2024 Letter to Shareholders

2024 was the strongest year in ICE’s history; a statement we are proud to have been able to make every year since our IPO on the New York Stock Exchange in 2005. We generated record net revenues¹, record adjusted operating income² and record adjusted earnings per share². Our net revenues¹ totaled $9.3 billion, up 16% year-over-year, underpinned by our strategic positioning of ICE at the center of some of the world’s largest industries undergoing analog to digital conversions.

• In our Exchanges segment, which includes our futures network as well as the New York Stock Exchange, net revenues¹ increased 12% year-over-year to a record $5.0 billion. These results were highlighted by a 25% increase in our energy futures revenues and a 22% increase in our financial futures business.
• In our Fixed Income and Data Services segment, we generated record total revenues of $2.3 billion. These results were driven by our fixed income data and analytics business, which grew 5% year-over-year to a record $1.2 billion.
• In our Mortgage Technology segment, revenues totaled $2.0 billion, as we continued to make strides with the successful integration of Black Knight and the execution of our vision of digitizing the mortgage workflow from home buyer identification all the way through to the capital markets.

On a consolidated basis, ICE’s adjusted operating income² for the year was $5.5 billion, up 16% year-over-year, and our adjusted operating margin² was 59%. Adjusted free cash flow² was a record $3.6 billion, up 13% from one year ago, which enabled us to return over $1 billion to stockholders through dividends, while continuing to make strategic investments across our business. In addition, we increased our quarterly dividend by 7% to $0.48 per share beginning in the first quarter of 2025. As we approach our 25th year anniversary, we are also proud to announce a significant milestone, having evolved from a small start-up less than three decades ago to recently crossing $100 billion in market capitalization. Together, these achievements highlight the continued strength and momentum of our business as we look to the next phase of growth.

2024 underscored a need for market participants to remain nimble in the face of uncertainty. The record of over two billion futures and options traded across ICE during the year highlights the role of our data and tools in global risk management, price discovery and capital allocation.

For over 20 years, we've worked with clients to build a network of interconnected energy markets that provide critical price signals to inform decision making. Against a backdrop of shifting trade dynamics, we offer thousands of hedging instruments, underpinned by the deep liquidity in our global energy benchmarks ICE Brent, Gasoil, Dubai (Platts) and TTF, each of which traded at record levels during the year.

Investments we’ve made in our global platform mean we are uniquely positioned to provide critical price transparency across the energy spectrum, so customers can navigate the energy transition and meet forward-looking demand. In oil markets, our strong trading volumes were driven by uncertainty around supply and demand fundamentals, geopolitical risk and ongoing movements in Russia/Ukraine sanctions policy, as well as managed money flows.

Brent continues to hold its title as the world’s largest and most traded oil contract, anchoring price discovery for three quarters of global crude. In the U.S., the shift of oil activity from Oklahoma in the mid-continent to the Gulf Coast illustrates the evolution of pricing and trading patterns, with Houston today the central location for domestic crude price formation. ICE’s Midland WTI contract, known as HOU, had a particularly strong year in 2024, seeing a significant endorsement from the oil producer Continental Resources which switched a portion of its Permian production to price off HOU. Continental had previously priced this production as a differential to WTI Cushing. Similarly, in recognition of HOU's establishment within Midland WTI pricing, we saw two price assessment companies - Platts, part of S&P Global Commodity Insights, and General Index - both launch daily price assessments of Midland WTI crude as a differential to HOU.

Cleaner energy sources, which include our global natural gas and environmental markets, account for nearly half of our energy revenues compared to one-third a decade ago. Still, the shift to these energy sources remains a complex, long-term dynamic. In Asia for example, coal accounts for ~50% of the region's energy supply, and the coal switching opportunity there alone represents more energy than total energy consumption in North America.

Record traded volume in 2024 across our natural gas market reflects changing market dynamics around the flow of LNG – including a renewed focus on energy security - all of which has implications for trade, pricing, and the way participants address risk. Against this backdrop, our natural gas benchmark TTF had a record 2024 for traded volume and has continued to trade strongly in 2025. 

Around the world, the way energy is produced and consumed is changing. Built over the past two decades, our environmental markets are the most liquid for participants to price their emissions. Trading across our environmental contracts hit $1 trillion in notional value for the fourth consecutive year in 2024, while our North American environmental suite hit record traded volume. As more programs are launched, we are creating new markets such as CORSIA for airline emissions.

In interest rates, central banks diverged in their policies as mixed inflation, economic data and geopolitical uncertainty increased the need for risk management. This dynamic saw our interest rate derivatives markets trade at their highest volume levels in 2024. ICE is the only exchange globally to offer a diverse, liquid derivatives complex across European rates, with our Euribor and SONIA contracts representing the most liquid benchmarks for European and U.K. rates respectively. 

In equity markets, we saw a cautious reopening of the IPO market with the New York Stock Exchange welcoming 53 new companies including Reddit, LandBridge, Loar Holdings, Viking Cruises, Standard Aero, UL Solutions and Rubrik, helping to raise over $17 billion in new proceeds and representing nine of the top 10 performing IPOs. At NYSE Arca, the top U.S. exchange for listing and trading exchange traded funds (ETFs), work continues to extend weekday trading to 22 hours a day - a move which should make U.S. markets more accessible to investors across the globe.

Across fixed income markets, several dynamics support growing liquidity and price transparency: the rise of electronic trading, the proliferation of data, and a greater diversity of market participants. Here, ICE’s pricing data and analytics inform real-time decision making and critical processes for companies around the world, reflected in the strong ongoing growth of our fixed income pricing and reference data business.

In indices, our pricing and reference data has created a foundation for ICE to become one of the largest providers of fixed income indices globally. Growth in our indices continues to be fueled by the conversion of mutual funds to ETFs and their expanded role in markets. We saw record growth in assets under management for ETFs benchmarked to ICE’s indices listed on Asian exchanges in 2024, driven by strong retail interest in fixed income and thematic investing across the region. 

Customers are responding to the investments we have made in our desktop business, recognizing the value that our proposition offers at a fraction of the cost to alternatives in the market. ICE Connect offers a compelling range of datasets from ICE and third-party sources to target new clients in the middle and back office. 

Growth in ICE Global Network (IGN) reflects ongoing data and technology investments we have made in that business, cementing IGN’s position as the gold standard for an ultra-secure, highly resilient network that is a backbone for financial and commodity market information flow. 

New product launches which reflect our response to a market need include ICE Voice - a single, integrated platform for chat and voice which provides instantaneous connectivity for financial market participants and can aid in firm-wide compliance programs.

In 2024, the U.S. housing sector was stymied by the persistence of high interest rates and uncertainty around their future path. ICE continued to apply its playbook of bringing sophisticated data and technology to markets, to deliver greater transparency and efficiency. For potential homeowners, we’re trying to make the mortgage process as efficient as possible. For capital markets, we’re improving data quality and centralizing access in a fragmented market with the goal of providing better pricing and pre-payment modelling. 

With this vision, we have built a unified network of mortgage assets for the management of the U.S. mortgage life cycle. This spans a life-of-loan offering from the point of consumer acquisition all the way through to the secondary capital markets. 

Combining the expertise and datasets gained since acquiring Black Knight, we have been busy mapping our climate, mortgage and housing datasets to unlock new insights and transparency at a level which has never been possible before. As communities experience more extreme weather-related events, we are using this data to bring clients precise insights into the financial impacts of these occurrences, such as the reaction in municipal yields, property insurance and taxes on impacted and surrounding areas. 

In parallel, we made several enhancements to Encompass - our end-to-end digital mortgage underwriting solution - including the launch of multichannel support for web-based loan manufacturing, and we are pleased to see clients adopt this innovation. For MSP, ICE’s best-in-class loan servicing software, roughly 80% of new client wins during the year were cross-sells to Encompass clients.

We continue to invest in our servicing technology, combining origination and servicing on one network, and streamlining key tasks across loan onboarding, investor reporting and customer service. During the year, new product innovation included our MBS mortality indicator, which taps data from ICE Mortgage Technology and ICE Data Services to produce daily trading signals for agency residential MBS pools, advancing the ability to predict near-term prepayments. As we look to the year ahead, ICE is focused on executing our strategy and investing ahead of secular growth to enhance the value proposition of our network.

As ever, I am grateful to our team for driving these record results - a testament to their commitment to helping clients navigate critical market shifts: whether it be global energy dynamics, fixed income trading, or mortgage sector modernization. 

Strong client relationships are central to our success, and we thank them for their ongoing trust in our expertise, markets and solutions. 

Our dedication to creating value for our stockholders remains paramount, and on behalf of my colleagues, we would like to express our deep appreciation for your continued support of Intercontinental Exchange.