Benjamin R. Jackson - Intercontinental Exchange, Inc.
Analyst
Thanks, Scott, and good morning to everyone on the call. I'll begin on slide 8. As technology advances and the regulatory landscape evolves, fixed income market structure is transforming. Participants are increasingly looking for more efficiency and are challenging the traditional model. With our comprehensive suite of products and services, our growing portfolio of ETF and index solutions and connectivity to over 5,000 customers through our fixed income service offerings, we are uniquely positioned to address these needs and reduce the frictions that exist across the trade lifecycle today. The first example of this coming to life was the August announcement of our ETF primary trading initiative with BlackRock. The ETF create-redeem process is currently a disconnected workflow, sometimes taking hours, if not a full day, to complete. Leveraging our industry-leading pricing and reference data, portfolio analytics and our execution technology, we expect to bring to market the ICE ETF Hub, a tool that will improve participant productivity and lay down a foundation for this trillion-dollar industry to continue its robust growth. A second example has arisen this past quarter. In response to feedback from a number of large ETF sponsors and index fund managers, we launched a portfolio rebalancing service. The service is leveraging our customer network, pricing data, reference data and auction capabilities from ICE Credit Trade. Some of the world's largest asset managers have already utilized the product, which enables them to efficiently reposition a portfolio against a changing benchmark or to quickly absorb capital flows, while limiting trade friction and tracking error, particularly when those funds are benchmarked to indices underpinned by our leading pricing and reference data. The third and fourth examples are in response to customer demand in the growing area of electronic execution of micro and OddBot trading. These initiatives will include partnering and connecting to third party order management systems in order to streamline client workflows. Efforts are already underway with a number of providers, including Charles River and Aladdin. Finally, as the industry gains additional comfort with electronic trading, they are looking to combine the speed, liquidity and execution quality found in our well-established streaming price or click-to-trade protocols with RFQ functionality. While the underlying technology needs are relatively simple compared to our streaming price liquidity tools, RFQ is helpful for larger trade sizes and highly illiquid instruments. So we are working to enhance our existing RFQ capabilities which already represent close to 20% of our volume, and handle over 10,000 requests per day. And we will integrate this enhanced RFQ functionality into our robust all-to-all execution platform, which logged over 800,000 trades in the third quarter of 2018. And so as we look to 2019 and beyond, we see tremendous opportunity to partner with our customers to solve real challenges across this asset class, and I look forward to updating you on our progress in the future.