Intercontinental Exchange, Inc. Q1 FY2020 Earnings Call

Good morning. Welcome to the Intercontinental Exchange First Quarter 2020 Earnings Conference Call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. After today’s presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. Please note, that this event is being recorded. I’d now like to turn the conference over to Warren Gardiner, VP of Investor Relations. Go ahead.

Good morning. ICE’s first quarter 2020 earnings release and presentation can be found in the Investors section of the ice.com. These items will be archived and our call will be available for replay.

Thanks, Warren. Good morning, everyone. And thank you for joining us today. Before we begin, we want to offer our hope that you, your colleagues, and your families are staying safe and remain healthy during this unprecedented time. I'll begin this morning on Slide 4, with some of the key highlights from our record first quarter results. First Quarter net revenues totaled $1.6 billion, up 23% year-over-year, driven by record trading and clearing revenues of $883 million and record data services revenues of $564 million. It's worth noting that this quarter started with January yielding what at the time was the best revenue month in our history. That record was nearly equal during February. While growing uncertainty related to COVID further increased our customers' demand for price discovery and risk management in March. It is our customer focus and our investments in both sales resources and product innovation that generated the high-retention rate and growth in open interest, which lays the foundation for our record performance even prior to March, and which supports our ability to continue to grow once the impacts of COVID subside.

Thank you, Scott, and good morning to everyone on the call. Before I begin my remarks on Slide 7, I want to express our sincere hope that you and your families are safe and healthy. I'd also like to take a moment to thank my colleagues at ICE for the resilience and the dedication that they've exhibited over the last few months, and importantly, thank our customers, who now more than ever, put their trust in our people and our technology to manage their risk across asset classes around the world. Business continuity planning has always been paramount at ICE. Being prepared for managing risk is our business, and it's in our DNA. A number of years ago, we started building large scale remote capacity with a robust cyber overlay, so that our employees could work from home for extended periods of time. This meant equipping them with portable technologies, building secure virtual desktop environments, and being prepared to supply important equipment out of our own inventory.

Our first question is from Rich Repetto from Piper Sandler. Go ahead.

Good morning, Jeff. Good morning, Scott. I guess my question, Jeff, is can we get your perspective or your views on the energy and the crude oil market right now, and the issues that are going on with the pricing? How do you expect Brent to price, you know, as the next contract expires and any color that you could give us to educate us more on that marketplace?

Sure, happy to, Rich. Well, first of all, WTI (West Texas Intermediate crude oil), as many of you know, is crude oil delivered in pipelines at Cushing, Oklahoma, on a specific day, and there's local storage there. When there are pipeline problems or storage problems or problems on a specific day, that particular price discovery can reflect those problems. And that's what people believe have happened with the negative pricing at WTI earlier this month. But, I will say that we are aware that there are investigations going on to satisfy the market; the price discovery that happened on that day at that moment and that place is truly representative. So, we look forward to the outcome of that. Brent is slightly different, and I'll explain a little bit at a high level and then maybe ask Ben Jackson to help me augment some of the details. But there's a lot more cushion, if you will, built into the way Brent operates. First of all, it's a global contract. And so it's really looking at global capacity, global shipping capacity, global port capacity, global storage capacity, because the oil is seaborne. And as you know, I think Rich, it is a cash settled contract that settles against an index that ICE generates itself by looking at what is considered the physical market called the Dated Brent market. And we look at cargoes that are exchanged hands between major oil companies, these tend to be trades of a full cargo, ship cargo, or a half-ship cargo that trade around the world, as the oil companies are trying to manage the delivery out of Deepwater Derrick, shipping availability, port availability, and storage around the world. Those cargoes are traded to keep that whole physical infrastructure in check and balanced. And those are the cargoes that we look at and create an index. If there are anomalies in trading, we have the right to question those anomalies and either ask for more information or disregard them or adjust them. So, there's human judgment that goes into that. And lastly, the Brent index, the Brent crude oil contract, the futures contract that we trade does not deliver on a day. It is a forward-looking delivery period that has more cushion in it than we have at West Texas Intermediate crude oil. So, once long short, it's more global, it's more diversified, has more buffer, and has human judgment in it, all of which can help alleviate some of the near-term stress that happens compared to WTI, where you have a moment in time and local infrastructure.

Sure, I can add a little more to that. And thanks for the question, Rich. So, Jeff hit it very well around one of the core differences between the two contracts, as one is global in nature and one's very local and landlocked. With WTI, as Jeff said, there's well-publicized structural issues at Cushing, and infrastructure issues have happened in the past with pipeline and storage issues that create volatility in delivery. And as Jeff also said, the major difference between that and Brent is the Brent is a waterborne contract, where it's much easier to load crude on the vessel and bring it anywhere in the world where there's demand and the economics make sense. So, you'll see a huge demand pool that you're servicing with the Brent contract, and you don't have those fundamental landlocked structural constraints on the contracts. The other difference that has not been talked about as much, and Jeff touched on this briefly, is that WTI is a spot month contract. It expires right when the delivery schedules at Cushing are being set. For example, the June contract expires on May 19, with only a couple of days left of scheduling to happen on the Cushing infrastructure for deliveries. For the Brent contract, it's much more of a forward contract. So, if you take that example of the June contract as well, that contract expires a full month before. And actually today is the expiration day of the Brent June contract. So the full month between that and the contract is much less susceptible to issues that you'd see that can happen around infrastructure-related issues or constraints that you'd see in a landlocked contract like WTI. The other big difference to just highlight quickly, Rich, is because there was some misinformation put out there recently around the concept of Dated Brent. And we give customers, yes, we give customers the choice of Dated Brent versus Brent to hedge. Dated Brent is a true spot month contract. So that price has cargoes all the way going up to the delivery month. Dated Brent versus Brent are two very different contracts, and there's a spread relationship that develops between those two contracts that does trade because they are very different. Dated Brent is a spot contract. In that contract, we see that 85% of the open interest in that contract are professional, large commercials that are all over the delivery process that's happening in crude oil. So it's a heavily, heavily commercially oriented contract. And Brent and Dated Brent trade as a spread to one another, just like WTI front month to WTI second month trade as a spread to one another. But I can say that Dated Brent, the Brent never blew out anywhere near to the degree that WTI did in the past week, where the spread between WTI front month to back month went from $58 to $59, and at that same period, Dated Brent to Brent was around $5. It's these recent and past moves in WTI versus Brent that have shown that WTI can be a riskier contract to risk manage. And that's why customers overwhelmingly select Brent to manage their risk. They also select Brent as really the basis and pricing mechanism to price all kinds of refined products that we talk about oftentimes as one of the fastest growth areas of our business, which is our other oil complex. So these are refined products like gas oil, bunker fuels, jet fuels, gasoline, they all trade relative to Brent and they all trade in a global nature in areas around the world such as Europe, Asia, and North America, and it's one of the fastest growing parts of our complex. This is why, if you look at the overall oil complex, our market share and overall oil from an open interest perspective is 64%, up from 55% just a couple of years ago. And in ADV terms, our market share is 56%, up from 45% in the recent past. We're grateful that our customers are coming to us now more than ever to help manage their risk in this turbulent time.

Our next question is from Alex Kramm from UBS. Go ahead.

Good morning, everyone. Just wanted to shift gears to the data side a little bit. I think you gave a decent amount of color already, but obviously, the data guide is unchanged. So Scott, or anybody else, would be very happy to hear a little bit more why you're so confident? And also what you've been seeing, I guess, with sales teams displaced, working from home? And how you feel like that will change over the course of the year to still make your guidance? And then very quickly related to that, if you think going forward, I mean, the majority of that business is pricing analytics and fixed income. So with everything that we've seen here with everyone being displaced, I would just assume that it's going to get harder to get prices by calling dealers. So just curious, if you feel like this is actually an area of incremental demand coming out of this kind of crisis that nobody expected. Thank you.

Yes. It's a good question, Alex. Thank you. Let me start with what I don't know. I don't know exactly when the world goes back to work, whether that's second quarter, third quarter, fourth quarter, or early 2021. I don't think it would be useful for you. I don't have an economist on staff to tell you that it could be fast or slow or anywhere in between. So, I don't have great visibility into exactly when things open up. But I have a lot of visibility into fact that gives me confidence. So, one of the things I’ve got confidence based upon is I look at the pipeline and talk to Lynn and her sales team. The pipeline remains really robust. And so the opportunity exists to sell into that pipeline and to generate revenue, and as we sit here today, we believe are consistent with the original data guide that we provided. I look at ASV that's up 4%. And if you do just the straight math on that ASV number, it lands you right on top of where we're guiding in the second quarter, and I think provides a firm foundation as we move into the third and fourth quarter. I listened to Lynn and our team talk about phone calls we got in the middle of the crisis from customers thinking about or who had moved away to one of the other competitors and realized that the tracking error on the prices from those peers were significantly greater than the tracking error on our prices that are coming back to us. I know we were able to close a couple of key deals, but those deals didn't sign due to the work from home, which is not a loss revenue, it's just a delay, which I think can also help us in the back-half of the year. So in the very near term, I see a lot of positives that give me confidence as we move into the back-half of the year. I think more importantly, the key message I'd like to get across is there's nothing that's happened in the last month or two or three that changed the medium to long-term prospects of this business, and our ability to generate 4% to 6% revenue growth. So, no matter what happens in the third or fourth quarter or early next year, this business is set up to grow well, for exactly the reason that you indicated. It is a business that provides mission-critical information into the fixed income market. In fact, I've heard a number of our customers say, during the crisis, price discovery in fixed income came from us. And I think that's going to be even more important as we get to the other side of this crisis. I think the demand for fixed income investment will continue to grow. I think the evolution of indices and ETFs will continue to generate demand on prices. And we're going to be there to serve it. And then the last data point that I would give you, that gives me confidence is we look back after 2000 and 2001, the IDC business grew greater than 4%. We look back after 2008, 2009, the IDC business grew greater than 4%. And that was when it was just prices. Today, its prices and reference data in fixed income and a strong network. And by the way, it's supplemented by a futures exchange business that between 2009 and 2012 also grew high-single digits coming out of the financial crisis. So, in the near term, it's hard to call what exactly the numbers are going to be in the back-half, but I'd keep that in perspective as well. Because even to the extent we're off a little bit, we're talking about $0.02 to $0.03 a share on earnings well above $4, so it's something less than 0.5% of earnings in the near-term. And a long-term model still positioned very well to grow 4% to 6%.

Alex, this is Jeff. I wanted to share an interesting anecdote that surprised me. Our salespeople in data have targets and budgets, as you would expect. In Asia, our team faced the challenges of remote work very early in the quarter and experienced significant disruptions among our customer base. Despite this, they were able to meet or exceed their sales targets. While the sales process itself became quite challenging for our team, the demand remained strong. Our salespeople and customers found ways to continue doing business and get things done. Early in the quarter, we were optimistic about our direction before the lockdowns impacted Europe and the U.S. I feel reasonably confident that our entire market is adapting to this new normal of working from home.

Our next question is from Dan Fannon from Jefferies. Go ahead.

Thanks. Good morning. I guess, shifting back to the energy markets. I was wondering if you could kind of discuss the health of your customer base with oil at the current prices and talk about the commercial component in particular? And then just a point of clarification, because WTI is seaborne now, and just wondering if Brent, I mean they're facing the same supply issues that WTI is in the lack of demand. So just curious, you talked about the seaborne versus cash settled in some of the differences. But with WTI being now seaborne, does that alleviate some of that delta or variance between the two contracts?

Thanks, Dan. This is Ben again. So, on the latter part of your question there around WTI being seaborne, the reality is when you look in the physical market, when those barrels and when that oil hits the water, it's most often priced by Brent—that's when it becomes Brent. So, that's one of the major differences and it doesn't stop or prevent any of the issues that you see around the infrastructure-related issues around storage or pipeline capacity to get oil actually to the coast. So, that's one. On the customer base itself, a couple of quick comments on that. So, on every earnings call, you've either heard Jeff, Scott, or myself for many, many years, talk about that, since the inception of our futures business, we've really had the corporate commercial customer at the heart of our business. Those are customers that have real directional price risk. And whatever commodity it is they're consuming or that they're producing in the physical markets. And what the futures markets are intended to do for them, as all of you know, is to hedge that risk if prices move against them and to protect them in turbulent times. And we've partnered with our customers very differently than others have and built out this suite. As Jeff mentioned in his prepared comments, hundreds and hundreds of oil products around the world. We have many, many different natural gas products around the world, and power contracts around the world that help our customers hedge. So, we're grateful. What we can say right now is that we're grateful that our customers are coming to us now more than ever.

Our next question is from Michael Carrier from Bank of America. Go ahead.

Hi. Good morning. Thanks for taking the question. Scott, just a question on how you're looking at expense and capital management in this backdrop. So on expenses, you actually give a range, how much of the base will flux to say like a quick return versus a longer delay, and whether that's operationally or whether that's travel and those types of items. And then thinking on capital return, do you see any shift given the current backdrop? Thanks.

So Michael, you were a little bit unclear in the question. I think what you were asking, the latter part was on capital return, which I'll touch on, and on the former part with expense management in the challenging environment. That's the question I'm going to answer. Hopefully, it's right. So, first of all, the way we're thinking about expense is it's consistent in terms of where we thought coming into the year. And the reason for that is we think it's really important to continue to invest in our business as we move through 2020. And the strong performance across our business allows us to continue to do that. It's important that we continue to invest in ETF hub. Jeff talked about some of the milestones that we hit in that; it's important to continue to invest in building out our mortgage solutions. That's a business that when we bought it was a $140 million revenue stream that now is on track to be $170 million plus. And you, I'm sure, read the articles about the need for that business to automate beyond where it is today. So, we're going to continue to invest in that. We're going to continue to invest in the data sales team. We talked about growth in the European sales team and challenges in the fourth quarter. That business in Europe went from a decline in the fourth quarter to growth in the first quarter. And we continue to invest in the sales team because when customers are ready to start taking the meetings, or as Jeff alluded to, if they want to do deals over the phone, we want to make sure that we've invested in the sales team that's necessary to deliver on that. And so our expense guidance is consistent because we believe that this business is well-positioned to continue to grow this year and beyond. And it's important that we continue to feed the growth engine with the investments on the expense side. Now, having said that, you'll note that in our original guidance, we had $15 million to $25 million of expense efficiencies that we were counting on, and we will certainly deliver those. We absolutely do have flexibility if things get significantly worse as we move through the year. For a long time, a big part of our compensation system is paid for performance. And so to the extent that the business performance starts to slow, we've got a natural break that happens on comp expense, which is half of our overall expense. But as we sit here today, Jeff alluded to, our employees did a phenomenally good job from home, delivering the markets, the risk management tools that our customers needed. And again, we're very confident in the future of this business and don't want to cut off the investments that are necessary to generate future growth. In terms of capital return, we reported a 9% growth in our dividend in the first quarter, and just announced a similar growth for our second-quarter dividend. This dividend has increased by double digits every year since its inception in 2013. Additionally, we maintained a buyback run rate of $400 million, spending an extra $300 million during the quarter. This additional amount was primarily spent during an open window when we believed the market had mispriced our company due to the eBay leak. We thought it was prudent to repurchase shares at that time, which we acquired at around $92 each, and those shares remain valued around $92. Looking ahead, we plan to return 100% of the capital not needed for mergers and acquisitions, which includes the extra $300 million spent in the first quarter. We remain on track with our leverage target and will monitor this throughout the year. Given the strength of our cash flows, I expect our routine $400 million quarterly share buybacks to continue, along with our growing dividends. Our overall approach to capital returns remains unchanged. It’s worth noting that in the first quarter, we not only spent an extra $300 million on buybacks, but also invested nearly $300 million to acquire Bridge2 Solution, while still maintaining a leverage level of 2.3 times, demonstrating the strong cash flows of our business.

Our next question is from Brian Bedell from Deutsche Bank. Go ahead.

I have a two-part question. First, regarding the data side, thank you for sharing insights on the various anecdotes. Are you noticing any inquiries about price concessions as some companies attempt to cut costs? Second, unrelated to that, can you remind us of the approximate percentage of users who are commercial hedgers compared to financial players in your energy segment?

Yes. I got it. This is Jeff. On data what we're seeing is, the sale of the NYSE, U.S. equities tape is a very mature business, and not so much that there's pricing pressure. There's just consolidation I think in the way, at least, historically before this crisis, there had been ongoing consolidation in asset managers. And that really wasn't as much price as it was number of customers. But the rest of our business, we're seeing this huge demand and has really no price pressure on it, in the sense that there's a rotation away from desktop terminals, fixed terminals. As you can imagine, when you work from home, people are looking for lightweight, portable, easy to access, secure information and that's really a technology delivery issue that we are very good at, because of our investment in technology, because we're prepared to give you information in any form you want it, we've been able to move quickly to fill kind of this new need. I think we're demonstrating to a lot of people that, because we had so much capacity in our systems that on these extremely volatile days, our data was able to keep up and our analytics were able to deliver results, where we heard anecdotally that a number of our competitors that may have had lower prices or people that had moved to them for other reasons, wish that they hadn't done that. And we saw people come back to reengage with us, which was a very warming feeling for our sales teams. So, long story short, no, not a lot of price pressure. Much more about can I get the right information at the right place at the right time, and can I rely on it? And, that's what we're good at.

Right. And just before Ben picks up on that question, the only other thing I would add, as I mentioned earlier, is we're not just selling prices anymore. Now with customers that need the prices and the reference data and indices, and as Jeff alluded to, the connectivity. It's a full sale solution that we have. And so it tends not to be as much about the price of any one element, but how well we can bundle that package together to meet their needs.

Let me address the second part of Brian's question regarding the mix. In my earlier comments, I mentioned some statistics. It's important to note that we are primarily focused on commercial activities, significantly more than our closest competitor. For instance, around 44% of the open interest comprises commercials. If you analyze WTI and Henry Hub at one of our competitors, you'll find that their commercial interest is more than double ours. We primarily serve commercial traders and have designed our markets accordingly. The second largest segment includes swap dealers and banks that provide structured products to these commercial customers, which contributes significantly to trading and hedging activities. Another notable point is related to Henry Hub. With Shell oil production declining in the U.S., the natural gas that comes as a byproduct has also decreased, leading to volatility in the U.S. basis markets. In response, customers are increasingly utilizing our basis markets to manage their risk, more than ever before. They are not only engaging with the basis markets but also trading longer-dated Henry Hub positions, which is typically where commercials manage their risk. Historically, since we introduced our Henry Hub contract, we have focused on this segment. As a result of these trends, our Henry Hub market share in terms of open interest has reached a 10-year high at 46%. We're witnessing more customers approaching us to manage their price risk exposure, which is the fundamental purpose of futures markets.

Our next question is from Ken Worthington from JPMorgan. Go ahead.

Hi, thank you for taking my question. I'd love to continue the discussion on gas. The Dutch Gas business continues to do particularly well. Open interest has doubled year-over-year. What is the addressable market here? Because that business continues to do exceptionally well and it's a high-fee product? And in the resurgence of U.S. natural gas, again, the follow-up on your comments there. We've seen natural gas open interest continue to build both in the futures and options side. Options activity got killed last year that's rebounded. And you mentioned, gas open interest was at 10-year highs. Why is that happening now? The Shell issue has been or opportunity has been going on for quite a while. And gas had sort of suffered while that business was growing, but we've seen a real resurgence. So anyway, could you further flush out your comments on the rebound we're seeing on the U.S. gas side?

Certainly. Thank you, Ken. This is Ben again. One thing we've been monitoring is whether the pandemic will affect people's shift to cleaner fuels, particularly in Europe and Asia, and if it will lead to a slowdown. What we've observed is that it hasn't had that effect. During our discussions with commercial customers, we've noted that the low prices of natural gas and LNG are driving continued momentum towards cleaner fuels in both regions. This has contributed to the growth you mentioned regarding TTF. We are also observing substantial growth in our JKM contract. A significant portion of that market still operates in the OTC space, indicating plenty of potential for transitioning more of that business to futures. Each month, as we analyze the trading volume between the OTC market and futures, we find that customers are increasingly recognizing the benefits of trading in the futures markets, leading to a shift toward that side of the business. Regarding natural gas, we are experiencing similar trends to what I previously mentioned. With Shell oil wells beginning to shut in and reduce production, we've transitioned from a substantial excess of natural gas in the U.S., which suppressed prices and minimized volatility, to a situation where volatility has increased significantly. In discussions with numerous commercial customers, we're finding they are now more eager than ever to explore longer-dated positions. The natural gas basis markets continue to expand nicely in terms of open interest. Often, people trade in those markets as spreads to Henry and do so in a longer-dated manner. Historically, that has been our focus in the market, which is why we are seeing robust growth in both Henry and basis markets.

Ken, this is Jeff. I want to highlight that in Europe, the EMIR legislation is similar to the Dodd-Frank legislation that the United States implemented following the financial crisis. Both U.S. and European lawmakers aimed for greater control over the over-the-counter markets, which pushed many market participants toward clearing swaps and derivatives. However, in Europe, utility businesses were exempt from clearing OTC positions and had no margin requirements with each other. Consequently, when Ben mentions that the over-the-counter market in Europe is active, it's in part because the futures market needs to establish trust, as trading requires posting margin. This can make trading more costly for many. The downside is that your counterparty in these transactions is the clearinghouse, which offers more transparency and regulatory oversight compared to bilateral agreements, where the counterparty information may be less clear. In stressful situations, people become more cautious about their counterparties. Therefore, we view this as another opportunity. We observed a similar trend following the Enron collapse and the 2008-2009 financial crisis. I believe we will work diligently to demonstrate to European customers that we provide a better environment for them to manage their positions. Change always presents opportunities.

Our next question is from Alex Blostein from Goldman Sachs. Go ahead.

Hey, good morning, everyone. Thanks for taking the question. I wanted to chat about your credit business for a second. So, I saw a couple of days ago, you guys launched ICE-Select to consolidate access to a variety of liquidity platforms, obviously, you guys purchased over the years. Can you talk a little bit about how that integration process is going? How are you guys marketing that to clients? Maybe give us an updated sense of what sort of the credit trading revenue for that whole business looks like. And whether or not this is a point in time for ICE where we could see a more material acceleration in credit trading revenue? Thanks.

Thanks, Alex. It's Ben. On the latter point around revenue, I think the way to think about our platforms and I've said this on our earnings call a couple of calls ago, is that the performance in terms of revenue that you'll see will still be very similar to what you'd see in the ATS volumes, that are reported from the consolidated tapes, less than 250, because the execution venues historically have been retail oriented. And where we've been focused is on building out our network and getting established, and getting as many touchpoints as we can into the institutional trading space to really start to penetrate that market. So, let me let me hit the first part of your question then. Our strategy has been to help industry participants solve real strains in that secondary market, secondary trading market of just sourcing liquidity for bonds. It's been very difficult, especially in times of stress, and we saw this in the last couple of months to procure bonds, individual bonds, because it's still mostly analog, still a lot done heavily over the phone. So, our strategy has been to pull together our pricing or analytics capabilities and our execution technologies to create new innovations. And the first innovation, which we've talked about many times on this call, is ETF Hub. And Jeff gave some statistics in his commentary. But we launched that platform with equities in the beginning of Q4 last year, fixed income in late Q4. And we've already had in a short period of time $200 billion in notional trade on that platform. In March alone, that accelerated to $87 billion. And out of that $87 billion, $63 billion of it was fixed income. When you think about $63 billion in fixed income in a month in primary trading, that's a pretty good starting place of the market that trades electronically and on the phone. In the secondary market, where people are going to procure the bonds to gather the basket, and then they go to our primary trading offering to go ahead and swap that basket for a particular ETF share. So, we're seeing nice growth in the primary trading space. Jeff also mentioned that we have a new innovation that just came out, with the ability to customize the basket of securities that are swapped for an ETF share. We believe this is an important fundamental building block for us to further grow our community of APs and issuers that are on the platform. In parallel to that, so you saw the announcement yesterday that you referenced. So, we're very happy that with the announcement we were able to make yesterday, because what that in fact is, it's for the first time we've pulled together all of the liquidity on our various venues. So, acquisitions like TMC, BondPoint, and Creditex, we pull all that liquidity into one easy to use portal for customers to access. We've also combined the multiple protocols that we have. So, everything from RFQ to auctions to click to trade, all into one interface. And last but not least, we've added on our institutional analytics as part of our data services business that serves the vast majority of the institutional investment community, with tools like best execution, and our real-time pricing service called CEP. So now our customer can access in one portal a deep set of liquidity. You have a choice of all of these different protocols. And you have institutional analytics to tell you what's the quality of my execution that I would get in these electronic liquidity pools. So where this starts to come together now, what our vision has been is that, between the primary trading order flow, so that $63 billion that I had mentioned, that we did in March, and our fully integrated businesses across ICE Data Services, as well as our ICE Bonds businesses through the ICE-Select portal that we announced yesterday, that now positions us for the first time to really compete for institutional flow that has traditionally done either in electronic form or still predominantly way over the phone for the first time. And because we're now in that position in the second half of this year is when we're going to start publishing for all of you relevant metrics, the development of our network on the hub, as well as the development of our execution venues as they continue to mature.

This concludes our question-and-answer session. I would now like to turn the conference back to Jeff Sprecher for closing remarks.

Thank you, Kate. Well, we look forward to speaking to you about the company's current quarter on our next call. And I hope that in the meantime, you and your loved ones stay safe and stay very positive about the opportunities that lie ahead for all of us. And with that, I hope you have a great day.

The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.