The acquisition of Black Knight is a key strategic move, establishing a life-of-loan platform and strengthening the overall ecosystem for consumer credit. While it increases revenue, it also significantly impacts operating expenses and requires careful integration.

ICE is focusing on expanding its data, technology, connectivity and other workflow tools, and is actively pursuing acquisitions and strategic relationships to strengthen its competitive position globally. This strategy aims to address the rising demand for transparency and efficiency in financial markets.

ICE is increasing its portion of recurring revenues from 34% in 2014 to 52% in 2024. These recurring revenues include data services, listings and various mortgage technology solutions.

Management emphasizes the importance of integrating acquisitions and managing capital allocation to enhance stockholder value, as measured by return on invested capital, earnings accretion and cash flow growth. This indicates a focus on efficient capital deployment and value creation.

Management is providing customers risk management tools to meet carbon cap and trade program requirements and renewable fuel standards. Increasingly, market participants are turning to our global environmental markets to help navigate and manage risk related to climate change, the energy transition and the move to net zero emissions.

Management is focused on supporting inclusion and belonging across our broader employee population and the representation of diverse experiences and perspectives on our Board of Directors. We hold ourselves accountable via periodic data reporting to senior management, data reporting to our Board of Directors, and transparency in reporting data to our stakeholders via our annual Sustainability Report, including Equal Employment Opportunity, or EEO-1 data.

ICE's role in the global financial system positions it at a greater risk for cyberattacks, cyberterrorism and other cybersecurity risks. The company's systems and those of its third-party service providers are vulnerable to cyberattacks, hacking and other cybersecurity risks, which could result in wrongful manipulation, disclosure, destruction, or use of information.

ICE and its clients are subject to extensive legislation and regulatory scrutiny, and the company faces the risk of changes to its regulatory environment and business in the future. Our compliance and risk management methods, as well as our fulfillment of our regulatory obligations, may not be effective, which could lead to enforcement actions by our regulators or other legal proceedings.

Ongoing impacts and uncertainty following the U.K.'s exit from the EU, commonly referred to as Brexit, could adversely impact ICE's business, results of operations and financial condition.

ICE faces intense competition, and if we fail to keep up with rapid changes in technology and client preferences, it could negatively impact our competitive position.

Our proprietary systems are built using state-of-the-art technology and are designed to support our customers' workflows across the networks we operate. We employ a significant number of employees in technology-related activities.

We operate multiple trading venues, including 13 regulated exchanges, as well as 6 clearing houses, which are strategically positioned in major market centers around the world, including the U.S., U.K., EU, Canada, Asia Pacific and the Middle East.

Technology and communications expenses increased by $114 million in 2024 from 2023, primarily due to hardware and software support costs and data services expenses, mainly at Black Knight, combined with rising revenues on certain products causing an increase in our revenue share.

We regularly evaluate our existing operations, service capacity and business efficiencies and, as a result of such evaluations, we may undertake strategic initiatives outside of and within our businesses. We may not be successful in executing on our strategies to support our growth organically or through acquisitions, other investments or strategic alliances.

We expect to continue to develop our exchange technologies. We also expect to continue to invest in mortgage technology to streamline and automate more workflows and build new capabilities. Finally, we expect to add content and build new analytics to enable further electronification in fixed income markets.

Our emerging technology initiatives under development and the use of artificial intelligence in certain of our existing products may be unsuccessful and may give rise to various risks, which could adversely affect our business, reputation or operating results.

We leverage our customer relationships, global distribution, technology infrastructure and software development capabilities to diversify our products and services. We are continually developing, evaluating and testing new products to better serve our client base.

We expect to continue to invest in improving our data distribution and software services to meet the needs of our customers and improve their trading and connectivity experience by reducing latency, improving security and providing the most relevant information and data.

We were an early consolidator in global markets and we intend to continue to explore and pursue acquisitions and other strategic opportunities to strengthen our competitive position globally, broaden our product offerings and services and support the growth of our company while enhancing stockholder value as measured by return on invested capital, earnings accretion and cash flow growth.

We used the net proceeds of our senior notes due in 2025, 2027, 2029 and 2062, or collectively, the Notes, together with the issuance of commercial paper, cash on hand and borrowings under the Term Loan, to finance the cash portion of the purchase price for Black Knight.

During 2024, we paid cash dividends of $1.80 per share of our common stock in the aggregate, including quarterly dividends of $0.45 per share, for an aggregate payout of $1.0 billion, which includes the payment of dividend equivalents on unvested employee restricted stock units.

To promote our business objectives, we are focused on supporting inclusion and belonging across our broader employee population and the representation of diverse experiences and perspectives on our Board of Directors.

From cybersecurity to operational resiliency to regulatory compliance, risk management is at the heart of how we operate.

We are addressing our impact on the climate, the climate's impact on our business and our opportunities to support a broader sustainability impact through our products and services.

Global economic, political and financial market events or conditions have at times in the past negatively impacted and may in the future negatively impact our business.

Our business is subject to the impact of interest rate and inflation levels and volatility and financial markets volatility, which are caused by conditions that are beyond our control.

The market and mortgage data subscriptions and trading volumes in our markets could decline substantially if our market participants reduce their level of spending or trading activity for any reason.