchmark products such as sugar, coffee, cocoa, and cotton. On the next slide, you'll see that over the past 10 years, through acquisitions, we have assembled a world-class set of products, including the fastest-growing futures contract in the world, or one of the fastest growing futures contracts in the world, the MSCI Emerging Markets Index. The importance of these benchmark products cannot be overstated. When a mill in Bangladesh buys cotton, they consult the ICE price. When Brazilian farmers sell coffee, they consult the ICE price. When people want to know the health of the U.S. economy, they look at our U.S. Dollar Index.
The important thing is that we're tying all of this together with ICE Connect, as you can see on slide 46. ICE Connect is a single sign-on platform for our proprietary applications for trading, messaging, data, and analytics. I'm going to queue up a video overview of ICE Connect now. The cool thing is that these applications are already relied upon by tens of thousands of users around the world today. It's a powerful tool for trading, chat, and risk management. Best of all, because it's mobile and web-based, customers can manage risk around the clock and around the globe. To take you back to slide 48, I'm going to give it back to Chris.
Thanks, Trabue. I'll wrap my comments on slide 48. Key things I'd like for you to take away from our segment. Product innovation based on client collaboration strategically increases our ability to serve these markets over time. The data we generate from each and every one of the instruments we have listed in our products creates new data, and it's growing exponentially. Each new bit of data that is generated from that helps us create better, more tailored products for the client base to use. This creates a virtuous cycle, one that you see prove itself out over the last decade. A logical review of our historical performance shows that execution, clearing, and data are all interdependent, and they all grow together.
This provides us with the best position ecosystem in the space in order to take the data, create the best products, provide the best liquidity, and do it all over again each and every day. With that, I'd like to turn it over to my colleague, Hester Serafini, to talk about how that is in a capital-efficient clearing solution.
Thank you very much, Chris. We're turning to slide 49. Clearing is really the operational and risk system and infrastructure that makes everything that Chris and Trabue just talked about possible. When a trade is done on the exchange, it feeds to the clearing system, and the clearing house steps into the middle of every trade. The clearing house becomes a buyer to every seller and a seller to every buyer. Why is that important? It's important because when a customer trades on the exchange, all they really need to focus on is the market exposure that they're looking to hedge. They don't have to worry about the counterparty exposure if they were to put on a hedge with a bilateral counterparty. How are they going to manage that counterparty exposure? They can focus just on the market risk that they're looking to hedge.
Ultimately, clearing is really what makes the market work. A big differentiator for clearing at ICE versus our competitors is that we see ourselves as a service provider. We're not just a processing utility. Clearing at ICE is not a back-office function. It's an engine that allows us to be innovative, that allows us to do new things and to be nimble and develop new products. We're really a big strategic partner to our exchange. We have six clearing houses around the world, as you can see on slide 49. We operate clearing houses in the U.S., in Canada, in the U.K., in the Netherlands, and also in Singapore. We operate both vertically integrated and open-access clearing houses and have been successful in both business models. The geographic diversity of how we've spread out the clearing houses around the world is actually a very deliberate business strategy at ICE.
We service a variety of different customers around the world that have very specific local needs, and we want to be able to service them in the location where they want to be serviced. In addition, many of the large commercial end users that we do business with are themselves global entities that operate in many jurisdictions around the world, and we want to be able to service them, and we service them best by offering them an integrated clearing and exchange platform that operates around the world, so we can do business with them in the time zone and location where they want to be serviced and where they have needs. It's very important, though, to note that even though we have clearing houses spread around the world, we're all on a single technology platform.
The experience that a clearing member or customer has when they deal with ICE around the world is the same thing, regardless of whether they do business in Singapore, they do business in London, or they do business in New York. It's the same experience, it's the same platform, it's the same technology connectivity. Once the clearing member's connected in one clearing house, it's very easy to add additional clearing houses because it's the same infrastructure. This again is part of our business model. Turning to slide 50. As you can see, we're active in pretty much all markets, virtually all markets. We clear six million contracts a day, and we're operating both in futures and OTC markets. As I mentioned before, what's very important to us at ICE is to think of ourselves as service providers.
What we do is listen to our customers and find out what our customers need. What our customers need is innovation, or ask for, is innovation. As you can see on the right-hand side, we've listened to them and we've delivered a lot of new products. We've delivered close to 3,000 new products in the past 10 years to better serve our customers. We've taken many contracts that were traditionally in the OTC space and moved them into the future space. We were the first to clear energy OTC products. We were the first to clear CDS. What does the future hold for clearing? There certainly is a lot of regulatory uncertainty around what's going to happen with Brexit, what's going to happen with MiFID II, what's going to happen with open access.
Before I get into some of that uncertainty, I want to make one thing very clear, no pun intended. Clearing is here to stay. If you talk to regulators, you talk to end users, you talk to dealers, everybody's in agreement that clearing is a great risk management tool. It's part of the forward. If anything, people want more things to be cleared rather than less. Clearing is here to stay. There's no uncertainty about that. The uncertainty is around what the international regulatory landscape for clearing will be. MiFID II was certainly looking to make some adjustments potentially to that. Brexit may have some impact on that.
I think it will take a while before we will have more clarity, because regulators are still working through some of these very complex issues, and it's going to take them at least a year, maybe longer, I think, to provide more clarity to the markets. What's the good news, however, is that we at ICE, because as I mentioned before, operate many clearing houses around the world in many different jurisdictions, all on a single platform, are extremely well-positioned for this uncertainty because we're very nimble and we're able to move products and services to the place where our customers are going to require us to do business with them in a post-Brexit, post-MiFID II world when it becomes clear how these new regulations shape out and they know where they want to do business.
We're very well positioned for this uncertainty and to react to whatever happens. I'd also mention about Brexit, there's been a lot of talk about fragmentation of markets and that that could be a result of Brexit, depending on how it plays out. That also would be something that'd be very good for ICE, because whenever there's market fragmentation, we've actually done well. It means more trading volume, it means more arbitrage opportunities, it means more market activity, which means more revenues for us. And finally, I'd like to talk a little bit about MiFID II and open access potentially, and point your attention to the deal that we recently did with Euronext, where Euronext chose to move the contracts that they trade to clear at ICE Clear Netherlands, one of our clearing houses.
The fact that they chose to pick us and then decided to move to ICE, shows that we're very well-positioned to compete for additional clearing business in an open access world. That's good news also. This transaction was actually, or this deal was actually very well received by the clearing member community because as I mentioned before, our clearing houses around the world are all on the same system. Many of the clearing members, or the majority of the clearing members that clear Euronext products already are clearing on one of our clearing houses around the world, and it will be a very easy transition for them to integrate with the ICE Clear Netherlands platform and continue to clear the Euronext product.
Again, that shows how our business model of operating many different clearing houses around the world, but on a single platform, is playing off and really positioning us very well in these markets. With that, I'd like to thank you for your attention. This concludes this portion of the presentation.
Well, ain't nobody gonna stop me. Not a hurricane or wild cats enough to stop me.
Investing in yourself is the best thing you can do. Anything that improves your own talent.
Ladies and gentlemen, let's hear it right here, Bob Dylan.
Good afternoon, all. It's nice to have you all here in this building. We're thrilled to welcome you here to the corner of Wall and Broad, particularly at this time. Last Wednesday, we turned 225 years old as a company. It's pretty amazing. The country and the capital markets were founded right here at Wall and Broad. George Washington was sworn in here at Wall and Broad. At that same time, entrepreneurs would meet on the street corner right here, and they'd pitch ideas, and investors would choose who to invest in. One of those very first successes was Bank of New York, the first security ever traded on the New York Stock Exchange, and it was founded by Alexander Hamilton.
For 225 years, we've been doing that same thing and watching great companies come through here, entrepreneurs, men and women, raise money and go out and make the world a better place and spread the magic of free enterprise. We're not going to talk about history today. We're going to talk about the future. You've heard my colleagues talk about our approach to acquisition, Scott Hill, Ben Jackson, several of them. Those colleagues, Mark Wassersug, or Wass, as we call him, all of whom I've had the privilege, I usually would call it the privilege, depending on if we're fighting that day or debating, the privilege of working with for over a decade. The New York Stock Exchange is a great example of the ICE approach to acquisitions.
We acquired the New York Stock Exchange, and we set about to bring a problem-solving approach for customers and a lean, mean, growth focus for investors, the Jeff Sprecher hallmark. Just as an aside, I get asked a lot, "What's it like to work for Jeff?" It's kind of a thing in this industry. It's really easy to get along with Jeff. You just have to follow his two cardinal rules, grow revenue and shrink costs. As long as you're doing those two things, everything's cool. We've done okay the last couple of years. Things are going well here at the New York Stock Exchange. We've grown revenue every year. We've taken down costs every year. We've doubled operating margins of this business. We've more than doubled operating cash flow.
Equally important, we've set us up for the future because our core businesses are doing really well. We've set them up competitively as well. Let me explain. Early on, we realized this business had a really beautiful, virtuous cycle if you just focused on the basics. We have three listings venues. If you get that right, get that capital formation mechanism right, they drive our four trading venues, and that drives the data opportunities that you heard Lynn speak about. We just had to focus on that and only that.
We got out of some businesses, we shut some down, we sold some, we spun them off. We said, "Hey, where can we invest in our people, yes, but more importantly, where can we invest in a way that will benefit customers, and it'll give us a competitive edge?" Everywhere else, we run lean and mean. Not every room in this building has gold leaf. We do this for customers. Let me give you an example. In our listings business, we've invested in tools and services that John's going to tell you about in just a minute, that we've rolled out in just the last year and a half, our listing companies love. We also invested in this building. That may sound, at least to me, four years ago, that may even sound a little silly.
Geez, they're putting a lot of money in a building. Why are they doing that?" Our listed companies absolutely love it. It gives us a connective tissue with our listed companies that no other exchange in the world has. In fact, I was sitting over there in a side room. I was thinking, I might ad lib a little bit. I want to give these guys a sense of the CEOs who have walked through the door in this short week. Honest to God, I couldn't even come up with the entire list. There have been so many. So many CEOs. We've had First Data Corp. We've had Coca-Cola come in, Speedway Motorsports, Chubb, on and on. I came up with about 15. Why does that matter?
It deepens our relationship with customers. It gives us a measure of inelasticity as well with those customers. It spreads the good word about our business. In the trading business, we've invested in simplifying our technology and the way we operate, which just makes it easier for customers to do business with us. In data, as Lynn talked about, we've invested in innovation. Our Integrated Feed was very well received. Again, we've invested. It's resulted with a great deal of success. I skipped over one thing in the listings business I'm going to jump back to. We've invested in the listing business. How has it worked out? Fabulously. We're in a really good spot right now. We don't want to crow about it too much, to bring too much attention to it. It's going quite well.
The way it works with new listings is you make most of your dough with larger new listings. A large new listing, maybe $700 million or above, kind of the industry standard. We've now won 28 in a row. You have to go back three years and look at all the large IPOs. We have 100% track record. You'll hear a bit more about that from John. I'm going to introduce Stacey and John in just a moment. They're going to explain why we're doing well, how we're going to grow over the next couple of years. Before we do that, let me just level set and kind of explain what our business is one time for all of you that don't live in this all day, every day. We have four regulated entities.
The first, the big box on the left, that's the flagship, that's NYSE, the premier venue for corporate listings. On that NYSE venue, we only trade what are called Tape A securities or NYSE-listed securities, notwithstanding the fact that we only trade a minority of all tickers. Some days, we're actually the number one venue for trading in the U.S., even though we intentionally, up to this point, have limited ourselves. Moving next to our NYSE American business, that has not historically been a point of focus or a point of emphasis for the New York Stock Exchange pre-acquisition or even post-acquisition. That is changing. That's our small to medium-size listings venue. We only trade today about 300 tickers, 300 securities. Those are those stocks listed on NYSE American.
That, too, is changing, but I'll allow Stacey to kind of tell you what the plans are and why we're excited about the growth potential. We operate on that NYSE American business, a customer priority pro rata options market. If you're not certain exactly what that is, be happy to tell you in a breakout, but I'm distinguishing it from our NYSE Arca business, the third venue, where we operate another options venue, which is price time priority. NYSE Arca is also the flagship for ETF listings. We have over 90% of all the ETF AUM is listed with us. AUM is a key metric, and Stacey will explain why. The reason that we're winning, there are many, but a reason why we're winning there is we have a deep liquid trading venue for ETF.
Look, an exchange, at least the trading portion of exchange, the number one thing we can do is bring as many buyers and sellers as possible to trade a security and reduce cost to capital. Our Arca platform is twice as big as the next closest venue for trading ETFs. Finally, there's the NSX platform. We acquired a company called NSX earlier this year. Ben and Stacey and others implemented an orderly wind down. It's dormant at the moment. We've renamed it NYSE National, and we're going through a consultative phase with customers to determine when and how we reopen that platform. Just to drop a few breadcrumbs, when you say, "Hey, what's the unifying theme here?" The unifying theme is we want to provide choice to our customers, our trading customers, our institutional and individual trading customers.
Choice of how they source liquidity, of how they execute liquidity. If you think about it, that's the theme I've been describing. A hybrid market floor and electronic on NYSE, all electronic for ETFs and NYSE American, a zero rebate venue with a speed bump for NYSE American. With National, we're trying to figure out how to round out choice. Similarly, with options, price time versus pro rata. Let me introduce my colleagues. Before I do that, let me just tell you, we have a really great management team here at the NYSE. Largely a new team that we've put together over the last three years, a diverse, collaborative team. As with any of Jeff's teams, a lot of fighting and debating and airing it out in public. We love it. What is the tie that binds? We love doing what we're doing.
We love working with our customers. You may have even seen it coming in here today. You come in, I hear all the time, the security guard had a big smile on his face. I met a couple of your colleagues on the elevator up. People around here really feel like what we're doing is important, and that customer focus is something that's been really amplified since that acquisition three years ago. Now I'll hand it over, first to Stacey, and then she'll hand it over to John. John is our global head of listings here, both new listings as well as oversight on our existing listings business. Stacey is our chief operating officer with oversight for our options, bonds, equities, and ETFs trading. With that, Stacey.
Thanks, Tom. Good afternoon. I'm going to start on slide 54. You've heard a couple of times today about the virtuous cycle, and Tom just touched on it, that listings drives trading, drives data opportunities. The reason why I want to reiterate that is because that really underpins our 2017 equity market strategy and how we're looking to grow each of our equity markets based on our plans that we announced earlier this year. Given that listings drives trading, it's not surprising that the three largest listings venues in the U.S. are also the three largest trading venues in the U.S. We operate two of them, NYSE and NYSE Arca.
What some don't realize, though, and although Tom just mentioned it, is that on the New York Stock Exchange today, we are only trading the shares of companies that are listed on the New York Stock Exchange. The amount of volume that trades in the market tied to NYSE-listed companies is around 52% of the overall U.S. equity market. As Tom mentioned, we are the largest trading venue at times on NYSE, and we're only trading half the market. One of the things we're most excited about is we're going to change that. We're going to trade the whole market. We're going to expand trading on NYSE from the 3,150 securities that we're trading today to the full U.S. equity universe of 8,500 securities, including Nasdaq companies and ETFs.
This isn't like launching a new venue, because if you look at NYSE, it's already a robust trading venue with the deepest liquidity and highest market quality. We can see that Tom had it on the last slide, the volatility associated with NYSE. We have lower volatility each and every day on the open and close, and certainly on the first days of trading. That market model that exists out there for NYSE is already an established market model, and we're going to expand that by more than doubling the number of securities that we trade. On NYSE American, we're only trading 350 securities, and those are largely the small and medium-sized companies that are listed on NYSE American. We're going to similarly expand that to the full universe of 8,500 securities. That's happening next month at the end of July.
When we do that, we're going to change both the fee model and the execution model. We're going to introduce NYSE American with a low fee structure model and with a speed bump model. We don't offer either one of those things today, so both of those are new offerings that will be complementary to our existing exchanges. I think it's important because, again, we're offering our issuers and investors choice, what makes most sense for them. Investors are not one size fits all, and our markets are not one size fits all, so they're really geared around meeting the needs of our customers. We're able to do this because we continue to deploy our Pillar platform. It's state-of-the-art technology that is going to provide a single interface for our customers across each of our markets. It's flexible, it's scalable, and it's more uniform.
You just heard Hester talk about how we approach that on the ICE side across our clearing houses, and it's similarly within our equity markets, trying to give customers a uniform technology. Which is important to them because it's certainly much easier for them, although Wass likes it too because it's a little bit easier for us. On the Arca side, we're already on the Pillar technology. I'm going to move ahead to slide 55 and talk about the Arca market and how we're better positioned on Arca for the movement from active to passive investment. Today, 90% of all ETF assets under management are listed on NYSE Arca, and AUM is king. The reason why AUM is the most important metric when you're talking about ETFs is largely tied to the market model that we have there as well.
On the corporate listing side, we charge a listing fee for each company that lists, and then as the amount of shares that are outstanding grow, that fee grows, and there's significant revenue tied to listings. You also have trading and data revenue associated with it, but that listings revenue is significant. On the ETF side, we don't charge much of listing fees. It's a very small fee for listing, in some cases, no fee at all. The trading and the data revenue are really what drives success in the ETF business. AUM is really what we're looking at as a key metric when we look at the ETF business. On NYSE Arca, given that we have 90% of assets under management, that's really something that we're very proud of, that we maintain that position there. Why?
Why do we continue to have success in ETFs? I think there are three real reasons, liquidity, service, and data. If you look at that chart on the right side there, you can see that NYSE Arca is more than twice as large as our next largest trading competitor. We have more than twice the market share of all ETF market volume. Again, our ETF issuers understand that matching buyers and sellers together in one single pool of liquidity is one of the primary functions of an exchange. Arca is clearly the market leader there. Service. We have deep experience in the ETF industry, and our ETF team helps issuers, ETF issuers, from the conceptual phase of an ETF product launch or family of ETFs, all the way through to implementation.
They assist them through the design, we can provide advisory services, they also help navigate what can be a sometimes difficult regulatory framework. That certainly we hear all the time from our customers that our service is far superior, and I've heard it just this week. Data. You've heard a lot about data today, so I won't belabor it, but I think it's really important to understand that what Lynn is doing in her business and what she's able to offer our customers really helps drive success in our trading businesses as well. The reference data and calculation data helps to drive ETF growth.
It's not just when you hear about some of the projects and the most recent acquisitions or what Chris talked about on the bond platforms, each of those things really ties into opportunities for us to grow our ETF listing and trading business. We hear from our customers that that reference data is critical. They've evolved how they trade, they've evolved how they've consumed data, we get the benefit of that in multiples of our businesses. It might sound like we're repeating that message a lot, but it's just how we think about the business and how we look at across the ICE family, how can we provide our customers with complete solutions?
Just in sum, when you look at, we are already the number one corporate listing venue, the number one ETF listing and trading venue, number one corporate trading venue, number one exchange group family. Yet in each of our markets, we have growth opportunities that are untapped. We're going to do that and deliver that, we're really excited about it. With that, I'll turn it over to John Tuttle, Global Head of Listings.
Great. Thank you so much. As Stacoy and Tom mentioned, I have the good fortune of looking after our 2,400 listed companies and our global IPO business. We are home to the greatest community of companies on Earth. It's 87% of the Dow, 77% of the S&P 500, 81% of the Fortune 100. Actually, if you take a step back and look at our entire population of listed companies, so all 2,400 listed companies, and you pull the middle one out, you pull the median out, and you do that same exercise for our closest domestic competitor, the market capitalization of an NYSE-listed company is about eight times larger than that on our competitor. Why does that matter? Why does that matter for investors? It's because these larger companies provide higher listing revenues, higher trading revenues, higher data revenues.
In fact, a large NYSE IPO, if you look at the net present value of those listing revenues, trading revenues, and data revenues for a large IPO, can be 20, 30, and in some cases, 40 times higher than that of a smaller IPO. As Tom mentioned before, we've done very well over the past three years when you look at all the large IPOs. The rule of thumb within the industry is about a $700 million capital raise or higher. If you look back, we're 28 out of 28, and we have quite a few companies in the pipeline as well. They're from across industries, including technology, including Fitbit, Snap, Twitter, and of course, Alibaba, which was the largest IPO of all time by several metrics.
If you peel it down another layer, though, and you look at all of the transactions this year that were qualified for both our domestic competitor and the New York Stock Exchange, about 87% of the proceeds have been raised on the New York Stock Exchange, and close to 90% of the technology proceeds for qualified IPOs. Why are these companies choosing to list on the New York Stock Exchange? They're doing it for several reasons. It's what Tom and Stacey mentioned, which is our market model. It's purpose-built for executing complex corporate transactions like IPOs. Because it provides superior market quality on IPO day and throughout the life of listing. Another reason why is because they join the greatest community of companies on Earth, the NYSE network. For us, it's much more than putting their logo on a PowerPoint slide.
We're constantly finding ways to bring them together to not only share ideas and information and best practices, but to create opportunities for them to help grow and expand their own businesses. Number three is our visibility platform. On an average day, the NYSE bell ceremony is among the most highly viewed news events in the world. It's an incredible platform for our listed companies to get their message out in front of potential customers or potential investors. Number four are the products and services that we provide to our listed companies, and the one I'm most excited about is NYSE Connect, which is our state-of-the-art market data and analytics portal. At the tail end of 2015, we completed the acquisition of Interactive Data, and we took one of their products, which was called Market-Q.
We went out, and we talked to a lot of our issuers, and we said, "How can we create an offering that's going to help you be a better publicly traded company?" We've rolled out the new NYSE Connect to all of our 2,400 issuers. The feedback from them has been overwhelmingly positive. The roadmap for the product is incredibly strong. Best of all, compared to products offered by other exchanges, it's at no cost to the issuer. It's a real big value add. Last but not least, and I'm a little bit biased on this, but there are four buildings that define America: the White House, the Capitol, the Supreme Court, and the New York Stock Exchange. ICE made a strategic decision several years ago to invest in this building, and the results have been extraordinary.
On a daily basis, our leading and largest companies are in this building, hosting their analyst days, their board meetings, their investor days, and considering this their field office in Lower Manhattan, thereby strengthening our relationship even more with these companies. The listings business is well-positioned. It's well-positioned for 2018 and beyond. We have a robust pipeline of great IPOs set to come to our market. We have had zero transfers, zero companies transfer in 2017 from the New York Stock Exchange. In fact, we actually have several dozen companies from other exchanges who have proactively reached out to us to consider listing on our marketplace. We're constantly waking up, trying to find ways to add value for our listed companies.
Thanks for the opportunity to tell you a little bit about the New York Stock Exchange. We're going to take a moment to reset the stage here. Then we'll welcome the founder, Chairman, and Chief Executive Officer of Intercontinental Exchange, Jeff Sprecher.
Thank you. Thank you.
Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Jeff Sprecher, founder, Chairman, and CEO, Intercontinental Exchange, Chairman of the New York Stock Exchange.
That's a mouthful, huh? Well, my job is a good job, which is to begin the process of closing out the day. I wanted to talk a little bit about culture. I've had the privilege, I know most of the people in the room, and I'm sure many people that are on the telephone webcast, and I've talked to you dozens and dozens of times, along with Scott Hill. We got the sense, Kelly and Dan and her team got the sense that there were parts of our business that people weren't understanding, that we were moving quickly and changing and adapting and that you all were not necessarily fully aligned with what we were doing. Kelly had the idea that we should really do an Investor Day.
She asked each of the people that you have met so far today to look at their businesses and to think about two, three, four things about what they're doing that you all may not be aware of and that you may find interesting, and that may help drive the conversation as to what ICE's future is going to be and a little bit about why we're so excited. I think they've done a really good job. What's interesting about that team is that, as Lynn and others have mentioned, these are working managers. The way we run the company is entirely collaborative, and the culture that we talk about is people rolling up their sleeves, getting in front of customers. John Tuttle just arrived from China, and he looked pretty fresh to me, so he must have watched a lot of movies and taken a nap.
Wass came in after midnight last night because he was with clients on the East Coast. For them to take time out to put their presentations together, there was a lot of moaning about it, by the way, but they hopefully hit some things that are of interest and did a much better job than Scott and I are ever able to do on the limited time that we have on earnings calls. These guys are really, in my mind, the best executors in our space. Part of it is the way we collaborate. Part of it is the pride that we have to deliver on our commitments.
That's part of the ethos of the firm, that if we're going to say something publicly to you about our growth, about our synergies, about the markets we're going to move into, that we're actually going to do it, and we're going to hold ourselves to the standards. Year after year, compounding that has just been phenomenal for the company. I want to talk a little bit about my job, which is, nobody made me tsar here. I report to a board of directors. Fred Salerno, who is just back here somewhere, who's our lead independent director. Fred, nobody would ever hire me to be a public company CEO. I didn't have the resume. I had to start my own company in order to have the management job we're talking about.
It's not easy to be a public company CEO, and I've got my own scars to prove it. I've been able to rely on Fred, who's our lead independent director, who time and time again, has helped navigate this company, give me advice, somebody I can lean on, somebody I can complain to, somebody who from time to time will complain to me about what the board is feeling about how we're doing. That's been invaluable. Fred also runs our governance committee, and one of the things that we've focused on is as the company has grown and as it has changed, we need to add new talent. On slide 59, you're going to see four new directors. Tom Noonan is in the room here. Tom, founder of Internet Security Systems, ISS, which is now called IBM ISS.
One of the leading cyber minds, has worked very closely with Wass and our cyber team on helping to build out safety, given his lengthy experience. Ann Cairns has joined our board. Ann is the president of that we benchmark ourselves to, Mastercard being one of those. She's been very, very helpful with us moving from a business that was transaction-based, thinking about security, big data, analytics, all the things that Sharon Bowen, deep public policy experience. Lynn talked a lot about how regulations around the world are driving growth for us as a market, as well in clearing, touching all parts of our customer base, and this board has really been put together to help this company do well. It's also diverse. It's helped with our diversity initiatives, diversity of views, diversity of geographies, diversities of sex.
The group here has taken, and many of you are taking corporate responsibility and ESG issues much more importantly. As we've gotten bigger and more important to the industry, we've done the same. We know it's important to many investors that we have online. ICE created recently our first corporate responsibility, ESG, Environmental Governance and Sustainability Report. We now have our second version outstanding. It's on our website. This is a really important document where we go through how do we touch our environment, how are we touching our employees, what are the things that we're doing, how are we thinking about our business in the context of a larger culturally, it's a cultural change, positive mindset, and it's something that we take seriously to the point now that we can document it and make it available.
We're early in the markets, and we really dominate the markets with trading of emissions, both carbon contracts and all sorts of different emission contracts under various emission schemes around the world. We dominate that business in the U.S. and in Europe. We believe in bringing market solutions, which is what we do well, obviously, to the market for climate. Lastly, the New York Stock Exchange, John Tuttle, mentioned this listing venue that we have here, and we have the greatest companies in the world that are listed on this exchange, all of whom are looking at their various ESG policies, thinking about their own business. What we've done now is created a website, an ability for people to gather information, a conversation in this very room that we have very often about ESG issues and corporate responsibility broadly.
We've joined the World Federation of Exchanges Sustainability Group. We've adopted a lot of models that are used around the world, and we've created a website, and all kind of collateral material for our listed companies so that they can enjoy, essentially, the benefit of what we're doing. I want to move to slide 61 to talk a little bit about how the culture and the people that you've met have really innovated. Because at the end of the day, solving problems quickly and efficiently is, I think, what's made this company's performance so good. I think many of you know our story, where we, at the founding of the company, were really interested in moving markets from analog to digital for trading, particularly over-the-counter markets that were non-standardized and really needed better organization in order to grow. We were very early in that trend.
People said we were crazy. People said it couldn't be done. Lo and behold, fate looked on us. We kind of cracked the nut and started to grow the business. We very quickly said and saw clearing, and as Hester brought up and said, this is actually a business. It was being treated by our industry as a back-office nuisance. We said, we think that it's going to become more important to risk management in this business. We think we should invest in this business. We think it's going to be global. We [inaudible] , Dodd-Frank here, if you want. Talked a lot today about the first leg of our stool, the data business. We've talked about it.
I think one misperception we're trying to get over is that somehow what we are talking about is just the consolidated tape that comes out of our exchanges, which is an interesting business, but that is not where we're investing. That is not the growth. That is not this big platform that we have on. Early in it. As Lars will show you, when we assembled the equity network, nobody paid much attention to it. We put it together, putting assets, investing in it, putting fiber around it, having conversations with our customers every day because that vehicle delivers better and better data on a piece of paper, you can do more information than anyone can testify to. I'm an older kind of dude, and I was born within a couple of hours of Steve Jobs.
A guy my age, to me, he was one of the greatest entrepreneurs of my generation. I've always looked up to him, always thought about how he was so creative, thought about the great things I could learn from the guy. It's really informed a lot of what we do at ICE. One thing that Steve Jobs used to do, which I'm going to plagiarize, say, "Oh, yeah, there's one last thing." I'm going to give you an opportunity. One last thing about the company. We bought a company called MERS. Not a particularly great name, I will tell you, but we didn't change it. The Mortgage Electronic Registration System. We've mentioned it in passing before. I don't think anybody's ever asked me about it since we bought it. We want to talk to you a little bit about it.
The mortgage industry, to us, is very much where the trading industry was when we first started this company. Here to talk about it is Brendon Weiss, who we put into MERS as the Chief Operating Officer. Brendon.
I'm really excited about the opportunity that we have in the mortgage industry. As Jeff mentioned, I've been here for a while. I spent a lot of time in the equity markets where we talk about microseconds and nanoseconds and milliseconds. I joined MERS in November, and the first thing that I learned is that people talk about transaction time in weeks and months. The reason why is because it's largely an analog business, right? 99% of mortgages end up with a person at a closing table signing their name to a stack of papers that then get shuttled off to one firm and then another firm where people sit and do a compare of those documents to make sure that everything is accurate.
Right now, what the mortgage industry is experiencing is a transition from that analog phase to the digital phase of digital or electronic mortgages. It really gives them the opportunity to obtain a lot of efficiencies in that process that they haven't been able to really achieve in the last 10 years because they've been spending a lot of their money on back office functions like compliance and everything else as a result of the regulatory reform. To give you a little bit of a flavor, I'm going to show a 30-second clip of a longer video that we developed recently that really kind of walks through the benefits of this transition to e-mortgages.
With industry participants' adoption of e-mortgage solutions on the rise, all borrowers will soon have a greater opportunity to experience the ease and convenience of an e-mortgage. Automation saves time during the application and closing processes, minimizes errors, and reduces costs, resulting in capital efficiencies and enhanced risk management. Throughout the process, from e-closing to e-notes to e-vault, everyone benefits from a more user-friendly process, increased collateral control, an improved audit trail, and elimination of the risk of lost notes. To learn more, visit mersinc.org.
Given the fact that most people probably don't know what MERS is. MERS has over 5,000 customers. This is a great opportunity for ICE. We're spending our time right now going out and meeting with all of those customers and explaining to them what ICE's function has been in different markets. This opportunity for us is no different than what Jeff saw in 2000 when he started the company. We're really excited about it. There's a lot of energy. Clients all want to work with us.
Brendon's being modest, by the way. MERS was a consortium of 5,000 members that we bought and are privatizing. We've become pretty good at working with consortiums. 5,000 is going to be a new test of our patience. MERS, if I could ever own one company, it would be 5,000. Many of you are aware of it. We run that as a for-profit company. Basically, that's what MERS is for the mortgage industry. I want to wind up by talking about our positioning. Just to reinforce, on slide 63, middle of this slide, we talk about four macro trends that this team has been focused on. Around each of those macro trends, ongoing regulation, automation, geopolitics, evolution of technology, you can see just on that slide that we have positioned ourselves around those trends.
The thing that has made us successful is by recognizing that there is a trend and that there is change going on, then figuring out where can we add to what we do, change what we do, adapt what we do, because our customers are going to be impacted by that change. If we can be there first, right solution, they'll love what we do. We'll be very successful. Finally, on slide 64. I think the positioning around those trends makes us really uniquely qualified to continue to grow. It's why Scott gives you specific growth guidance every time we give guidance. At the top of the list of things on-
Scott, you stopped
slide 64, you'll see.
Don't worry. It'll come back.
I hope you got a flavor. We brought part of our team here. These are all people that run their businesses. These are not people that have ever really had an interest in being in front of you. They do not have an interest in public speaking. They have an interest in collaborating and solving problems and working and traveling and all the things that you do, and we have tremendous depth and skill inside our company.
Hello? Can you hear me?
These are very good at what they do, and tell it to customers for many years.
I don't know why anyone would be long this company again on Cboe.
Charles, I want to cap it while we have a break over here, about some of these people and the many things that they do. When we're looking for good people inside our organization and people that we hire, we look for people that have passion, that want to roll up their sleeves and work hard and do what they say. We asked, just to summarize a little bit, we asked each of these people, "What are the couple things that you'd like to leave?" I took a note. Scott started out today giving you a formula for how we think about the growth of the data business. The pie chart that said part of it is price increases, part of it is customer acquisition, part of it is innovation, new pricing, new geographies, so on and so forth.
I think there's been a misperception that somehow the growth in the data business, at least our growth, comes from raising prices. Honestly, if you look at that pie chart and do the math, you'll see that our prediction long term is probably lower than inflation for price increases. We're going to get it from other ways that we feel very confident about. Hopefully, Lynn, Wass, and others showed you the infrastructure that we have where we think we can do that. Lynn put that same pie chart on and said, "Here's how I'm doing it. This is 2017. I can show you, Scott has guided you to where we're going to go in 2017. Here's how I'm getting it for this year." Ben laid out the formula that we use for M&A and integration, and it is formulaic.
A lot of you ask all the time, "How come you bought this company?" Or, "Why didn't you buy this company?" Or, "What kind of companies are you looking at?" Or, "Where are you weak?" Or, "Where are you strong?" Ben laid out really our thinking, which is we're looking for content and we're looking for distribution. We love stuff that's in the middle where we can get content and distribution. Particularly, we want proprietary content, something that is unique, something that we can innovate around, something that will be additive to our footprint. Where we can find network solutions like buying TMX Atrium recently to get us microwave capabilities up into Canada and New York, Chicago. That's of interest to us, too. I think of the company a lot like a media company, if you will.
It's very hard to disconnect the content from the distribution. It's very hard to disconnect the distribution from the content. Together it's a deep, deep moat. Ben showed you that formula. Wass wanted to show you this SFTI network, which I've talked about many times on the earnings calls. Basically said as we grow data, we have this tag-along service where we can say, "Oh, by the way, would you like us to deliver it on SFTI?" Anybody who's anybody in financial services probably wants some access to the New York Stock Exchange, probably has either gotten on the SFTI network or is thinking about getting on the SFTI network. Having that anchor tenant in our mall, this building that we're in, has been an incredible way for us to grow that.
The fact that we're on the leading edge of cyber, it comes with owning the New York Stock Exchange, that you better be on the leading edge of cybersecurity. The investment we're making, we're able to propagate that to our customer base. The team that I've showed you, we have really strong open interest trends in trading. We've got this new Pillar platform that's going to open up our ability to trade all different securities that we were never able to do before. We've had to sit and listen to our competitors crow on about, "If you add all my exchanges together and multiply it by 16 and divide it by 42 and look at this and look at that, we're the largest." We are the largest, and we're about to get much larger.
We talked a little bit with Hester about the fact that Euronext, an independent exchange under these new open access rules, has decided they're going to pick up their business and move it into our clearinghouse. We're working diligently with them to make that move. It's going to be an exciting new revenue source for us. It's going to create new synergies, going to give us an opportunity to sell data, connectivity, other solutions that we deal with our customers, with a whole new series of customers that they'll bring to us. Chris talked about this bond platform. A lot of you have asked me over the years, "What are you going to do about bonds?" I never really wanted to discuss it publicly, honestly, but we've been germinating this platform.
If you think about the bond market, there's a dealer-to-client market. There's a lot of work going on. Some very successful companies that are automating the dealer-to-client market. There's an all-to-all market. There's a lot of work going on by people trying to automate that. We decided to go to something that nobody was really focused on, the dealer-to-dealer market. We have great adoption going on around this auction platform. The MERS opportunity, we really believe there's going to be an analog-to-digital conversion in any kind of paper document system, particularly mortgages. The whole industry is working with us around MERS, talking to us, figuring out the pain points. We've got a lot going on. MERS is moving onto the SFTI network.
It will be done by next year with an all-new MERS backbone platform that we've been building for the last 18 months. These are the kind of new pieces of information that I don't get a chance to talk about because of the limited nature of the earnings calls, that these guys came up with when we asked them, "What do you think? What should we talk about?" I hope it was beneficial. We're going to ask you for your feedback in a survey. Whether this worked for you, whether the format worked, whether there were areas that you want to hear more or less about. Feel free to say you'd like to hear less from me. You will not offend me, and in fact, you'll make me quite happy. In any event, at this point, we're going to open things up for a Q&A session.
We're going to bring some chairs up, reset the stage. If you just give us a minute, I'm going to invite some of my colleagues up here, and we'll spend the rest of the day just taking your questions. Thank you, and give us just a minute.
In my zone. I got that sunshine in my pocket. Got that good soul in my feet. I feel that hot blood in my body when it drops. Ooh. I can't take my eyes up off it, moving so phenomenally. Room on lock, the way we rock it, don't stop. Under the lights when everything goes, nowhere to hide when I'm getting you close. When we move, well, you already know. Just imagine, just imagine, just imagine. Nothing I can see but you when you dance, dance. I feel a good creeping up on you. Just dance, dance, come on. All those things I shouldn't do. You dance, dance. Here I am.
All right. Hi there. While they're getting organized here, I'll just give you some quick Q&A ground rules. This is webcast, we'd ask that you give your name and your company name before you ask a question. Please limit yourself to one question. If you have a follow-up, feel free to get back in the queue. After the Q&A, Jeff will have a couple closing remarks, and that will conclude our day. First question. Oh.
Chris.
I just want to congratulate you, Jeff. I was there in the beginning when it was just a trading platform, and the combination of assets you brought together is a tribute to your vision.
Thanks.
One of the things, as an example of this, is just that SFTI network that you have. I remember when it was owned by NYFIX, it wasn't looked at as a valuable asset. It was owned by the NYSE. I think they were sort of criticized for owning it and buying it, and now it's like a key. It sounds like a key security and delivery. I guess the question is, how did this become such a valuable asset? Is it because it's combined with the market data, or is it because it's just a sign of the times? You hit the cycle where a network like this is more valuable because of the security risk.
Yeah. It's a good question, and the answer is it's both. The genesis of it, by the way, is Reg NMS requires the U.S. security exchanges have to get the best price. It's a requirement for every exchange to look at the prices on their competitive exchanges and route to them. You're at least going to have a handful of network connections. The people at NYSE said, "Well, we want to create a technology business." They actually said, "We should own the connections." Manage them. As they did that, it started to grow. They had put the NYSE technology platform in there, and there was a lot of gobbledygook. There was a lot of web-based stuff.
When we got it and looked at it, Mark and a group of us were talking about it, we said, "If we really lock this thing down, think about how to grow it, put all these cyber tools that we have on it's a different animal." Then it's a requirement for Lynn's business at IDC. She's pricing 2.7 million securities a day. She needs tons of information. The algorithms that we're using, these advanced algorithms that we use to price all this stuff, required our own connectivity. We had a decision to make. We could be a consumer of somebody else's network, or we could have our own network. We took the basis of safety and just said, "Let's combine what we need for IDC. Let's buy TMX Atrium. Let's get to Canada.
Let's look for where there are holes, and let's really make this thing so that it connects to anybody that matters. Let's start cleaning the data that's on it," because a lot of the artificial intelligence, quantitative trading, by the way, needs clean data, not just raw data. Some people want raw data, but most people need clean data. There's also a whole effort inside that network to provide services beyond just the wires. We thought, "You know what? We can build it, and we're going to use it. Let's see if when we go to customers, if we can add it on to a sale." Tim talked about reorganizing our sales force.
One of the things they do now is say, "Oh, by the way, now that you've bought this service from us, how would you like us to deliver it?" We found that a lot of people say, "Oh, that would be interesting. I'm already hooked to something on that network. Why don't I just move my whole infrastructure onto it?" So far, it's an experiment that's working well. I think it's only going to get more strategic with increasing cyber until we as a universe figure out how to encrypt everything or digitize everything or prevent cyber attacks. All of which slow things down and none of which traders want to deal with right now.
It was Richard Repetto.
Oh, yeah.
Rich Repetto, Sandler O'Neill. Okay. How about over here? Alex.
Who always goes first, as many of you know.
Oh, my God. Okay.
Thanks. I had to give the first one to Rich. Alexander Blostein, Goldman. Question for you guys around data, thank you for providing a lot more granularity around the topic. Obviously, it's a very important topic for investors. Going back to the pricing components, or roughly 30% of the total growth is expected to come from pricing changes. When you look across your customer base, whether it's the buy side or the sell side, the industry's clearly facing pretty mutual deflationary pressures. Help us, I guess, reconcile how you'll be able to increase pricing in this kind of environment, which products specifically do you feel you have the most pricing power in. Lastly, how do you think regulators will respond to continuous pricing increases?
Great question. About, I think, four questions embedded in that one question. Well done on managing to do that. The way we approach pricing is really around the value that we create to the market. As the amount of data inputs increase, and the amount of data outputs increase, and the complexity of those outputs increase, there's a lot more data that is being produced and consumed by users. You look at the actual pricing associated with that, it's just more of a recalibration to reflect the increasing amount of data that is being consumed by the industry, and the types of complexity associated with the data that is consumed by the industry. I think that answered at least two of your questions. I'm sorry. Give me that one again.
The regulators, if there's anything on the horizon that could put a cap on, or the price limit of things you try to do.
I don't believe so.
Other question?
No. Okay. I will go over to Martina. Yeah, that's fine.
Another question on data. Maybe on slide 27, if I'm reading this correctly, I think you're alluding to the addressable market for data growing.
Right.
7%, roughly.
I compare that to your guidance of, say, 6% for 2017, knock off M&A, it's more like five. I guess the first question is, what's the disconnect between five at ICE-
Yeah.
-versus seven for the market, how potentially it could actually grow more than seven? That's, I guess, part A. Part B, maybe to follow up on Alex's question, if the market or the customer segments are going towards quant hedge funds, which are very price-sensitive customer bases, I guess how is sustainable, again, as pricing increases when that's the customer segment growth?
Christian from Credit Suisse.
Sorry, Christian from Credit Suisse. I apologize.
I'll take the first one. First of all, the chart Lynn showed the industry breakdown for 2016 and looked at the addressable areas of the market growing 6.9%. We grew 7.3%. We outgrew the market last year. I have no idea what the market looked like for 2017. We said we're comfortable to grow at least 6%.
I'm very confident that the contributors to that growth, as Lynn showed you, will look very similar to the model that we've got. We feel very comfortable about where we're growing. We feel like in 2016, we grew a little faster than the industry overall in the areas where we're positioned. I think more importantly, as the team alludes to in the presentation, we have a geographic opportunity to expand. Europe's only growing 1% as an industry. We're growing much faster than that. It's a very disaggregated market that we feel like we can aggregate up, and that will generate a lot of growth from that. Asia's growing the fastest. It's our smallest area. It's a great opportunity. In fact, one of Tim's two stories was a story about a growth opportunity that he's delivered on and his sales team's delivered on in Asia.
I think the key thing to understand is we're confident in our ability to grow this business mid to high single digits. Some years it may be six, some it may be seven, some it may be eight, some it may be five. It's going to vary inside the pie on what it is. The net result is it's going to be a growth business. As I showed you, when you combine that with a very well-positioned trading business, very little to no expense growth, you get double-digit earnings and free cash flow. We feel good about the data business last year. We feel great about the data business this year. More importantly, what today's about, is we feel fantastic about the data business in 2018 and beyond.
There's been two questions that have referred to pricing pressure and concerns. There's a bit of an echo chamber around equities data in particular. I just want to highlight. Lynn manages a $2 billion data business, and equities is, I don't know, 10%ish of that, and that's kind of where that pressure is. The cash equities business, it's a tough business. The way we've been growing through it, Lynn talked about earlier, is innovating on products in the equity sector, which has been working very well.
There's a question in the middle of the room back here.
Thanks. Michael Carrier, BofA Merrill Lynch. Maybe just a question on both MERS and the bond platform. Just curious, like you were talking about now, is there, like, a reason for focusing on them today? Are we getting closer to the industry coming together and actually seeing a more material opportunity? Scott, maybe if there's any revenue opportunity or how you guys are thinking about in terms of the investments that are being made versus that potential over time.
Yeah. They're both growing really fast. Relative to the size of ICE today, they're not particularly material. The fact that they're growing so fast means that people are going to start hearing about them, talking about them, and we thought this was a good forum to at least let you know what it is, because both of these have been being incubated by us for 18 months or 2 years or so. On the bond platform, it used to be a point-and-click platform. People are now building APIs into it. More inventory is flowing into it. It's becoming more important. The number of firms that are using it, we've never put out, but it's dozens. More people are coming to it. I just think that bond platform is going to get more attention. We should have let you know what it is.
What is interesting about it is that recently we took Lynn's Continuous Evaluated Pricing and put it into that bond platform. The bond business is a bid offer market. It's with lots of illiquid securities. It's kludgy. There's a lot of requests for quotes. While it's automating, it's still pretty old school. We put the CEP in there. We've given traders the opportunity to just trade at the, what I would call the midpoint in equities. That's really taking off. Particularly for small-sized deals, Lynn's CEP is becoming an industry standard. It just made sense given we were going to talk about Continuous Evaluated Pricing, that we should expose the bond platform.
I'm also kind of tired of you guys every time we're together asking me, "What are you doing about bonds?" I was saying, we're looking at it, but the reality is we've been working on something, a segment of the market that's big but hadn't really been addressed. MERS is another one where Brendon and his team have been out talking to the market about how to automate the mortgage process, with electronic signatures now, and the ability for contracts to be signed online, the ability for a consumer to actually sit in their kitchen on an iPad or some device and read the documents instead of going to a hurried closing where somebody's just shoving paper and you're signing physical. It's just such an obvious thing. There's a lot of innovation, a lot of attempts to do that in the mortgage industry.
The fact that we're out conversing about it, and we're about to deliver the new MERS platform on the [inaudible]. What that has, by the way, is kind of an open backbone so that people can plug digital things into it. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are still members of MERS and are on our board. The fact we can build a highway that can get into their distribution systems that have the Wells Fargo, and [inaudible], and the other major lenders are engaged on that board with us on how we can build that backbone. I just felt like that information was going to start leaking out. You were going to start asking us what it is.
From an investor standpoint, I would view it as green shoots of things that we're working on that are really interesting that will drive that virtuous cycle of data, trading, risk management around ICE, but are not something that Scott Hill's going to put out really numbers on for a while.
Web to Alex.
Alex Kramm, UBS. Sorry to come back to the whole data and pricing question, I think the way it was asked before was kind of like with a negative tone. I actually want to turn around for a second and say, I think Jeff Sprecher even himself just said, it's less than inflation. I think it's 2% if my math is right. Look at some of the other data companies and some of the peers that you used on the slide earlier. They're easily taking 3%-4%. You look at the index guys, they're taking 5%-7%. You're talking about the fact that you have a highly proprietary data set, must-have offerings. Looks to me like you're leaving one or two points of growth easily on the table. I think an 8% data growth story is much more exciting than a 16% growth story.
Are you leaving money on the table? I think you're complaining about the multiple, it seems like you're leaving money on the table. Just comment on that.
I think you guys number one should go out in the hall and battle that out to see who wins. I think you all are missing a bit of a point that Thomas Farley made. We run a very large, very diverse data set. There is noise in the system about the pricing around cash equities, very small part of what we do. Tim Noble is out selling a tremendous amount of mission-critical bond prices, fixed income information. Trabue Bland mentioned in his presentation about the farmers needing to look at the prices on the ICE platform. That's absolutely critical. What we've found is jamming our customers because it's critical data doesn't serve us over the long term.
What we need to be able to do and what we do, and what Lynn Martin said at least three or four times today, is that we ultimately go out to customers, we talk to them about the additional value that we're providing. That value can come in a number of different ways. "Hey, I'm giving you more prices in this feed than you used to get. Hey, I'm covering more names than I used to cover. Hey, I can get it to you over the SFTI network, and you never have to worry about cyber again. You want it on a desktop? We're now rolling out ICE Connect. You can get it at ICE Connect." It's a value conversation. Again, the fear in putting the model out that I had was precisely this. "30%." Why is it 30%? It should be 40% or 15%.
Some years it may be 40%, some years it may be 15%. All of that's going to relate to what are the products we're selling, who are we selling them to, what value have we provided, how are we delivering them? That's what's going to dictate to it. I wouldn't pick on the model and say, "Oh, geez, you left two points on the table," or, "Geez, there's no way you're going to get those two points." Again, it's a very diverse data business that is a very attractive, very mission-critical business with a very strong set of customer relationships that we're going to balance in every one of those pricing decisions.
Again, don't get lost on the fact that inside that we said, another 20% from new products and new geographies, another 20% because our existing customers are going to buy more, another 20% because we're going to innovate and build new products. 3,000 new products we showed you on the [inaudible] . We've owned IDC for 17 months. Give us a little time. That number's going to go up. Look, again, the model is a directionally correct model. I wouldn't get too hung up on the precise element. It's not going to be to Christian's question every single year it looks exactly like that, but it gives you directionally what we think is the opportunity.
Again, importantly, what we did say, it's a business we think can consistently grow mid to high single digits, which combined with our trading business and no growth in expense, is a pretty good financial model.
Yes. Okay.
Brian Bedell, Deutsche Bank. Big picture question, shifting gears a little bit. Last 5 and 10 years, big theme or speculation of increase in the cross-border M&A. Obviously, the model lends itself well to cost saves given the scalability. Almost none of them have worked. You've reoriented your company, obviously, in a completely different direction. Jeff, do you think, given how you built your company, how Nasdaq has built their company away from trading, LSE moving more into data that cross-border exchange M&A kind of doesn't make sense anymore? As we think about the future for data, say 5 years out, do you see yourself competing against more and more different types of data providers? Think about slide 37. It looks a lot like what the custodian banks do, for example.
Yeah. It's a very good question. First of all, cross-border M&A has worked well for us compared to some of our peers. One of the things that we do is even though we have, I think probably the highest operating margin running exchanges in our industry, we left the exchanges in their local domiciles. We didn't try to bring everything to Atlanta where I live or what have you. As Hester showed, within her network are 6 clearing houses. The reason our operating margins were high is we did get everybody on a common technology base, and left the chief executive there, left the compliance people there, put a board of directors at these local exchanges that looks like their constituency and so on and so forth.
That works better than trying to jam it all together, because these are generally national assets and very important to local capital markets. We've shown you don't have to collapse them all together in order to get the cost efficiencies out. In terms of the data question, what we see happening now is essentially a movement from a large multi-asset class, terminal-based, desktop-based data consumption environment to what Ben talked about with taking his children out and having weather on a buoy exactly where his boat wants to go, is the highly tailored, customized bespoke data that's unique, that can be delivered in a lot of different ways. Maybe it is a desktop, we have ICE Connect and NYSE Connect, where we can deliver if somebody wants a desktop.
Really what people want are mobile iPads, data feeds that are feeding algorithms and news readers and other kinds of things that are just churning through big data functions. The artificial intelligence movement, we have a lot of AI in our company. We don't talk a lot about it, internal running our company is a lot of AI, we really are investing heavily in it. Not because it's cool, because if you look at what we have, our streams of data that are very clean. AI needs a lot of data, it needs a lot of clean data. That's where we see the direction going. I think there are going to be many, many vendors that have kind of interesting proprietary things.
The goal for us is to look at our broad customer base and figure out what's the next mission-critical thing that they need, and can we get that in our ecosystem. I think it's almost unrivaled. It's kind of the modern-day view of data. Exchanges are very well-positioned because we run networks. As Rich asked in the initial question, we started with an exchange-type network and built it into a massive data distribution network where it has exchanges on it. I don't know what Mark said, it's got a handful of 150 exchanges on it, 500 data connectors on it. That's what I think modern exchanges are becoming.
Oh, here, let's go to the back.
Hello. Vinnie from Magellan Master Fund. Just a quick question on the competitive dynamics that we're seeing Nasdaq and FX quickly pushing the energy or CurveGlobal . What are the competitive dynamics that you're observing, and who are the competitors the customer sets they're winning in or?
Yeah. What Christopher Edmonds tried to show you, and it may be a bit in the weeds, but if you take energy, we have, what do we have? 1,000 energy products, many of which are proprietary. They're cash-settled indexes that we either own or exclusively license. We dominate the energy trading business because we have everything that a corporate needs to risk manage. What our competitors are doing is of that 1,000 contracts, they're coming out and saying, "I'm going to try to offer low-cost trading in one of them." There will be some people that if you pay them or cut them the right deal for one contract, they may go over there. The corporations that really need to manage risk can't afford to leave the 999 other contracts that are all highly correlated, that are portfolio margined in Hester's clearing organization.
It's interesting. It's not sustainable. The industry has to have access to the risk management tools that we have. We have very deliberately built and launched and licensed all of that infrastructure. It's why we like to show the slide of how heavy the corporate use is of our platform because if you just want to day trade against algorithmic traders and buy flow and what have you can build that, but eventually people run out of steam because they can't actually manage risk on it. If that makes sense. In terms of global curve, it's an interesting idea that people want to have an economic offset between futures and OTC swaps.
Deutsche Börse offers that now, LSE offers that, and you can see how big that market is of people that are long swaps and short futures or long futures and short swaps. That is a way a dealer would manage a book, but it's not the way the end user manages the book. Again, you look at the portfolio of who's using our markets, it's the corporate end users. It's people like you, that frankly have directional. You're not long one short the other, getting an offset. That's the way somebody that's trying to make markets operates. It's a subset of the market. That offering exists today, and you can see how big it is. It's honestly immaterial to us.
Okay, let's come back to Rich.
Richard Repetto, Sandler O'Neill, my last and final question here. Scott talked about price-chasing value, and I guess, one of the things, and we've looked at new investor sort of pointing this out, but you look at multiples in the market data space, significant.
Higher than your blended multiple in the 20s. I guess the question is, are we coming up with metrics on the market data side? I think you've taken a step forward here with saying where the growth is coming from, are there other metrics that you can give exchange investors that used to see in daily volumes every day, and now we're dealing with like a dark pool? Could we also take, I think Lynn has this, the historical growth rates on the pie from on page 25, like where'd the growth last year come from in regards to pricing, new customers-
Yep
new products, et cetera?
Yeah. It's a fair question, right? If I step back and think about, again, a business we've owned about 17 months, it's reoriented the mix of ours, and you're spot on, Rich. You know 10 years ago, even five years ago, three years ago, if you wanted to know how our stock's likely to do, you watched trading volumes. It's not quite that simple today. I'll point out a couple things. Number 1, we've given you guidance as we've entered the year on what data revenues are going to be. There's not a lot of guesswork. We pretty much told you. In fact, Christian just said kind of what it was. We've told you what that was. Second, we introduced the ASV metric to try and give you a sense of, on a rolling basis, where are things headed.
In the first quarter we mentioned the ASV, which is our subscription value. It's not 100% of the data business, it's a big part of it. We've rolled that metric out. Today, we introduced the concept of where we think the overall aggregate growth can come from. I feel like, again, Jeff said you'll get a survey if you guys have thoughts on additional things that we can do. We've done a pretty comprehensive view of what other companies in the data space that have those mid-20 and higher multiples provide, a little bit of information on how they break down the revenue growth, ASV, guidance on their revenue expectations are pretty much in line with what's done. I feel like we're giving good transparency there.
In terms of the multiple discrepancy, you're exactly right, which is why we're very aggressively buying shares back right now. In addition to the revenue guidance, the revenue breakdown, the ASV, I mean, we're running a data business that's low 50s operating margins, and nobody else in the space is above the mid-40s. Look, I just think it's going to take time. Again, as we work our way through it, as we own and operate the business, as we deliver on synergies, as Lynn and Tim deliver on the top-line opportunities they talked about, I believe it will catch up, which again, is one of the reasons why we're buying shares. I would argue one of the reasons why historically, a year later, our share repurchases are worth 22%, more than two years later, they've been worth 50% more.
I think we're going to have the same thing happen here.
Okay, back here.
Patrick with Raymond James. A question for Tom. Where do you see the NYSE business growing going forward? We're not seeing growth in listed companies. You have somebody like BATS going to try to go after your closing auction business. Is the growth going to come from what we would think about as NYSE, or is it about feeding the data, feeding the other parts kind of downstream?
Yeah, it's a great question. Last year, by some metrics, and our banking friends here can attest to it, was the worst year in 20 years for equity capital markets activity, which is a principal driver for new kind of listings revenue. Notwithstanding that, we were able to grow through it. We continue to grow through it. It's worth keeping in mind the environment we're in, which at least leading up to this year, was truly awful. Meaning the number of new IPOs or new public companies that came into being contrasting with the M&A activity, which took 2 paying listing companies into 1 listing company. That's why I spent a lot of time, and John Tuttle spent a lot of time talking about where we're investing in our list of companies.
I rattled off the list of companies that come through here, because by adding that additional value and services, it does create some elasticity of demand. In fact, we've been able to increase our listing fees and purely value based because we're adding so much more value. Number 1, the hope is there's some reversion to the mean with respect to the environment for new listed companies. The largest listed companies are the 1 that bring us the greatest amount of new money. As we talked about, we're winning those. On the trading side, it's actually been a very good story for equities trading. In fact, if you look at our equities trading revenue over the last 4 years, calendar years, it's increased significantly. That's a very positive story. The options business is a tough business, has been a tough business.
What we did is we reoriented our position in our options business. First of all, we took back 100% of the economics, whereas prior to the ICE acquisition, NYSE did not own those businesses in their entirety. We've really running that options business lean and mean for margin. We've bottomed out the revenue, and now we're running that business at a much better trajectory, notwithstanding the tough economics of that space. Finally, data. We've created new products. We talked about the Integrated Feed, very well received. Other new data products that we brought to market data. There's really a number of different growth opportunities, listings, equities trading and data. Stacey talked about in equities trading, just adding all securities to NYSE. Right now, we're handicapping ourselves, adding all securities to NYSE American.
We actually have a number of interesting growth drivers there.
I think we've taken all the, we've got one more. Yep.
Chris Allen, Buckingham. Just wanted to ask a little bit. You went from a couple hundred cleared products up to about 3,000. I'm wondering what was driven organically, what was by acquisitions, what was from shifting over the counter to cleared. Just thinking about what's the next areas of product development, whether it's more on the index side moving forward from a trading perspective and clearing or penetrating new asset classes like corporate bonds obviously is an example of one that's not electronically traded moving that way in a big way.
Yeah.
I'm just thinking about other asset classes.
It's a good question, Chris. This company has no R&D department. A lot of exchanges have somebody who's the head of R&D. We've never had that. You met the R&D department today. We just spend a lot of time in front of customers, and going back to the energy question about competitors, we spend a lot of time with customers and they'll say, "I'm doing this, and this, but I also have this small portfolio of other things that are largely OTC because they're non-cleared or not listed, and I'm having to do OTC margining now," or, "I've got part of my portfolio with you, but part is in this other system, and if you could just list these things, I could give you my whole book." Just having that conversation over and over and over again is what drove that.
It was really customer-led, and we have a team internally that meets every two weeks and just goes through what are the new products and what did we hear in the market? What should be the next tranche of things that we're working on? To answer the second part of your question, the real trend, and you guys see it every day, is this move towards some kind of indexation, benchmarking against something. A question that wasn't asked, but I'll answer it because it's responsive to you is, yeah, we have all these indices, similarly, there's a backlash at how much passive managers are paying for indexes. We don't own indexes necessarily for the sake of owning indexes.
It's great if somebody wants to license our index, and we'll call it the ICE index, or we'll call it the NYSE index, which is another great brand name, or we can call it by the manager's name. We don't really care as long as it's calculated by Lynn, as long as it's our data that's fueling it, as long as our reference data is the deterministic data for it. Whether we charge you as an index or whether we charge you for the data and all those other services, we kind of don't care. We are the disruptor in a weird way in this index space, because historically, most indices that you all are familiar with are equity indices, and historically, equity indices just use the tape that comes out of Tom's exchange or one of his competitors.
There's nothing particularly proprietary, if you will, about an equity tape. The indexes that we just acquired from BofAML, the ones that we've launched, the LIBOR, Brent, go through the whole portfolio of thousands of indexes that we have. One of the underlying themes you'll see is that it's based on our proprietary data, in which case, we have a lot of flexibility at how we charge for that index and can be creative with a manager launching an ETF or with a customer that wants to come up with some new thing. That's really what's going on inside the company right now.
This concludes our Q&A. I think Jeff just had a few words, since we've gone over time a little bit.
Well, first of all, thanks for being here at our Investor Day. I hope, like I said before, that we met your expectations. We're really looking forward to your feedback. Scott and I'll be, next quarter on the earnings call, dealing with the typical earnings thing. If you have feedback on how we can change that up or how often you'd like to see the other managers in the company, we'll look forward to it. Otherwise, thanks for your patience. You guys have been a great audience, actually, and we really appreciate it. Thank you.