Intercontinental Exchange, Inc.

What is Intercontinental Exchange?
ICE is a publicly traded operator of global futures, options, and equity exchanges, a financial data provider, and a mortgage technology company headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia. It trades on the NYSE under the ticker ICE.

Does ICE own the New York Stock Exchange?
Yes. ICE acquired NYSE Euronext in 2013 for approximately $8.2 billion, making the NYSE a subsidiary within its Exchanges segment.

Is Intercontinental Exchange publicly traded?
Yes. It trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker ICE, and has been listed since 2005.

Who founded Intercontinental Exchange?
Jeffrey Sprecher founded the company in 2000 in Atlanta and still serves as chairman and CEO.

What are ICE's business segments?
Exchanges, Fixed Income and Data Services, and Mortgage Technology, the last built from the Ellie Mae and Black Knight acquisitions.

How does ICE make money?
Transaction and clearing fees, listing fees, recurring data and subscription revenue, and mortgage software fees per loan and on subscription.

Jeffrey Sprecher founded ICE in 2000 to build an over-the-counter energy trading platform, launching electronic markets for power and natural gas at a moment when those markets ran on phones and paper.

The company bought the International Petroleum Exchange in London in 2001, took ICE futures public on the NYSE in 2005, then snapped up the New York Board of Trade in 2007 and Creditex in 2008, expanding into agricultural softs and credit derivatives.

The transformation deal came in 2013, when ICE acquired NYSE Euronext for roughly $8.2 billion, taking control of the New York Stock Exchange, the Euronext exchanges it later floated off, and the Liffe derivatives complex. It was an audacious buy: an electronic upstart acquiring the 221-year-old temple of American equity trading.

ICE kept buying. Interactive Data Corporation joined in 2015 for about $5.2 billion, anchoring the pricing and analytics business. Ellie Mae followed in 2020 for $11 billion, creating ICE Mortgage Technology, and Black Knight was added in 2023 for roughly $11.7 billion, giving the mortgage unit end-to-end origination and servicing software coverage.

As a market infrastructure company, ICE's main footprint is data centers and offices. The company publishes annual ESG disclosures covering emissions, workforce, and governance, and its exchanges host ESG-linked products including environmental futures.

The company's ethical scrutiny centers on market integrity: as an operator of systemically important markets, it answers to the SEC, CFTC, and European regulators on matters of surveillance, conflicts, and fair access.

ICE operates in a heavily supervised sector where fines and enforcement are routine industry events; the NYSE has faced periodic SEC enforcement actions over exchange rule compliance and order-handling matters across the decades it has existed.

The mortgage technology consolidation drew antitrust attention: the Black Knight acquisition closed in 2023 only after litigation and negotiated remedies addressing competition concerns in mortgage origination software.