Speaker 1:
From the New York Stock Exchange at the corner of Wall and Broad Streets in New York City, welcome Inside The ICE House. Our podcast from Intercontinental Exchange is your go-to for the latest on markets, leadership, vision, and business. For over 230 years, the NYSE has been the beating heart of global growth. Each week we bring you inspiring stories of innovators, job creators, and the movers and shakers of capitalism here at the NYSE and ICE's exchanges around the world. Now let's go inside the ICE House.
Stuart Williams:
The shipping industry is the heartbeat of global trade, ensuring goods move seamlessly across oceans and continents every day. Behind every product on store shelves is a web of carriers, freight forwarders, and logistics experts working tirelessly to navigate the complexities of transportation. As demand for more efficient and predictable solutions grows, the industry is turning to innovation, to improve contract fulfillment, bring price transparency and leverage data to streamline operations. But as with any industry transitioning from analog to digital and from fixed price contracts to indexation, there are many challenges along the way. NYSHEX, the New York Shipping Exchange, is working to bring a shared digital infrastructure, uniting shippers, carriers, and forwarders with a reliable and trusted system to help the container shipping industry navigate this journey.
My name is Stuart Williams, chief Operating Officer of Intercontinental Exchange, and joining me today for this episode is Gordon Downs, co-founder and CEO of NYSHEX. Gordon is a veteran of the shipping industry, beginning his career with Maersk and spending more than 12 years at the Danish shipping and logistics giant in a variety of roles that took him from South Africa to Japan and from Denmark to Chicago. I should also disclose before we start our conversation that ICE became a shareholder in NYSHEX in November of 2024, and that our two firms are collaborating together with the industry to create a series of freight rate indices, the New York Freight Indices or NYFI that launched here at the NYSE yesterday.
Gordon, thanks so much for being with us here Inside The ICE House.
Gordon Downes:
It's great to be here. And what an intro. Thank you, Stuart.
Stuart Williams:
So I gave a brief overview of your career in my introduction, but I'd like to hear in your own words, how did your career begin and what first drew you to international shipping?
Gordon Downes:
So my grandfather turns out was a freight forwarder, and when I was in middle school, he asked me to come and spend some of my holidays working at his office, running back and forth between customs and the port with the terminal orders and so on. So you start to get exposure to this at a young age and you realize it's a really cool industry. And then also being South African, finishing high school shortly after South Africa left apartheid and suddenly international trade became much more prevalent in South Africa. The opportunity for a career in shipping and logistics was very, very appealing. So that's what prompted me first off to study maritime economics and maritime law, and then joined Maersk as a trainee back in 2000.
Stuart Williams:
Fantastic. So by the time you decided to launch NYSHEX, you had more than 15 years of experience in shipping and logistics. Can you walk me through the gaps or challenges that you saw in your day-to-day job at Maersk and in the industry that inspired the idea for NYSHEX?
Gordon Downes:
So day-to-day challenge at Maersk was very frustrating. One of my roles at Maersk was what we call a trade manager where you're responsible for managing the vessels. The deployment of those vessels. I was covering the what's called the intra-Africa trades. And you make these massive capital investments in vessels and equipment, et cetera. And then you run these vessels like a bus service, they leave on specific dates and they operate on a rotation. And we would sign contracts with customers when we would launch these services and we would expect that our vessels would be well utilized. And then a lot of times those customers wouldn't fulfill those contracts, or even worse, sometimes they would make bookings anticipating maybe they would load on your ship and then at the last minute, what we would call no-show. And when that happens, you're effectively running a perishable service and the space on your ship is perished. Every time you set sail, you're expecting to have a number of containers on it, and those containers aren't there, they just perish.So it was extremely frustrating working at Maersk, running into these obstacles.
Of course, the way we dealt with it is we would overbook the ships. We would see on average we have what's called a 20% downfall. And so we would overbook by 20%. And in theory, that's great if your downfall rate is consistently 20%. But we all know the flaw of averages. And so sometimes you get it right, but oftentimes you get it wrong and then you overbook your ship and now you've got more cargo, then you can actually fit on the vessel and then you have to what's we call roll cargo. You have to leave cargo in the key side. And for me, what's really interesting, I also spent some time working as a shipper at SAB Miller, the beer company. And when we were as a shipper exposed to situations where our containers were rolled, that was damaging to our supply chain. For example, we would have sometimes container loads full of cans, which is light often put on the ship last. Oftentimes not paying the highest price on the vessel. And so when containers are left behind or rolled, oftentimes it would be our cans. The problem is when you don't get your cans to the canning line on time, suddenly you can't sell beer in cans that week. So it's really damaging for a carrier. And it's of course also damaging for the customers who are exposed to the negatives on those situations.
Stuart Williams:
Right. And who would pick up the incremental cost of the delay there? Would that be the shipper or the carrier typically?
Gordon Downes:
Both would share their own costs. So the carrier, if they, for instance, leave a container on the key side, the carrier would cover the cost of port storage. So the port charges a few dollars, quite a number of dollars every day where an extra container is stuck in port. But as a shipper, the big cost that you have to incur when a container is rolled is you have to start building up extra inventories. So you've got buffer. When a container does get rolled, then you're not running dry on your canning line. So the cost of inventory is actually one of the most expensive costs out of this whole bullwhip effect of inefficiencies.
Stuart Williams:
Now, when you and I started talking about this, I had not had a lot to do with the global container shipping industry, and I was quite surprised that the level of fulfillment or unfulfillment of these contracts. Why don't you share with our audience today, what level of fulfillment or unfulfillment is there on these contracts?
Gordon Downes:
Yeah. It's a shocking staggering number. And just to put this in perspective, most people don't realize to begin with how big the shipping industry. There's 150 million containers moving around the world every year. It's massive. We all depend on the shipping industry for most of the things we use in our daily lives. And of course we all realize during the pandemic bottlenecks what happens when things go wrong. But people assume that this industry works well. It's an ancient industry, it's been around for a long time, but they don't realize that 65% of all contracts are not fulfilled.
Stuart Williams:
It's extraordinary.
Gordon Downes:
It's extraordinary. So there's 35% ... And of course we're talking averages. 35% of container contracts are not ... Well, the 35% that does not fulfill, it's typically caused by three things. So the first thing is when the incentives get misaligned. The second thing is when there's operational complexities and a container that's supposed to be loaded on a vessel doesn't get loaded because something fell through the cracks. And then the third thing is when you've got these service adjustments, and that relates to situations where a carrier might, like I did when I was a trade manager plan to deploy a certain number of vessels on a rotation based on expected demand and then that demand doesn't materialize or maybe demand in another trade picks up faster, and then you readjust your network. And that creates a lot of reasons why these contracts are not fulfilled. So those are the three main reasons why these contracts are only fulfilled 65% of the time.
Stuart Williams:
It's incredible. Unpack a little bit for us the first of those three, the misaligned incentives. What do you mean by misaligned incentives?
Gordon Downes:
So like a lot of markets, you have a contract market and a spot market. In the shipping board, we have the same thing. People will sign oftentimes large multi-million dollar contracts that cover thousands of containers over a period of 12 months, often 24 or 36 months. But then you also have a spot market, which of course is when you don't have a contract, you just go to a carrier or a freight forwarder and make a booking on the spot. And the spot price for shipping is very volatile. In fact, the standard deviation is a percentage of the average is as much as 34%, which is a lot more volatile than most other modes of transportation. And even some of the commodities, it's more volatile than that.
Now the problem is when you've got a fixed contract rate and a spot rate, which is going up and down the whole time, you create these situations where there's in either case, an incentive for the carrier to not load a container. So for example, if I'm a carrier and you're a shipper and we agreed on a contract rate of a thousand dollars and spot goes to 1,500, well I've got a $500 incentive to load a spot container and leave your container behind. And on the flip side, if the spot rate goes to 500, you've got a $500 incentive to not load with me on my contract, but to load with someone else on a spot. So this volatility in the spot market creates an incentive for both parties not to fulfill those contracts.
Stuart Williams:
Got it. We'll come back to that because I want to a little bit just now where the indices play a part in helping to solve that particular problem. But going back to the early days of NYSHEX ... And I believe it's your 10th anniversary.
Gordon Downes:
That's right.
Stuart Williams:
Of NYSHEX this year. Congratulations.
Gordon Downes:
Thank you.
Stuart Williams:
Congratulations. One of the things that impressed me when you and I were talking about your business was the way that you've been able to pull the industry together. And I think very similarly around the greatest way one can be successful in any business is to bring the customers along and effectively use our customers, as our R&D department to make sure we're building something that's going to have a great utility for the market itself. So can you talk me through the early days when you were setting up the business and how you managed to pull so many different parts of the industry together around what you were trying to achieve?
Gordon Downes:
So this is a long journey. As you say, it's been 10 years and we are still very much pulling the industry together. And this is a critical part of our strategy even today. In the early days, of course, we knew this was a problem that negatively affected everyone. So when container contracts don't get fulfilled, everyone loses. When space on a ship is not utilized and that vessel sails across the ocean, it's just waste. So that's obviously a big incentive. People are incentivized to save costs. And it's not like we're in a zero-sum game where we're trying to help one party get the benefit of something over another party. This truly is a value-creating opportunity. So that counted in our favor. And then what we really optimized for is identifying the companies and the people within those companies who were really passionate about solving this problem. And we also knew that this was not a problem that could be solved by any one of the participants.
So when I worked at Maersk, in fact, we try to solve this problem on our own a number of different times. And it was hard to do this because number one, our competitors would look at the efforts we were making to do something new and innovative and oftentimes undermine that because they didn't want this to become a threat. And number two, when we would try and propose something to our customers to say, for instance, let's create a new way of contracting where we'll both be committed to fulfilling the contract and so on. And the customers would oftentimes turn around to us and say, "Well, hey, you're just as guilty as I am for not fulfilling this contract." So it's really hard to do this on your own, whether you're a carrier like Maersk or a shipper like SAB Miller or what have you. But we always knew that if you could get a consortium, a group of people who all share the same goal together and start to make people think together about how you solve this, and everyone's vested in the outcome because everyone benefits, you can accomplish great things. And so that's really the essence of it.
And I think what helped us a lot in the early days was in the United States, we have this regulator called the Federal Maritime Commission, or we just say the FMC. And in the early days, we went and approached them and suggested there is a way for us to solve a problem that they were acutely aware of. And we work with them to ultimately structure a compliance framework whereby we could bring the carriers to our boardroom table and we could collaborate even though they're competitors, but under the auspices of these FMC agreements. And so they get special antitrust protections of course, provided we focus on the topics around the course of the business. But that was a very unique opportunity for us to use a compliant framework to bring competitors together to work on solving issues that affect the whole industry.
Stuart Williams:
And why don't you share with our listeners today some of the platforms or services that you operate today as NYSHEX.
Gordon Downes:
We offer three big products, platforms, if you want to call it that, and they're all fit under this category of shared digital infrastructure, which you said in the beginning of the conversation. And really just to explain our principle behind shared digital infrastructure, we really believe that number one, it has to be valuable for all the members. It has to create a win-win. Like I said, we don't want to be involved in a situation where we're solving a problem for one part of the industry but not the other part. We really do feel that the best solutions are those that pull people together. That's number one. Number two is we're really optimizing for the utility effect. So you build something once and you share the value of that and everyone can benefit for that. And then the third point is just we really lean in on this concept of being multi-carrier.
So for a shipper, one of the big frustrations is that you always work with many different carriers because of course, it's very risky to just trust your supply chain to one provider in case they don't have a ship on a given week or they have some sort of problems. And if you're working with multiple carriers, there's nothing more frustrating than having to go to many different websites every week to manage all your contracts and allocations and bookings and equipment moves and so on. So leaning into this role of being multi-carrier has been very important.
So based on that foundation of what drives our definition of shared digital infrastructure, we have built three products. The first is a software as a service product, which is offered to larger enterprise accounts, typically carriers that helps them to manage their allocations, their contracts, their visibility into how they're performing on those contracts, and a lot of other really cool analytics on top of that. The second component is what we call proactive performance management. And this is something which is really geared towards shippers and freight forwarders or NVOCCs who are managing very complicated operations with offices around the world, different time zones. Sometimes they're working with stakeholders that are not even part of their own organizations like truckers that are third party truckers or what have you. So to have one application where all of the contracts, all of the allocations, all of the vessel schedules, all of the bookings and all of the individual container milestones are all shared across that network is valuable. And then on top of that shared network, we've built in these real time alerts. So if something's going off plan, we are letting the right person know immediately in the hopes that they can take action and get it back on plan. So that's what we call PPM or proactive performance management. And that's more of a subscription based transaction fee model where we charge a fee of $3 per TU.
And then the final product is one we just launched with you yesterday, and that's our NYFI indices, which we are launching together, and we're really excited about that. And why is that important? This is a big trend we see in our industry towards indexation. There's a shift towards transparency, which has been ongoing for a while now, but now the market is becoming more transparent in terms of what are the spot prices. And we are seeing convergence whereby a lot of these typically fixed rate contracts are now being tied to an index. So you remove some of these challenges that I referred to earlier when we talked about incentives. You remove some of those incentive misalignments and you can make a contract where the price just follows the index and the focus of the people involved in this contract can just be around delivering the service that they committed to one another.
Stuart Williams:
Yeah. That's helpful. Let's unpack the indices a little bit now. As market operators here at ICE, one of the things that we hear regularly when we are talking to CEOs and CFOs amongst our customer base is the importance of having more predictable earnings. And obviously markets and indices are tools or risk management tools that can be brought to bear to help smooth out the effects of volatility, whether it's on the revenue side or on the cost side. And I want to just talk a little bit about how the NYFI indices are going to help here. And maybe let's link this back to the points around misaligned incentives we were talking about earlier where fixed rate contracts will by definition vary from the spot price over time because the spot price is a daily market or weekly market at the very least.
So why don't you just unpack a little bit for our listeners. How regularly are the indices calculated? Perhaps a little bit on the methodology. What type of data inputs have you got coming into the indices? And how are we confident, how are you confident that those indices then track the real market and therefore if linking a contract to the index means that that contract will then follow the market and reduces the likelihood of those misaligned incentives that we talked about earlier?
Gordon Downes:
Yeah. That's a very, very topical and important question. And so I think it's important to highlight that spot indices in particular have been around in our industry for many years. I think the first ones started to come out around 2011 with the Shanghai Container Freight Index. And again, these indices have started to become widely respected. And the indexing contracts for the most part up until now have been linked to the SCFI indices. And these are very, like I say, well established and widely respected indices. But what we started to realize is that when contracts are being settled against these indices, it's really imperative that these indices, as you pointed out, really reflect the actual spot market because if they de link, you've got basis risk and you can end up with misaligned incentives, which of course is the whole purpose of creating an indexing contract. So we spend a lot of time studying the SCFI and some of the other indices that have been out there for a long time to really zero in on what are the things that we need to make sure are first and foremost when we design the NYFI indices.
And there, I'd say three really critical components to that. So the first component is that the NYFI indices are based on the actual moving rates. And what that means is the price that a shipper actually paid to a carrier to load a container on a vessel as opposed to some of the other indices are based on quoted or booked rates. One of the problems with quoted or booked rates is that many, many rates are quoted, but not many bookings are made on those rates. So the quoted rates don't always represent the market. Even book rates, we see a very high incidence of bookings that get made but don't get fulfilled. So this concept of measuring actual moving rates based on a container that's being gated and shipped on a vessel adds number one representation of what the shipper is actually paying to carriers to load containers. But two, it's more auditable, more I would say tangible. You can look at an invoice, you can look at a rated bill of lading and verify this is indeed the price. So it's less subject to error or I wouldn't say manipulation, but the risk of manipulation. So that's the first component.
The second component is really around the trust of the indices. And for us, this is a key, I would say point we focused on. When we built these indices, we set out to make sure that all of the key stakeholder groups were at the table. And of course, IDI, ICE, digital-
Stuart Williams:
Data Indices.
Gordon Downes:
Data indices, forgive me. We've been part of this journey with us, but making sure that every single voice was represented. And not only that, but the ongoing decisions that we make are not made by us as NYSHEX per se, but they're made by the stakeholders who are using these indices. And to make sure that the voices of the carriers, the shippers and the NVOCCs are coming together in what's best for all three of those stakeholders versus just being shipper-centric or NVOCC-centric or carrier-centric.
Then the third component of this is just making sure that the indices are widely available and not subject to any economic constraints. So again, when we looked at some of the existing indices that are out there, a lot of them are focused on specific ports. So for example, the SCFI is limited to shipments that originate out of Shanghai, but of course that doesn't help you if you're looking for an index to represent the price of moving transatlantic because of course Shanghai's not involved in that trade. So there's some natural limitations there. And then there's some other companies that offer indices, but they put them behind paywalls. Their services really generated around selling those. Our decision right from the beginning is to make these indices widely available and to make sure we're covering all the major global trade routes whereby a carrier or shipper may want to make a contract that's tied to an index.
Stuart Williams:
That's great. So what are the lanes that you've launched so far?
Gordon Downes:
So we've launched on three big lanes. The first is the Trans-Pacific Eastbound. So that covers cargo originating from Asia, that's China, that's Northeast Asia, Japan, Korea, etc. And Southeast Asia, which is very relevant, especially now as we see the tariffs and shifting sourcing patterns across from China to other parts in Asia. And that's coming to the US east Coast, US Gulf and Us west Coast. We also launched a Trans-Atlantic Eastbound and a Trans-Atlantic Westbound. So in other words, trade to and from Us and Europe, both directions. So these are big trades, relatively volatile trades. And the goal was to get these three indices out there, let people start to give us feedback on it, let's see how they perform in real life, make improvements to that index, and then based on what we learned in the first three to expand this to cover all the major global trade routes.
Stuart Williams:
So those come next, the rest of them next.
Gordon Downes:
Those are coming next, we'll focus next on the other major head-haul routes, so Asia, Europe, etc. And then once we've got the major head-hauls, we'll start to move to back-hauls. So that would be the Trans-Pacific Westbound. So in the world of shipping, most of the vessels going from the US back to Asia are typically light. They're typically loading like commodity cargoes versus finished goods. So we call that a back-haul trade. So that comes after the head-haul trades. And then finally we'll do what's called the intra trades. That's like intra Asia, so cargo moving from one Asian port to another port. So that's how we've broken down the priorities in terms of rollout schedule.
Stuart Williams:
That's great. And if one of our listeners wants to access the NYFI, how do they go about doing that?
Gordon Downes:
It is so easy. All you do is go to nyshex.com/indices, sign up and off you go from there. And we look forward to soon hopefully being available to partner with ICE to make sure that these indices are available directly through ICE as well.
Stuart Williams:
That's great. Give our listeners a sense of the room yesterday. Obviously you and I had the benefit of being here in the NYC boardroom when we launched the NYFI yesterday. We had about 150 industry participants within the room. What was the level of engagement, the level of interest, the questions that arose? Give our listeners a sense of that.
Gordon Downes:
So well, the level of enthusiasm, the level of engagement was off the charts and partly because I think people are excited about this new product. Partly they're excited about the opportunity not just to work with us in the index, but also to work with others in terms of hedging solutions. But I think the overarching theme behind all of this is there is so much uncertainty in global supply chain. It's always been a volatile industry, and we talked about the volatility being 34% of the standard deviation as percentage of average. But with the shifting tariffs and the implications of what that means for sourcing patterns, what that means for the carriers and their ability to run their service networks, there is so much uncertainty. So bringing together a group of 150 leaders from across the industry, putting them in an environment where not only can they talk with one another about how are they all adapting to these changes, but to be able to present new solutions to some of these problems that they're acutely focused on right now truly was an inspiration. So we got a lot of engagement and of course doing it here at the New York Stock Exchange. What a great venue to do, something as fantastic as that.
Stuart Williams:
It's pretty special. So looking ahead, Gordon, it seems that greater adoption of technology and data and pricing and hedging tools could go a long way to reducing volatility and improving predictability in this really important market. You made the point that so much of what we buy every day that we interact with has at some point in the value chain, spent some time on a vessel working its way around the world. So it's an important industry having a more predictable and less volatile market benefits pretty much everybody. Describe your dream end and state, or at least a dream medium term state for the industry and what kind of benefit that brings both for the industry itself, but also for the consumer at the end of the chain.
Gordon Downes:
So that really makes me so excited just thinking about what the future could be. Again, working in this industry for so many years and running into all these problems and the frustration that it causes is so frustrating that it's refreshing to take a look out into the horizon and to see all the opportunities that we have as an industry. So the medium term solution ... And this is actually not that far off. Is a world whereby if I'm a shipper and I want to have a contract whereby I'm following the spot market, I can make an indexing contract and I can get the benefit of that. If I'm a shipper or even a carrier and I want a contract that's going to perform, but is fixed rate, typically that's been very difficult for the reasons we talked about with the fluctuating spot prices and the incentives that it creates compared to the contract prices. But hopefully in the not too distant future, you'll be able to use a financial instrument to be able to hedge that.
So if I'm a carrier, I can have the benefit of a high performing index rate floating contract, but I can also use a financial instrument to remove the volatility in my price And get the benefit of a fixed rate. And then that allows me, if I'm a carrier to make investments in my assets because I don't have to worry about whether or not my business is going to make the necessary returns to justify these investments. Maybe I can get a lower lending cost. Maybe I can use the futures prices to start to get a better read on what the demand might be to make investments ahead of time. Because of course, we all know that investing in container shipping has a long time horizon. It takes three years to build a new ship. So the more we can start to see forward and future price data, the more people can make informed decisions and the more we can balance supply and demand.
And that goes back to the second part of your question. How does this benefit the consumer? A better functioning supply chain, better functioning shipping market is going to make supply chains more reliable. It's going to result in fewer empty shelves. It's going to result in easier financing for companies that are looking to raise capital to invest in not just new ships, but also in new sourcing locations, new product types, et cetera. So there is so much downstream benefit from this. But I go back to for the practitioners in this industry, one of the most frustrating things is the fact that you sign all these contracts and they don't get fulfilled and you've got to go sit down with your customer and renegotiate it and it strains the relationship. It creates an enormous amount of workload. If we can remove that relationship strain, if we can remove a lot of that workload, the quality of life of people in this industry goes up. And I think about a lot because I can empathize having worked in this industry for so long.
Stuart Williams:
Right. Right. You make a good point. As part of that answer, you said that markets can provide those short-term price signals that help to quickly and more efficiently improve or remove the supply-demand imbalances. And then of course those long-term signals that help make informed decisions around capital allocation. This is a big benefit for the industry if you can get it right,
Gordon Downes:
100%.
Stuart Williams:
And if we can get the industry to adopt, I think there's a real upside here. So Gordon, you mentioned ... Was it your dad or your grandfather was a freight forwarder?
Gordon Downes:
Grandfather. Yes.
Stuart Williams:
Grandfather. Should we assume there's a Downs Junior making its way up in the Downs household that is going to be following into the shipping industry?
Gordon Downes:
Yeah. I would love to think so. My son is committed to becoming the Messi of his generation, but if that doesn't work out for him, then I'm going to definitely steer him towards shipping.
Stuart Williams:
Shipping. We'll keep an eye out for the Messi of the future generations with the Downs on his back, but if not, we look forward to welcoming the Downs Junior into the shipping industry. Gordon, before we wrap, we mentioned earlier it's NYSHEX's 10th anniversary.
Gordon Downes:
That's right.
Stuart Williams:
And as you look forward, you and your leadership team look forward into the next 10 years, what are you thinking about in terms of how you continue to grow your business and support the industry and what's in the pipeline for the next few years for NYSHEX?
Gordon Downes:
So in the short term, one of the things that is so exciting is AI. Not to go too deep into this, and I know there's a lot of hype around it, but we've been blown away by how we can use AI to accelerate some of our developments and how to add value. I'll just give you one super quick example. We've been working a lot with our shippers to figure out what causes contracts not to be fulfilled. One of the causes, albeit not the biggest cause is when documents don't make it in time to the carrier to allow a loading. That could be a VGM certificate, which stands for verified gross mass, which is needed to make sure a container is not overweight before you put it on a crane and potentially hurt someone because it's overweight. And when those VGM certificates don't make it in time to the carrier, a container doesn't get loaded. And it's actually really important to be able to keep track of those documents. And before AI trying to build a solution to keep track of these documents requires humans to say, yes, this document was received, and it's a lot of work.
But using AI, it's made it so much easier to just upload a whole swath of documents and the AI can read through those documents and say, yes, the VGM was there. Yes, it's correct. Yes, it was on time. So that's just one example. And I'm so excited to see how many more applications we can bring with AI to the shipping and logistics business.
And then also working more closely on the financing side. I think that the opportunity not just to work with ICE, to build out the financial markets so that hedging swaps and options and futures make this industry more efficient and all those things, but also to potentially work in the ocean freight payment settlement space is a huge opportunity for us to create value there. Another startling fact, but roughly one in every three shipping invoices gets disputed. So if we can start to solve some of those problems around the root causes of why invoices are being disputed and try and improve the payment flows so that you have less stale sales outstanding, there's just efficiency to be gained all the way this process here. So we're excited to go after and use this concept of shared digital infrastructure to solve some of these problems, which is so hard to solve as an individual carrier or shipper or freight forwarder in this space.
Stuart Williams:
That's great. Gordon sounds like you've got your plate full for the next decade.
Gordon Downes:
Definitely do.
Stuart Williams:
So we wish you all the best with that, and there's no question in our minds that technology and data and price transparency are the way of the future for this industry, and we wish you the best of luck as you bring that to the industry and bring the industry along, making it efficient for the industry, but also for all of the consumers that sit at the end of that chain. So Gordon, really appreciate you spending time with us today, and we look forward to continuing to work together with you in the broader industry.
Gordon Downes:
Likewise. Absolute pleasure.
Speaker 1:
That's our conversation for this week. Remember to rate, review and subscribe wherever you listen and follow us on X at ICE House podcast. From the New York Stock Exchange, we'll talk to you again next week. Inside the ICE House.
Information contained in this podcast was obtained in part from publicly available sources and not independently verified. Neither ICE nor its affiliates make any representations or warranties expressed or implied as to the accuracy or completeness of the information, and do not sponsor, approve or endorse any of the content herein, all of which is presented solely for informational and educational purposes. Nothing herein constitutes an offer to sell a solicitation of an offer to buy any security or a recommendation of any security or trading practice. Some portions of the preceding conversation may have been edited for the purpose of length or clarity.
