Yahoo Finance Intercontinental Exchange, Inc. (NYSE:ICE) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript
Intercontinental Exchange, Inc. (NYSE:ICE) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript May 2, 2024
Intercontinental Exchange, Inc. reports earnings inline with expectations. Reported EPS is $1.48 EPS, expectations were $1.48. Intercontinental Exchange, Inc. isn’t one of the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds at the end of the third quarter (see the details here).
Operator: Hello everyone, and welcome to the ICE First Quarter 2024 Earnings Conference Call and Webcast. My name is Emily, and I'll be facilitating your call today. [Operator Instructions]. I will now hand over to Katia Gonzalez, Manager of ICE's Investor Relations. Please go ahead.
Katia Gonzalez: Good morning. ICE's first 2024 earnings release and presentation can be found in the Investors section of ice.com. These items will be archived, and our call will be available for replay. Today's call may contain forward-looking statements. These statements, which we undertake no obligation to update, represent our current judgment and are subject to risks, assumptions, and uncertainties. For a description of the risks that could cause our results to differ materially from those described in forward-looking statements, please refer to our 2023 Form 10-K, 2024 first quarter Form 10-Q and other filings with the SEC. In our earnings supplement, we refer to certain non-GAAP measures. We believe our non-GAAP measures are more reflective of our cash operations and in core business performance.
You'll find a reconciliation to the goodwill and GAAP terms in our earnings materials. When used on this call, net revenue refers to revenue net of transaction based expenses and adjusted earnings refers to adjusted diluted earnings per share. Throughout this presentation, unless otherwise indicated, references to revenue growth are on a constant currency basis. Please see the explanatory notes on the second page of the earnings supplement for additional details regarding the definition of certain items. With us on the call today are Jeff Sprecher, Chair and CEO; Warren Gardiner, Chief Financial Officer; Ben Jackson, President; Lynn Martin, President of the NYSE; and Chris Edmonds, President of Fixed Income and Data Services. I'll now turn the call over to Warren.
Warren Gardiner: Thanks, Katia. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. I'll begin on Slide 4 with a summary of our strong first quarter results. First quarter net revenues totaled a record $2.3 billion and pro forma for the acquisition of Black Knight increased by 5% versus last year. First quarter adjusted operating expenses totaled $930 million. At the low end of our guidance range driven by an acceleration of planned expense synergies and a few onetime benefits within compensation costs. Moving to the balance of the year, we expect second quarter adjusted operating expenses to be in the range of $945 million to $955 million with a sequential increase driven in part by a full quarter of merit increases across the organization, planned investments, and the modernization of MSP and higher DNA as recent revenue related data center investments go live.
In addition, and in part due to synergies being realized sooner than previously expected, we are lowering our full-year expense guidance to $3.79 billion to $3.82 billion. This strong first quarter performance helped to drive record adjusted operating income of $1.4 billion up 8% year-over-year on a pro forma basis and record earnings per share of $1.48. First quarter free cash flow totaled $877 million enabling us to reduce debt outstanding by roughly $600 million in the first quarter. Since we completed our acquisition of Black Knight in September, we've reduced debt by roughly $2 billion, and as a result adjusted leverage ended the first quarter approximately 3.9x pro forma EBITDA with first quarter interest expense down $10 million from the fourth quarter.
Now let's move to Slide 5, we'll provide an overview of the performance of our Exchange segments. First quarter net revenues totaled a record $1.2 billion up 11% year-over-year. Record transaction revenues of $866 million were up 16% in part driven by a 12% increase in our interest rate business and record energy revenues, which grew 32% year-over-year. This strong performance included a 28% increase in our oil complex, 42% growth in global natural gas revenues, driven by another record setting quarter for TTF and 26% growth in our environmental business. In addition, as of the end of April, open interest is up 23% year-over-year, including 22% growth in our global commodities and 25% growth in our energy markets. Shifting to recurring revenues, which include our exchange data services and our NYC listings business, revenue totaled $357 million in the first quarter.
Similar to last quarter, growth in the number of customers consuming our Global Energy environmental data was partially offset by the rolling off of initial listing fees related to the strong IPO market in 2021, and lower exchange data revenue at the NYSE. It's worth noting that the IPO market has shown signs of improvement so far in 2024 with the NYSE capturing nearly 70% of total proceeds raised and welcoming six of the top seven IPOs year-to-date, despite more than 50% of new listings not meeting our gold standard of qualification criteria. Turning now to Slide 6. I'll discuss our Fixed Income and Data Services segment. First quarter revenues totaled a record $568 million. Transaction revenues of $119 million were driven by growth in corporate bond trading, which is in part driven by strong growth within our institutional channel.
This was offset by lower treasury and CD volumes as well as lower levels of CDS clearing activity. Record recurring revenues totaled $449 million and grew by 4% year-over-year. In our Fixed Income and Data and Analytics business, record first quarter revenues of $288 million increased by 4%. Growth was once again driven by improving trends in our PRD business and another quarter of double-digit growth in our index business. Importantly, fixed income data and analytics ASV or Annual Subscription Value improved from the 2% range experienced through much of 2023 to 4% exiting the first quarter as we continue to see customer reengagement and investment across the fixed income ecosystem. Other data and network services grew 4% in the first quarter, driven by our Feeds business and continued strength in our oil and gas desktop solutions, both of which grew double-digits year-over-year.
Importantly, demand for our connectivity solutions remained strong with the backlog of signatures related to our ICE global network offering expected to come online and into both ASV and revenue in early July following the build out of additional data center capacity. As a result, we expect second quarter year-over-year growth in overall recurring revenue to be similar to the first quarter with the year-over-year growth improving in the second half driven by continued strong trends across fixed income data and analytics and an acceleration in growth in our other Data and Network Services businesses. Please flip to Slide 7, where I'll discuss the results in our Mortgage Technologies segment. Please note that my comments are on a pro forma basis.
ICE Mortgage Technology revenues totaled $499 million in the first quarter. Recurring revenues totaled $390 billion. As we noted last quarter, recurring revenues were impacted by both industry consolidation and continued pressure on renewals within our origination technology business. It's worth noting that while current macro conditions are putting pressure on minimums at renewal, and thus our recurring revenues, customers are overwhelmingly remaining on our platform. And while yet to manifest in our results, lower minimums upon renewal are paired with a higher price per transaction, a dynamics that will provide an incremental tailwind when industry volumes normalize. Said differently, total contract value in a normal market is on average increasing upon renewal.
Transaction revenues totaled $109 million in the first quarter. While closed loans increased slightly, this was offset by lower professional services fees and lower default management revenues within our servicing business. Importantly, as I previously indicated, we have realized expense synergies faster than originally anticipated, which when coupled with a relatively stable top-line on a year-over-year basis has helped to drive an 8% increase in segment operating income. Looking to the full-year and after factoring in the dramatic shift in interest rate expectations for 2024 relative to just three months ago, we now expect total revenue growth in our mortgage technology business to be flat to down in the low-single digit range with revenues unlikely to improve materially from the first quarter levels until the second half.
The high end of the range is underpinned by a flat to modest improvement in the industry origination volumes, while the lower end of the range anticipates a more conservative decline in the mid-to-high single digit range relative to 2023. Despite these macro pressures, we continue to invest in product development and enhancement. We continue to expand our existing networks and we are executing on our synergy targets, all which further position our platform to realize accelerating growth when market conditions normalize. In summary, we delivered another very strong start to the year. We once again delivered strong revenue, operating income, free cash flow and adjusted earnings per share growth. And we continue to invest across our business to meet both the needs of our customers and to position our business to continue to deliver consistent and compounding growth for our stockholders into the future.
I'll be happy to take your questions during Q&A. But for now, I'll hand it over to Ben.
Benjamin Jackson: Thank you, Warren, and thank you all for joining us this morning. Please turn to Slide 8. Our customers continue to rely on our leading technology, mission critical data and transparent and accessible markets to navigate uncertainty, while managing risk. Across our Global Futures and Options business, total average daily volumes increased 16% to a record 8.1 million lots in the first quarter, including records across commodities, energy and total options. The strong performance drove record futures and options revenues with energy revenues nearly tripling since the same period in 2010 and growing double-digits on average over that timeframe. And through April, open interest across our global commodities and energy markets remains at all-time highs up 22% and 25% respectively versus last year.
A direct benefit from the long tail of secular growth trends unfolding across global oil, natural gas, and environmental markets. A number of years ago, we recognized the importance of investing in an energy platform that is truly global, one that better serves the needs of an evolving and growing commercial customer base. Today, as a result of organic and inorganic investments, trading on our network is not tied to any single product or limited to any one region. Instead, we have built a diversified energy network delivering comprehensive risk management solutions, providing capital efficiencies and position to grow alongside the continued evolution of global markets. In our oil markets, as trade dynamics evolve and become increasingly complex, customers seek not only liquidity in the major global benchmarks, but also in products that provide for greater hedging precision.
Reflecting this dynamic, our other crude and refined products continue to set records with ADV growing double-digits on average over the past five years. This portfolio increased 47% year-over-year in the first quarter alone, while open interest is up 27% through the end of April. In the more than 20 years that ICE has been building its global energy platform, we have created 100s of precise hedging instruments, driven by collaboration with our customers. All of these instruments are underpinned by the deep liquidity in our benchmarks such as Brent. In March 2021, in partnership with the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company and nine of the world's largest energy traders as founding partners, we launched Ice Futures Abu Dhabi or IFAD. This new exchange enabled for the first time market participants to come together and contribute to the price formation of a new innovation, the Murban Futures contract, an important benchmark for oil flowing to Asia.
In the first quarter, as IFAD marked its third anniversary, our Murban Futures reached new highs surpassing over 1 million contracts traded along with the series of open interest records in April. Similarly, our Platts Dubai contract had another quarter of record volumes increasing 58% year-over-year. Another innovation that we launched two years ago, the Midland WTI contract known as HOU is a deliverable crude grade of Midland Oil Basis Houston. This contract is fast becoming the most accurate representation of the Houston oil market as evidenced by HOU reaching record volumes during the quarter. Further supporting the growth of this new risk management innovation is that this oil has been added into the ICE Brent basket, which creates new opportunities for clients to manage risk by hedging with this contract.
Collectively, the strong performance drove another quarter of record oil revenues up 28% year-over-year. In our natural gas markets, the globalization of gas and the rise of LNG are secular trends we began investing in over a decade ago, beginning with our Endex investment, an investment that has established us as a leader in European gas trading. Today with Asia as the largest buyer of global LNG, the relationship between our European TTF and Asian JKM benchmarks drives global price formation. In the first quarter, the number of market participants in each market grew double-digits versus last year with both reaching record volumes. This strong performance drove record natural gas revenues up 42% year-over-year in the first quarter. Importantly, open interest trends for TTF and JKM remained strong through April, up 90% and 50% year-over-year respectively.
The globalization of natural gas alongside a global focus on decarbonization is critical to environmental markets. Built off of our acquisition of the Climate Exchange more than a decade ago, we operate the world's largest and most liquid environmental markets. Here we have seen the number of active market participants grow double-digits on average over the past five years, including record participation in the first quarter. At the same time, ADV across our environmental portfolio increased 22% year-over-year with open interest up 27% through the end of April. Price transparency across the energy spectrum is critical as companies look to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions in a cost effective manner. By combining the network and liquidity of our global energy platform with our leading environmental portfolio, we are well positioned to help our customers navigate this transition across global energy markets.
In summary, the evolution of our energy markets is one example of how we continuously invest and develop customer driven solutions across asset classes, as well as the creative approach we've taken to leverage our infrastructure, technology, and expertise to drive value creation. Our record performance is a product of these investments, some that we've made more than a decade ago and our commitment to staying close to our customers, an approach that permeates this organization helping to drive effective and efficient product innovation. This approach is also important to our data business, where we are uniquely positioned to leverage our distribution and our infrastructure to create new content and to expand the breadth of our offering. Our position as a leading provider of price and reference data has served as the foundation for what is today one of the largest providers of fixed income indices globally.
The accelerating growth of passive investing and the efforts we've made to increase the breadth of our offering and the flexibility of our approach to index construction has contributed to the double-digit average annual growth in our index business, since we acquired the Bank of America Merrill Lynch franchise in 2017. A key driver of this growth is the increase in the passive ETF assets under management benchmark to our indices, growing to a record of $593 billion through the end of the first quarter from less than $100 billion in 2017. While critical, our pricing data and index businesses are only components of what we offer to this growing industry. As a leading provider of such proprietary data services, we have developed deep expertise in gathering and cleansing unstructured data, skills in building the database that serves as the foundation for developing actionable insights and identifying opportunities not only in the fixed income markets, but across many other asset classes.
This is an expertise we're starting to leverage across a number of mortgage data initiatives. For example, in April, we announced the integration of our property and loan level mortgage datasets with our property level climate risk metrics covering more than 100 million U.S. Homes. This integration improves transparency and facilitates risk management throughout the housing finance and property insurance sector, allowing customers to apply ICE's climate metrics to individual loans, properties, and entire portfolios, improving the visibility to the inherent climate risks in each. In addition, we are leveraging these insights to enhance asset level climate risk modeling for existing municipal bond and mortgage backed securities products. As we move forward, there is significant opportunity to continue to expand and evolve the products and services within our fixed income and data services business.
Turning now to our Mortgage business. Following the proven playbook we've applied across our global energy and fixed income businesses. In mortgages, we are leveraging market leading technology, mission critical data and our network expertise to build innovative solutions that improve workflow efficiencies. With a touch point to nearly every market participant, we have connectivity to a customer base in need of the automation that our digital solutions provide. In this regard, we're pleased to share that we closed 20 new Encompass clients in the first quarter. Building on the wins we announced last year with banks such as M&T and JPMorgan Chase and the announcement earlier this year of adding Fifth Third Bank to Encompass on top of their move to MSP announced late last year.
We are pleased to now announce that Citizens Bank and Webster Bank, both existing MSP clients are moving to Encompass. Just like many of the other recent wins that we are implementing, these clients see the significant value that we can provide through our complete front to back offering. For MSP, building on the capital mortgage solutions of Texas and CapEd Credit Union wins mentioned on the last call, we closed Lennar, a long time Encompass client. Our growing customer relationships serve as a validation of our vision, bringing together a complete front to back experience for our customers and their clients through one trusted platform. Our clients seek a solution provider that supports digital workflows throughout the homeownership lifecycle, starting with matching a consumer to the right lending product at the right time on the loan origination, closing, servicing and the capital markets.
This is directly in line with our long-term vision and the journey we have been on. Importantly, we remain focused on executing on our strategy of relieving the pain points and inefficiencies that exist across the mortgage workflow and remain committed to investing behind secular growth while enhancing the value proposition of our network. For example, we have completed the evolution of Encompass to a new web user experience with new automation tools and more ways to partner and extend the platform to serve our customers' business needs. In parallel, we're executing on our investment commitments to continue to advance our market leading MSP servicing platform. A perfect example of this execution is the recently announced rollout of our MSP Digital Experience or MSP DX.
This service is an intuitive and conversational new interface leveraging natural language processing for our servicing system designed to streamline workflows, increase efficiencies and expedite training of new servicing personnel. Along the same lines, we've completed our first integration of Encompass to MSP. This integration leverages our data and document automation platform and our neural network, large language model for the classification and extraction of data from documents to automate loan onboarding from Encompass straight to MSP, reducing errors and providing significant efficiencies to clients that have our front to back solution set. Simultaneously, we've been integrating our tax, flood and closing fees into Encompass providing lenders more choice in service providers for these important underwriting data assets.
In summary, as we move through 2024 and beyond, we are excited about the many opportunities for growth that lie ahead. Opportunities that we're able to capture because of the investments we've made in the past and the strategic investments we will continue to make across our networks into the future. With that, I'll turn the call over to Jeff.
Jeffrey Sprecher: Thank you, Ben. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us. Please turn to Slide 9. We are increasingly being asked how ICE is incorporating artificial intelligence into our business. So, while I'm not here to discuss the financial impact, I thought I'd touch on some of the AI investments across ICE. Like many large corporations, we have developers working on how to integrate AI models into our products, on how we better contract for and monetize our proprietary datasets, and on how we improved our own productivity. Along those lines, we've created an internal R&D group that we're calling our AI Center of Excellence, where we're testing novel use cases and working to build appropriate governance guardrails to reduce or eliminate the risks inherent to AI.
We're focused on getting it right while working towards a goal of bringing AI enabled enhancements and new products to our customers. Ben just spoke about investing in our Mortgage Data & Document Automation product, which is an extension of the product formerly called AIQ that we acquired with Ellie Mae. We've also mentioned investing in our commodity chat platform called ICE Chat to improve upon actionable insights and market data. And we've commented on our work using artificial intelligence models for pattern recognition in our regulatory compliance activities. Today, I'd like to further speak to some of the lesser known second order impacts of the market's current energetic focus on AI that we see feeding growth to ICE. If you think back to the start of ICE, the prevalent financial exchanges were largely open outcry venues and both listed and over-the-counter trading involve significant involvement of human intermediaries.
Our thesis of using digital networks to connect people and broaden access to risk management pushed us to create and manage our own data centers and network channels. Today, we operate from 14 global data centers and we've built out the ICE Cloud, a managed network connecting our data centers to many third-party trading and data venues and interconnecting major players across the global financial services industry. We've made the determination that managing our own IT infrastructure and making it available to our customers directly and through an ICE managed cloud offers us a competitive advantage while providing for better intellectual property protection and creating an avenue for our connectivity and data revenue growth. One service that we offer our customers is the ability to utilize their code and equipment within the ICE global network and transmit the digital output across the ICE managed cloud.
This ICE strategy has resulted in requests from customers to incorporate their AI models inside of our network and is driving increasing demand for ICE data center and ICE Cloud access. We've already received customer deposits for much of our planned year 2025 and year 2026 network build outs and we've been working with our vendors to plan for its continued expansion. This customer interest in artificial intelligence modeling should provide a multi-year tailwind to revenue growth in our data and connectivity business. Another second order revenue impact from the current interest in AI is the attention that our listed emissions offset markets and our listed renewable energy markets are receiving from power companies and third-party data center developers as they plan for their future growth given that ICE is a major host of the world's tradable emission and renewable energy markets.
Our subsidiary, ICE Benchmark Administration, which administers regulated benchmarks, manages our carbon market data service that provides validated data to companies seeking information about the voluntary markets for carbon credits. Interest in these markets is surging as evidenced by corporate involvement more than doubling over the past six months to more than 250 firms. And last month, the United Nations' Science Based Target Initiative, the world's main verifier of emissions targets said that it will permit the use of emission offset credits to count towards reducing emissions against Scope 3 targets. Coupled with the European Commission's aim to increase its emissions reductions beginning in 2024 plus the EU's inclusion of new industrial sectors that will be subject to these targets, we believe the backdrop for revenue growth in ICE's environmental and renewable markets attributable to AI model demand remains bright.
Shifting now to our strong results. In the first quarter, we once again grew revenues, grew adjusted operating income and grew adjusted earnings per share, yet again delivering the best quarter in our company's history. Our consistent results are a testament to the value of our mission critical data, leading market technology and the strength of our strategic business model. ICE is a company that has deliberately grown through curated acquisition and entrepreneurship. We have targeted an interrelated collection of markets to help our customers manage risk due to both acts of nature and acts of man. Typically, we think of our global commodity oriented businesses as being levered to acts of nature, such as issues that affect supply chain flows.
And we think of our global financially oriented risk management businesses as being levered to acts of man, such as central bank and cross border trade policies. We purposely have targeted providing a mix of these businesses to find growth somewhere in the world in varying underlying conditions and we have intentionally positioned our company to provide customer solutions to facilitate all weather results such as those we are reporting for this record quarter. I'd like to end my prepared remarks by thanking our customers for their continued business and for their trust. And I'd like to thank my colleagues at ICE for their contributions to our best ever quarterly results. And with that, I'll now turn the call back to our moderator, Emily, and we'll conduct a question-and-answer session until 9:30 am Eastern Time.
Operator: Thank you. [Operator Instructions]. Our first question today comes from the line of Ken Worthington with JPMorgan. Ken, please go ahead.
Ken Worthington: Hi, good morning and thanks for taking the question. I wanted to dig a bit more into the globalization of gas. So a couple of questions here. OI is surging in TTF, volume growth remains very strong. How far along is this period of rapid growth for TTF? And is it really being driven by the globalization of gas or is there something else driving this most recent surge? And then can you address the extent to which the Biden administration pause of LNG export licenses could impact the globalization of gas? It feels like a speed bump along the way, but does like a Republican President change the equation? Thanks.
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