RAISE Summit '26 | Stuart Williams, ICE

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More from RAISE Summit '26

Stuart Williams

COO

ICE

play_circle_outline Inside Intercontinental Exchange: NYSE Ownership, 13 Exchanges, 6 Clearinghouses, Data and Mortgage Technology

play_circle_outline ICE-Owned Infrastructure for Proprietary AI: Security, Data/IP Control, Co-Location, and the Closed vs Open Model Debate

play_circle_outline Focus on customer connectivity and ICE as a global pricing engine

play_circle_outline Strategic priorities: compress idea-to-revenue, regulatory engagement, customer adoption

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Stuart Williams, ICE

Stuart Williams

COO ICE

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>> Palo Alto Studio Connection, Silicon Valley and Wall Street.

>> I'm John Furrier, the host of theCUBE here with Dave Vellante, my co-host.

>> Welcome to The RAISE Summit coverage brought to you by Solidigm with support from TensorWave, d-Matrix, and Argentum.

>> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's livestream here in Paris, France. I'm John Furrier, the host. We're at the RAISE Summit where all the international players are here. In the AI business. You got builders, operators, investors all convening here in Paris to figure out the future of AI, the future of our society and economy as AI powers a lot of generation of revenue, but a lot of work still being done. It's early innings. Our next guest, Stuart Williams, chief operating officer of ICE, Intercontinental Exchange. Stuart, great to see you on theCUBE. Thanks for coming on.

>> John, appreciate the invite. It's good to be here.

>> You were on the main stage yesterday on a chat. The world is about data, and I want you to explain the relationship with ICE and NYSE first, because you guys actually own the New York Stock Exchange and other exchanges, and you have a plethora of other businesses.

>> That's right.

>> So, John, I think the way to think about ICE is, we're not a VC that owns the NYSE. NYSE is part of the ICE family.

>> We operate 13 exchanges all around the world. We operate 6 clearinghouses. We've got a data business, and then we've got a mortgage technology business.

>> And really the way to think about the company is that we've built an infrastructure ecosystem that provides the platform both for us to operate a range of businesses on, but also an ecosystem that our customers can connect into and get access to any number of our services, whether it's capital raising, whether it's hedging, trading, whether it's managing your data flow and taking data from us for some of the AI workloads that I'm sure we're going to get onto shortly.

>> Or whether it's managing your way through the mortgage ecosystem. All of that sits on one platform, one infrastructure layer that our customers can access through that network.

>> Since I moved to New York and started working with the NYSE as part of the NYSE Wired program we put together with Brian Baumann, I'm amazed by the breadth of business that you guys have and the innovation mindset. You guys are very innovative and the market's changing and we're in a major evolution mode now. A lot of transformation, business model transformation.

>> Right.

>> But data continues to be the theme everywhere here in AI. We just had another guest on. It's all about data activated for AI. AI is a data business, right? You guys are perfectly positioned. Explain your vision for ICE on how you guys see the data, because also the markets are changing.

>> Yeah, it's a great question.

>> I think we're certainly seeing that flow through within our customer base. There's increasing demand for our proprietary data, whether that's exchange data, real-time data, whether that's the reference data and pricing data that we provide for fixed income instruments, whether that's some of the data that we're able to extract out of our mortgage platform that supports and gives price signals to mortgage-backed security traders.

>> So we're definitely seeing that increase, and we've recently brought to market a number of new data products to really bring to market some of the requests from our customers.. And so, we recently announced a Reddit sentiment analysis data offering where we're pulling out sentiment from the bowels of the Reddit chats that our traders can use as signal into their trading decisions. We cut a deal with Polymarket as well to distribute their data, which again is a new market and data demand amongst our customers. So, yeah, we're

>> seeing—You're not afraid to put your toe in the water and jump

>> in?No question, no question. And that's really been the case since the start of ICE, when Jeff first founded the company back in the early 2000s, it was about identifying those markets that were analog markets that had folk in colored jackets on trading floors with hand signals and bringing those markets into the 20th, 21st century and putting them onto technology.

>> And really it's been about identifying those—

>> you talked about a pivot point or a moment in time where business models change rapidly. And so our goal has been over the last 20 years to identify those points in time and work out how we can bring our technology, our data, our expertise to those markets to help facilitate that transition.

>> I love the term arbitrage. I learned in business school when you're in business school, arbitrage. And I'll never forget when I first started seeing high-frequency trading use the speed of light advantage and get an edge on the trade. And that's good arbitrage. Hey, if you can get a look at something faster. But now we're in a market where there's high-frequency insights. And with AI, there's more and more insights being surfaced. So you have real-time and high-frequency insights. How do you guys look at that as an opportunity across your portfolio?

>> Yeah, look, I think just for the broader understanding of your listeners, the importance of the competition for the bid offer in any market is that if you've got strong competition for the bid offer, that bid offer's gonna narrow. And that is the biggest cost of any trading. Forget the fees that are charged, it's all about the bid offer.

>> And that liquidity is what everybody's looking for to transact with.

>> And so what—

>> It gets smaller and smaller.

>> That's right.

>> Well, what the high-frequency trading community does is help to narrow that bid offer. And so everybody benefits from that network effect.

>> What we've seen recently over the last number of years is as compute improves models improve, our high-frequency trading community is able to take in more data, is able to process more data, and is able to be more certain about where they are in the market. And what that means is that the bid-offer narrows yet again. So really, the introduction of additional data sources, the ability to process those additional data sources, it's really having a knock-on effect of narrowing the bid offer in the market, improving execution quality, and anybody that's in the market gets to benefit from

>> it.So you're saying more data will increase the advantage on that piece? Well, it is. So offering more data makes

>> sense.People are hungry for data.

>> 100%, it

>> does. It increases the advantage, but it also increases the competition, and everybody within that network benefits from that increased

>> competition.That's a great business model.

>> They're hungry for data.

>> Let's get into the technology, because you guys are also very technology savvy. But also you are very secure, right? And there was a debate on stage that you were on yesterday around, well, how could we give our model, give our IP away? Because right now there's a big debate between closed and open models. Okay. And enterprises are going to want to contain it. So enterprises aren't as savvy. Well, maybe financial services are, but you guys are very disciplined and intentional. Share your vision on how you guys look at one, the data IP and the AI IP.

>> Right.

>> So the starting point for us, and it's amazing how these trends go in cycles, has been that we want to own our own destiny when it comes to our infrastructure. So we operate our own data centers, we operate our own high availability, low latency network, which is a global network that connects our customers and our own ecosystem to a range of international venues and exchanges, liquidity centers.

>> And so that really forms the base of our business. And we've always felt strongly about owning that.

>> And the discourse is certainly coming back to the benefit of having that kind of model. So we start off by owning our own data centers.

>> We have that high availability, low latency network, that ecosystem. Our customers, by the way, can elect to co-locate within our data centers with us if they want to have close proximity to our matching engine, if they want to be within the ecosystem where they can access all of our data and our products and our services. And a number of them do.

>> And by the way, that business has grown substantially.

>> It's doubled over the last 4 years, and we're now building new data center capacity to be able to double that again over the next year.

>> You're like your own hyperscaler, basically.

>> You have to be for our ecosystem.

>> That's correct. And look, we're a technology company.

>> We're a technology company that runs markets, runs data, runs mortgage technology.

>> And so that's a key part of our philosophy. And then of course, on top of that, to your point earlier, we like to host our data within that ecosystem.

>> We'll provide it via whatever channel our customers want to take that data from us.

>> But in terms of where that core data is housed, it's within our own ecosystem. And that allows us also, by the way, to host our AI models within the ICE ecosystem on top of that and provide that intelligence out to our customers.

>> One of the things you mentioned earlier about the shifts, you guys look at shifts, then jump in. There's a lot of technology shifts happening now. We're seeing a lot of activity with blockchain, on the financial services tech side. You're seeing fintech come in. You're starting to see large folks look at, okay, blockchain not as just currency, but as an underlying infrastructure. that data is democratized in their model, right? So as you look at some things like democratization of data with blockchain, as you look at the private markets with all these secondaries going on, there's liquidity there that's unregulated. Then you got all these new ETFs coming out. There's so much change in finance. I've never seen this before. What's your take on that? Because you've got a lot going on. How is ICE looking at the landscape right now? What are you watching? What are you monitoring? Where's the focus?

>> Yeah, you've seen us, put various bets down on a number of these areas.

>> We were one of the first to market bringing a fully regulated crypto platform, the Bakkt business back in, I think it was 2017, 2018. So we've always had that mindset of being on the forefront of understanding new technology, new markets. But of course, you've also got to couple that with some first principle thinking about what problem we're trying to solve. What are we actually going to bring that's going to benefit the market ultimately? Because there's a lot of fluff and a lot of, noise and hand waving and jazz hands that tends to emerge around a lot of these new things for a period of time. We're kind of in that phase of some of these things right now, but you've got to boil it down to where can you make capital more efficient?

>> Where can you help customers save money?

>> Where can you make markets more efficient?

>> That's really our focus.

>> And so we're looking at how, for example, with our NYSE digital platform announcement, how we can move some of the US equity market trading to a more 24/7 model where you're not just trading effectively a CFD on an equity, but you can trade the actual equity with dividends, with governance rights, with all those sorts of things. where can we leverage some of the blockchain technology to make capital more efficient at the settlement layer? So this is how we think about things is we want to be at the table, but we want to understand what problem is actually going to be solved and then lean into that.

>> Andy Grove, famous Intel executive, had an expression Only the Paranoid Survive. So I have to ask you guys, when you look at the market with all the AI tooling, you could— I won't say vibe code your way to success, but there could be a new entrant from the Goldman Sachs of the world. There's a lot of other people in the business, not Goldman Sachs, but are you guys worried about competition?

>> Do you guys get paranoid, say, whoa, whoa, if we don't get on this, someone else will?

>> Because we're in a market with a lot of transition. And it's a lot easier to do things. So where's that defensibility? And are you worried? Are you thinking about what could happen?

>> So we have always had that startup mentality in the sense of, you're worried about anything that's going on and you're trying to make sure that you're well positioned to compete. So we've always had that mindset and it's hard to replicate the market position you have on that business.

>> Well, no, I agree. We're building the network, but I think the thing for us to focus on is to ensure that we continue to innovate. We're not resting on our laurels. We're continuing to bring new services to our customers.

>> We're staying at least at pace with them, if not innovating ahead of them. And really, that's been our goal as we stitch that ecosystem together.

>> And look, there's a lot of innovation opportunities out there.

>> And AI, you raised it in the context of a threat, but we see AI also in the context of an opportunity. And as long as we're continuing to innovate and bringing that to our customer base, we're going to continue to add value and attract more

>> customers.Don't stand still.Keep

>> moving. Well, frankly, you got to keep running to stand still. So we're

>> sprinting.All

>> right.You're the chief operating officer. You see all the business of ICE. Explain in simple terms what people should think about when you explain ICE to someone, because it's very complicated for the average person in tech or anywhere that's not in finance. How would you explain ICE to someone? Obviously, the NYSE is a well-known brand. You have a lot of other things. What would you explain? How would you describe ICE?

>> Yeah, it's a good question. So ultimately we're trying to connect our customer base to opportunity, whether that's connecting our customer base to capital on the NYSE because you're a startup and you need to raise capital to scale, whether that's connecting an energy trader to the Brent market, providing the ability to hedge their forward risk as they make investment decisions, as they put CapEx in the ground 10 years out, they want to be able to lock in their revenues and the costs that are associated with that.

>> Whether that's a fixed income trader that needs to get access to pricing data to do a daily mark-to-market, whether that's a prospective home buyer in the US who wants to get a mortgage.

>> And really, that's kind of probably the biggest investment decision that most people in the US will ever make, or even an MBS trader who needs to understand prepayment risk or credit risk on that MBS instrument.

>> So really what we're building and what we're working on is an ecosystem, as I said earlier, that looks at what are the customer base within our kind of markets that we serve looking for and how do we serve them and what is the opportunity they need to be connected to. And I suppose part of that is you can also think of ICE just as a giant pricing engine, right? So liquid markets, we generate real-time prices and people are participating in those markets.

>> Less liquid markets that might only have a price signal once a week, once a month, we've got models that produce that pricing data on a daily basis.

>> And if you move over into the mortgage segment, well, we're providing the pricing and the connectivity for origination and servicing of mortgages.

>> And your core competency is data and technology. You have to be.

>> That's correct.

>> So we see ourselves as a technology company and we operate markets on our technology.

>> Final question: what are you optimizing for this year? What's on your top 3 to-do list? What's your focus for the next year?

>> So what we're really focused on is looking at how we can take the time that it takes from idea to revenue and compress that as much as we can.

>> So that involves internal efficiencies, it involves efficiencies with our regulatory community, and obviously there's a lot of flux on the regulatory side of things right now, and so we're working very closely with a plethora of global regulators on that. And then it also includes our customer adoption. So really what we want to do is look at how we can leverage AI, leverage our technology to compress that and bring to market more products and services for our customers.

>> And just what's the market cap of ICE right

>> now?Because people might not know how big you guys

>> are.So I think right now we're just shy of $80 billion.

>> Not too

>> shabby.That's not small. That's not small.

>> Stuart, thanks for coming on

>> theCUBE.Really appreciate it. Intercontinental Exchange is the parent company of the NYSE. Of course, theCUBE has a studio there and created the NYSE Wired with the NYSE. Again, we're an open platform and we're looking forward to bringing more and more content to you. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. Thanks for watching.

Stuart Williams, ICE

search

>> Palo Alto Studio Connection, Silicon Valley and Wall Street.

>> I'm John Furrier, the host of theCUBE here with Dave Vellante, my co-host.

>> Welcome to The RAISE Summit coverage brought to you by Solidigm with support from TensorWave, d-Matrix, and Argentum.

>> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's livestream here in Paris, France. I'm John Furrier, the host. We're at the RAISE Summit where all the international players are here. In the AI business. You got builders, operators, investors all convening here in Paris to figure out the future of AI, the future of our society and economy as AI powers a lot of generation of revenue, but a lot of work still being done. It's early innings. Our next guest, Stuart Williams, chief operating officer of ICE, Intercontinental Exchange. Stuart, great to see you on theCUBE. Thanks for coming on.

>> John, appreciate the invite. It's good to be here.

>> You were on the main stage yesterday on a chat. The world is about data, and I want you to explain the relationship with ICE and NYSE first, because you guys actually own the New York Stock Exchange and other exchanges, and you have a plethora of other businesses.

>> That's right.

>> So, John, I think the way to think about ICE is, we're not a VC that owns the NYSE. NYSE is part of the ICE family.

>> We operate 13 exchanges all around the world. We operate 6 clearinghouses. We've got a data business, and then we've got a mortgage technology business.

>> And really the way to think about the company is that we've built an infrastructure ecosystem that provides the platform both for us to operate a range of businesses on, but also an ecosystem that our customers can connect into and get access to any number of our services, whether it's capital raising, whether it's hedging, trading, whether it's managing your data flow and taking data from us for some of the AI workloads that I'm sure we're going to get onto shortly.

>> Or whether it's managing your way through the mortgage ecosystem. All of that sits on one platform, one infrastructure layer that our customers can access through that network.

>> Since I moved to New York and started working with the NYSE as part of the NYSE Wired program we put together with Brian Baumann, I'm amazed by the breadth of business that you guys have and the innovation mindset. You guys are very innovative and the market's changing and we're in a major evolution mode now. A lot of transformation, business model transformation.

>> Right.

>> But data continues to be the theme everywhere here in AI. We just had another guest on. It's all about data activated for AI. AI is a data business, right? You guys are perfectly positioned. Explain your vision for ICE on how you guys see the data, because also the markets are changing.

>> Yeah, it's a great question.

>> I think we're certainly seeing that flow through within our customer base. There's increasing demand for our proprietary data, whether that's exchange data, real-time data, whether that's the reference data and pricing data that we provide for fixed income instruments, whether that's some of the data that we're able to extract out of our mortgage platform that supports and gives price signals to mortgage-backed security traders.

>> So we're definitely seeing that increase, and we've recently brought to market a number of new data products to really bring to market some of the requests from our customers.. And so, we recently announced a Reddit sentiment analysis data offering where we're pulling out sentiment from the bowels of the Reddit chats that our traders can use as signal into their trading decisions. We cut a deal with Polymarket as well to distribute their data, which again is a new market and data demand amongst our customers. So, yeah, we're

>> seeing—You're not afraid to put your toe in the water and jump

>> in?No question, no question. And that's really been the case since the start of ICE, when Jeff first founded the company back in the early 2000s, it was about identifying those markets that were analog markets that had folk in colored jackets on trading floors with hand signals and bringing those markets into the 20th, 21st century and putting them onto technology.

>> And really it's been about identifying those—

>> you talked about a pivot point or a moment in time where business models change rapidly. And so our goal has been over the last 20 years to identify those points in time and work out how we can bring our technology, our data, our expertise to those markets to help facilitate that transition.

>> I love the term arbitrage. I learned in business school when you're in business school, arbitrage. And I'll never forget when I first started seeing high-frequency trading use the speed of light advantage and get an edge on the trade. And that's good arbitrage. Hey, if you can get a look at something faster. But now we're in a market where there's high-frequency insights. And with AI, there's more and more insights being surfaced. So you have real-time and high-frequency insights. How do you guys look at that as an opportunity across your portfolio?

>> Yeah, look, I think just for the broader understanding of your listeners, the importance of the competition for the bid offer in any market is that if you've got strong competition for the bid offer, that bid offer's gonna narrow. And that is the biggest cost of any trading. Forget the fees that are charged, it's all about the bid offer.

>> And that liquidity is what everybody's looking for to transact with.

>> And so what—

>> It gets smaller and smaller.

>> That's right.

>> Well, what the high-frequency trading community does is help to narrow that bid offer. And so everybody benefits from that network effect.

>> What we've seen recently over the last number of years is as compute improves models improve, our high-frequency trading community is able to take in more data, is able to process more data, and is able to be more certain about where they are in the market. And what that means is that the bid-offer narrows yet again. So really, the introduction of additional data sources, the ability to process those additional data sources, it's really having a knock-on effect of narrowing the bid offer in the market, improving execution quality, and anybody that's in the market gets to benefit from

>> it.So you're saying more data will increase the advantage on that piece? Well, it is. So offering more data makes

>> sense.People are hungry for data.

>> 100%, it

>> does. It increases the advantage, but it also increases the competition, and everybody within that network benefits from that increased

>> competition.That's a great business model.

>> They're hungry for data.

>> Let's get into the technology, because you guys are also very technology savvy. But also you are very secure, right? And there was a debate on stage that you were on yesterday around, well, how could we give our model, give our IP away? Because right now there's a big debate between closed and open models. Okay. And enterprises are going to want to contain it. So enterprises aren't as savvy. Well, maybe financial services are, but you guys are very disciplined and intentional. Share your vision on how you guys look at one, the data IP and the AI IP.

>> Right.

>> So the starting point for us, and it's amazing how these trends go in cycles, has been that we want to own our own destiny when it comes to our infrastructure. So we operate our own data centers, we operate our own high availability, low latency network, which is a global network that connects our customers and our own ecosystem to a range of international venues and exchanges, liquidity centers.

>> And so that really forms the base of our business. And we've always felt strongly about owning that.

>> And the discourse is certainly coming back to the benefit of having that kind of model. So we start off by owning our own data centers.

>> We have that high availability, low latency network, that ecosystem. Our customers, by the way, can elect to co-locate within our data centers with us if they want to have close proximity to our matching engine, if they want to be within the ecosystem where they can access all of our data and our products and our services. And a number of them do.

>> And by the way, that business has grown substantially.

>> It's doubled over the last 4 years, and we're now building new data center capacity to be able to double that again over the next year.

>> You're like your own hyperscaler, basically.

>> You have to be for our ecosystem.

>> That's correct. And look, we're a technology company.

>> We're a technology company that runs markets, runs data, runs mortgage technology.

>> And so that's a key part of our philosophy. And then of course, on top of that, to your point earlier, we like to host our data within that ecosystem.

>> We'll provide it via whatever channel our customers want to take that data from us.

>> But in terms of where that core data is housed, it's within our own ecosystem. And that allows us also, by the way, to host our AI models within the ICE ecosystem on top of that and provide that intelligence out to our customers.

>> One of the things you mentioned earlier about the shifts, you guys look at shifts, then jump in. There's a lot of technology shifts happening now. We're seeing a lot of activity with blockchain, on the financial services tech side. You're seeing fintech come in. You're starting to see large folks look at, okay, blockchain not as just currency, but as an underlying infrastructure. that data is democratized in their model, right? So as you look at some things like democratization of data with blockchain, as you look at the private markets with all these secondaries going on, there's liquidity there that's unregulated. Then you got all these new ETFs coming out. There's so much change in finance. I've never seen this before. What's your take on that? Because you've got a lot going on. How is ICE looking at the landscape right now? What are you watching? What are you monitoring? Where's the focus?

>> Yeah, you've seen us, put various bets down on a number of these areas.

>> We were one of the first to market bringing a fully regulated crypto platform, the Bakkt business back in, I think it was 2017, 2018. So we've always had that mindset of being on the forefront of understanding new technology, new markets. But of course, you've also got to couple that with some first principle thinking about what problem we're trying to solve. What are we actually going to bring that's going to benefit the market ultimately? Because there's a lot of fluff and a lot of, noise and hand waving and jazz hands that tends to emerge around a lot of these new things for a period of time. We're kind of in that phase of some of these things right now, but you've got to boil it down to where can you make capital more efficient?

>> Where can you help customers save money?

>> Where can you make markets more efficient?

>> That's really our focus.

>> And so we're looking at how, for example, with our NYSE digital platform announcement, how we can move some of the US equity market trading to a more 24/7 model where you're not just trading effectively a CFD on an equity, but you can trade the actual equity with dividends, with governance rights, with all those sorts of things. where can we leverage some of the blockchain technology to make capital more efficient at the settlement layer? So this is how we think about things is we want to be at the table, but we want to understand what problem is actually going to be solved and then lean into that.

>> Andy Grove, famous Intel executive, had an expression Only the Paranoid Survive. So I have to ask you guys, when you look at the market with all the AI tooling, you could— I won't say vibe code your way to success, but there could be a new entrant from the Goldman Sachs of the world. There's a lot of other people in the business, not Goldman Sachs, but are you guys worried about competition?

>> Do you guys get paranoid, say, whoa, whoa, if we don't get on this, someone else will?

>> Because we're in a market with a lot of transition. And it's a lot easier to do things. So where's that defensibility? And are you worried? Are you thinking about what could happen?

>> So we have always had that startup mentality in the sense of, you're worried about anything that's going on and you're trying to make sure that you're well positioned to compete. So we've always had that mindset and it's hard to replicate the market position you have on that business.

>> Well, no, I agree. We're building the network, but I think the thing for us to focus on is to ensure that we continue to innovate. We're not resting on our laurels. We're continuing to bring new services to our customers.

>> We're staying at least at pace with them, if not innovating ahead of them. And really, that's been our goal as we stitch that ecosystem together.

>> And look, there's a lot of innovation opportunities out there.

>> And AI, you raised it in the context of a threat, but we see AI also in the context of an opportunity. And as long as we're continuing to innovate and bringing that to our customer base, we're going to continue to add value and attract more

>> customers.Don't stand still.Keep

>> moving. Well, frankly, you got to keep running to stand still. So we're

>> sprinting.All

>> right.You're the chief operating officer. You see all the business of ICE. Explain in simple terms what people should think about when you explain ICE to someone, because it's very complicated for the average person in tech or anywhere that's not in finance. How would you explain ICE to someone? Obviously, the NYSE is a well-known brand. You have a lot of other things. What would you explain? How would you describe ICE?

>> Yeah, it's a good question. So ultimately we're trying to connect our customer base to opportunity, whether that's connecting our customer base to capital on the NYSE because you're a startup and you need to raise capital to scale, whether that's connecting an energy trader to the Brent market, providing the ability to hedge their forward risk as they make investment decisions, as they put CapEx in the ground 10 years out, they want to be able to lock in their revenues and the costs that are associated with that.

>> Whether that's a fixed income trader that needs to get access to pricing data to do a daily mark-to-market, whether that's a prospective home buyer in the US who wants to get a mortgage.

>> And really, that's kind of probably the biggest investment decision that most people in the US will ever make, or even an MBS trader who needs to understand prepayment risk or credit risk on that MBS instrument.

>> So really what we're building and what we're working on is an ecosystem, as I said earlier, that looks at what are the customer base within our kind of markets that we serve looking for and how do we serve them and what is the opportunity they need to be connected to. And I suppose part of that is you can also think of ICE just as a giant pricing engine, right? So liquid markets, we generate real-time prices and people are participating in those markets.

>> Less liquid markets that might only have a price signal once a week, once a month, we've got models that produce that pricing data on a daily basis.

>> And if you move over into the mortgage segment, well, we're providing the pricing and the connectivity for origination and servicing of mortgages.

>> And your core competency is data and technology. You have to be.

>> That's correct.

>> So we see ourselves as a technology company and we operate markets on our technology.

>> Final question: what are you optimizing for this year? What's on your top 3 to-do list? What's your focus for the next year?

>> So what we're really focused on is looking at how we can take the time that it takes from idea to revenue and compress that as much as we can.

>> So that involves internal efficiencies, it involves efficiencies with our regulatory community, and obviously there's a lot of flux on the regulatory side of things right now, and so we're working very closely with a plethora of global regulators on that. And then it also includes our customer adoption. So really what we want to do is look at how we can leverage AI, leverage our technology to compress that and bring to market more products and services for our customers.

>> And just what's the market cap of ICE right

>> now?Because people might not know how big you guys

>> are.So I think right now we're just shy of $80 billion.

>> Not too

>> shabby.That's not small. That's not small.

>> Stuart, thanks for coming on

>> theCUBE.Really appreciate it. Intercontinental Exchange is the parent company of the NYSE. Of course, theCUBE has a studio there and created the NYSE Wired with the NYSE. Again, we're an open platform and we're looking forward to bringing more and more content to you. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. Thanks for watching.