Speaker 1:
From the library of the New York Stock Exchange at the corner of Wall and Broad Streets in New York City, you're Inside the ICE House, our podcast from Intercontinental Exchange on markets, leadership and vision and global business.
Speaker 1:
The dream drivers that have made the NYSE an indispensable institution of global growth for over 225 years. Each week we feature stories of those who hatch plans, create jobs and harness the engine of capitalism.
Speaker 1:
Right here, right now at the NYSE and at ICE's exchanges and clearing houses around the world. And now welcome Inside the ICE House. Here's your host, Josh King of Intercontinental exchange.
Josh King:
Here's a thought, often overlooked, but also probably not very controversial. Our global financial markets are a modern marvel here at the New York Stock Exchange.
Josh King:
For example, in these extraordinary times of volatility with the S&P 500 diving into a bear market down 21.8%, 161 days since this last peak, is perhaps not surprisingly operating really smoothly, like a well-oiled machine.
Josh King:
Here is the NYSE's president Lynn Martin speaking yesterday to Bloomberg's Taylor Riggs, Caroline Hyde, and Gina Martin Adams.
Lynn Martin :
I think the job of an exchange right now, particularly given all the volatility, all the uncertainty in the market, is to ensure that our systems are remain open, transparent, efficient, and that buyers can meet sellers and sellers can meet buyers.
Lynn Martin :
And that is absolutely what you are seeing happen on the New York Stock Exchange. We're seeing record amounts of incoming order messages, buys, sales, trades, whatever the case may be.
Lynn Martin :
In fact, we're processing about half a trillion messages a day across all of our platforms and we're doing so in an efficient fashion. So from our perspective, the markets are performing incredibly well.
Josh King:
Half a trillion messages a day. I was on the NYSE trading floor yesterday at the close, a day when the Dow dipped another 150 points to close at 30,365.
Josh King:
The floor brokers, their electronic key pads in hand, entering their orders for the closing auction, the direct market makers standing at their posts manually and with extreme precision keeping trading in balance on the various symbols in their order book.
Josh King:
That's what you want I think, human beings at the switch just as important when stocks are on the descent and perhaps even more importantly than when they're on the asset as they will inevitably be again.
Josh King:
The same thing is true in the skies above a conflict zone. In an F18 Hornet, originally from Northrop Grumman and McDonnell Douglas, later subsumed into the Boeing company. That's NYSE ticker symbol BA.
Josh King:
The twin engine fighter jet first entering service for the US Navy in 1984, 38 years ago. It's been upgraded with new technology that can basically fly and fight itself, able to hit a top speed of Mac 1.8 and fly at 40,000 feet, delivering 578 rounds from its cannon and a combination of bombs and missiles from beneath its wings that can utterly devastate an enemy in the air or on the ground.
Josh King:
The F18 is starring in a new motion picture. Maybe you've seen it. Top Gun Maverick starring Tom Cruise in theaters now, and immediately achieving blockbuster status after its opening on Memorial Day weekend in which it raked in 153 million in domestic box office receipts. Now surpassing 400 million as I'm sitting here today.
Josh King:
But the thing about that movie isn't the aircraft or the technology. It's like the markets, the human judgment involved in operating it, the key line in the film that Cruise's Pete Maverick Mitchell says to his top gun pupils is, "It's not the plane. It's the pilot."
Josh King:
In other words, no amount of technological wizardry can top the decision making skills of the human being in the cockpit, whether it's 40,000 feet in the air or trading desk at the exchange.
Josh King:
Today, we're going to talk to one of the top guns of the exchange world, Chris Edmonds, Chief Development Officer of Intercontinental Exchange, or ICE as we know it, about technology, trading and the delicate balance of man and machine with billions of dollars of assets hanging in the balance.
Josh King:
For this episode of Inside the ICE House, at least we'll give Chris Edmonds the call sign Iceman. Fasten your seat belts and put your trade tables in the upright position. Our conversation with Chris Edmonds is coming up right after this.
Speaker 4:
Connecting the opportunity is just part of the hustle.
Speaker 5:
Opportunity is using data to create a competitive advantage.
Speaker 6:
It's raising capital to help companies change the world.
Speaker 7:
It's making complicated financial concepts seem simple.
Speaker 8:
Opportunity is making the dream of home ownership a reality.
Speaker 9:
Writing new rules and redefining the game.
Speaker 10:
And driving the world forward to a greener energy future.
Speaker 11:
Opportunity is setting a goal.
Speaker 12:
And charging a course to get there.
Speaker 4:
Sometimes the only thing standing between you and opportunity is someone who made the connection.
Speaker 13:
At ICE We connect people to opportunity.
Josh King:
Our guest today, Chris Iceman Edmonds, is the Chief Development Officer at Intercontinental Exchange. That's NYSE ticker symbol ICE.
Josh King:
He's been with a company since 2010, about five years after our IPO and the New York Stock Exchange. A time when ICE's total headcount was still probably expressed in three digits, Chris will correct me if I'm wrong, and now stands somewhere around 10,000.
Josh King:
And if the company's announced acquisition of Black Knight goes through early next year, the number's going to hover around 16,000 give or take.
Josh King:
Chris is one of those guys who's done everything at the firm. He ran ICE Clear Credit, helping to grow the ITC derivative complex.
Josh King:
He's our SVP of financial markets supporting the active risk management available for asset classes offered by ICE and then became global head of clearing and risk.
Josh King:
He's now added marketing and communications to the mix in addition to overseeing all of ICE's clearing house operations and the global risk management team in his portfolio.
Josh King:
As our Chief Development Officer, Chris, I should say Iceman, welcome Inside the ICE House.
Chris Edmonds:
Thank you for the opportunity to be here.
Josh King:
A lot of aircraft metaphor in that introduction. Did you like Top Gun Maverick? And where were you 1986, 36 years ago, when the movie came out?
Chris Edmonds:
1986, I was about to start my senior year of high school. I remember the movie well, lots of different parts of it. And it was interesting watching the new version because I could remember that far back. Thankfully, I could remember that far back.
Chris Edmonds:
I remember watching that movie and my dad was a Marine, I grew up in a Marine household and I thought, "Maybe this is my calling." I went and knocked on the door of a recruiting office and said, "I want to be a pilot."
Chris Edmonds:
And we had a lot of conversations and they looked at my dad's career and they started camping out in our front yard. And my dad gave me one of my first lessons in what I'll call economic theory.
Chris Edmonds:
He said, "I had no other choice but to go to the Marines and you do. We'll see if you make the right decision." And ultimately I took an academic scholarship and went on to my education. And at some point in time led me into this crazy industry that we live in today.
Josh King:
But you are in fact, a licensed pilot.
Chris Edmonds:
I was a licensed pilot when I joined ICE in 2010. Interesting things about insurance companies and what they let you do when you get certain levels of responsibility.
Chris Edmonds:
So two things that I'd love to do passionately was fly and the other was to dive and both are frowned upon when you have certain sets of responsibilities in the corporate world.
Chris Edmonds:
So I look at those from afar today. I still speak from time to time in certain pilot language and things of that nature. I still love sitting next to folks on airplanes who are pilots and asking them the questions, have a lot of friends who are still very involved in it.
Chris Edmonds:
But that world of navigation is something that is, as one of my friends told me once upon a time, "You don't really know how good it is until you crest that first cloud in an early morning flight and you see the sunrise that no one below saw it and you escape the surly bounds of gravity."
Chris Edmonds:
And it was a lot of fun at the time.
Josh King:
Tell us about those early days of ICE. It's 2010, and I think to help save the company a couple bucks, you're sometimes doing some shuttle service between Chicago and New York?
Chris Edmonds:
We did fly ourselves around a bit to various meetings. And certainly prior to my time at ICE, I did that on a much more frequent basis.
Chris Edmonds:
Those trips, if you will, at the end of the day, were pure pleasure and it was a way to marry one versus the other. And I'll tell you what, we got into that and this predates my time at ICE, but because post 9/11, at the time I was living in Louisville, Kentucky, it was very difficult to get from on the schedule you needed from a small, I'll call it a mid-tier city, into the capital market city.
Chris Edmonds:
And we're like, "We're going to do it ourselves." And if you look at the long lines and before TSA pre and Global Entry and whatever. You were doing all you could to cut out that transport time.
Josh King:
But it also says a little something about the personality of the firm, too. Jeff Sprecher, Chuck Vice will tell the story that before 2010 they would maybe charter a very small aircraft, but fill the floor up with all the books and boxes they were going to take. This is a guy who makes sure that we don't over purchase staples.
Chris Edmonds:
That is correct. And I'll share one story. We were in London once, we had a board meeting there right after I joined the firm.
Chris Edmonds:
And I vividly remember, and I was in London last week, so I was standing on the same train platform from the Heathrow Express.
Chris Edmonds:
And I remember watching Jeff pull away on the Heathrow Express and I'd just missed that train back there and they were waving and I was going to catch the next one 15 minutes behind.
Chris Edmonds:
That was a very entrepreneurial and still is a very entrepreneurial culture. I think the biggest way to be successful at ICE is don't be afraid to roll up your sleeves and go to work.
Chris Edmonds:
And those in our history, and you went through the numbers of our population who have done best, or those who are willing to step up and do whatever, whenever.
Josh King:
Iceman walks into a bar, bartender says, "Hey, fly boy, what do you do?" Guy says, "I'm Chief Development Officer of Intercontinental Exchange." What actually does that mean?
Chris Edmonds:
I do what's needed at the moment. And when Jeff and I sat down about this role, he went through what his vision of chief development officer would be and said, "What did you hear?"
Chris Edmonds:
And I said, "Jeff, I heard don't let the clearing houses blow up and make sure everyone understands our message." And he goes, "Yeah, that's good enough."
Chris Edmonds:
And that was the end of the conversation and we took it from there. And as you and some of the team here know, my job is to make sure no one prevents talented individuals like yourselves from doing your job.
Chris Edmonds:
And that's what I want to stay focused on. This company, as you articulated a bit earlier, with Chuck and Jeff's vision was about eliminating red tape and making the world more efficient, making it more transparent.
Chris Edmonds:
And I feel like I have a job to carry on that legacy. And if there are opportunities for us to enhance that, then let's go do it.
Chris Edmonds:
And that doesn't come without risk itself. It's a opportunity for us to push the envelope. Jeff's told us many times in our history, "I'm okay if we fail, I'm not okay making the same mistake twice. But I'm okay if we fail and we learn from that and what we learn, we use to make the world a better place."
Chris Edmonds:
And I took those words as a very personal mission and at face value. And so far it's serving me well.
Josh King:
So I'm curious what your take is really on the last dozen years since you arrived. One of the biggest acquisitions then ICE bought the Climate Exchange in April of 2010 when you're just getting your feet wet.
Josh King:
And a month ago announced it was buying Black Knight for whopping 13 billion in cash and stock. A lot of deals between those two bookends.
Chris Edmonds:
Sure. And our recently retired CFO Scott Hill, who was my first boss at ICE, I think he said it on his way out that he had done something like 40 deals.
Chris Edmonds:
And this is a place you can dream big. You can see opportunity that maybe others don't, and you have a team of folks around you and a leadership that is willing to support a very calculated, educated decision process.
Chris Edmonds:
Not all of them work out and we take advantage of that. And I think those 40 deals in Scott's tenure and those that we've continued to do is a continuation of us dreaming big.
Chris Edmonds:
And we've said many times this company is about transitioning from analog to digital. And I think the biggest difference between us and some of our competitors in the space is we see ourselves as a technology DNA.
Chris Edmonds:
We compete against folks typically when we are defined as exchange or clearing groups who need technology. And I think if you look at the difference between our trajectory and maybe others, it's really we're processing under that technology DNA and others are clients of technology.
Chris Edmonds:
It becomes more difficult over time as our head count expands to make sure that culture survives. That what's incumbent on the leadership to make that happen.
Josh King:
What first drew you to ICE?
Chris Edmonds:
I met Jeff before ICE was created. Right after he bought the Continental Power Exchange. I was working for a company in Louisville, Kentucky.
Chris Edmonds:
We also had aspirations of doing electronic trading for energy. We were an energy broker at the time. We were going to do some activities with our customers to make their life more efficient, maybe garner some market share.
Chris Edmonds:
Jeff flew into Louisville. He and I had dinner, mutual respect. We met the next day. Similar visions. Realized that we were going in separate paths.
Chris Edmonds:
He pulled off some miraculous consortium based deals that we were fighting for. And the short story is I now work for Jeff, not the other way around.
Chris Edmonds:
But leaving the humor aside, we were going down the same place. And I looked at him from afar and we would testify before Congress, or we would see each other at industry events and a lot of respect.
Chris Edmonds:
And he did it the right way. And I think the biggest thing that I take away from that is he was able to dream bigger than I was at the time. And then execute on that dream.
Chris Edmonds:
Call it a vision, call it dream, whatever the right word is, but I was much younger. I know at that time I didn't have the vision that he executed on.
Chris Edmonds:
I had parts of it and having the opportunity to be part of the journey with him and share that vision and contribute in whatever ways possible has really been a unique opportunity for me and for my family and the folks that I've met. And the team that I work with around the globe. I wouldn't trade any of it.
Josh King:
Thinking about this long journey you've been on, Chris, let's even go farther back. Even before that first meeting with Jeff Sprecher.
Josh King:
You graduated from the University of Alabama, Birmingham with a degree in political science, I think in 1992. About that same time, maybe a couple years before, Senator Richard Shelby switched parties, going from Democrat to Republican.
Josh King:
And I've watched you testify before the Texas House of Representatives, the US House Agriculture Committee in Washington. Most recently the Commodity Futures Trading Commission also in D.C.
Josh King:
You're pretty smooth politically. Did you Harbor political ambitions while you were in Birmingham?
Chris Edmonds:
Growing up in the south, specifically Birmingham at that time, late 80s, early 90s, really there only three visible paths you see.
Chris Edmonds:
You're going to be a doctor. UAB is a massive medical school. Very proud of that, of what they've built, non-medical school related. And they've done really well with that.
Chris Edmonds:
But I thought I was going to law school and so did I have aspirations? Maybe. I didn't know what I was thinking at the time.
Chris Edmonds:
I ended up going to law school for a day. I'm like, "Yup. I'm not going to spend three years doing this." I had seen the business world, sales, marketing things of that nature, and I knew I could get there faster if you will. And went down that path.
Chris Edmonds:
So I have been an elected official. I was elected to the school board in our town in Illinois, and I spent four years serving the community there.
Chris Edmonds:
That fact came up during the testimony before the Texas House that day, so I understand what it means to have the responsibility of the community and everyone has a very defined view of what the future should look like.
Chris Edmonds:
Ultimately your job is to be a utilitarian. How do you maximize the most good for the most amount of people? And the board that I served on at the time, when we finally got set and understood our mission and worked with the district, it still is a very high performing district.
Chris Edmonds:
I have two great kids who came through that and are well prepared for future success and many others in the community. When you're at a high performing place, a little bit like ICE, expectations are high, and they continue to get higher, not lower.
Chris Edmonds:
So that's an interesting perspective for people to not just get by. But what are you doing to raise the bar?
Josh King:
Talking about how you do look elected official in the eye and tell them the truth is really one of your superpowers. Let's hear that testimony in some of the exchange within Texas House.
Speaker 15:
But if it's your contention that maybe IMM made a mistake or if it's really your contention, Mr. Chairman, we shouldn't be wasting money on IMM because it doesn't really matter what they say. All that matters is what Bill Magnus and what the PUC says. Is that your position?
Chris Edmonds:
No, so that wasn't my position. My position was at the moment in time, when the decisions were made prior to the IMM's report at that time, they had a certain set of information. They made a decision. The market reacted to it.
Chris Edmonds:
Since then IMM have had time to come in and do a very careful review of that and they've rendered that. I'm suggesting that at the time, how are you going to define that? It's not a clerical error, which is what we have. It's a mistake.
Speaker 15:
I didn't invent this stuff. Okay?
Chris Edmonds:
I understand. And I'm not trying to challenge you on that. I'm saying there are different moments in time and you're trying to sort out after the fact reactions that people had when they were making the original decision.
Chris Edmonds:
And the economic decisions that they made to serve the load is to the best of their ability and the contracts they entered into it. It's very possible that both are right at the end of the day, but at the moment in time, that was the conversation.
Speaker 15:
When a bureaucracy makes a mistake or makes a judgment, we have the referee over here that we've hired, to look over them and tell us what they see.
Speaker 15:
And they say that taxpayers are getting hit for an extra several billion dollars. You're saying, "Hey, look, they did the best they could at the time. So let's just leave it alone."
Speaker 15:
And I just don't agree with that position. Respectfully, and if you were sitting here, maybe you'd have a different point of view. I don't know. Have you ever run for office?
Chris Edmonds:
I am. I am an elected official in Illinois.
Speaker 15:
What position do you have?
Chris Edmonds:
School board.
Speaker 15:
School board.
Chris Edmonds:
Yeah.
Speaker 15:
Okay. I could come up with some examples that you'd go-
Chris Edmonds:
I get the responsibility. I fully respect that.
Speaker 15:
Okay. I'm glad.
Chris Edmonds:
And if I didn't I wouldn't be here today to try to give you the best I know.
Speaker 15:
Yeah. Well, I do appreciate your testimony. I just very, very strongly have to say that at the end of the day, you shed some real light.
Speaker 15:
You are testifying that it doesn't matter what we do. Folks out there are going to get hit with this one way or another. That's your testimony. They're going to pay for it one way or another.
Chris Edmonds:
It will have an impact on price. Yes, sir.
Josh King:
Chris, you got to have incredible patience to work with elected officials, regulators, for whom watching the power markets is not their day job.
Josh King:
Frame up the issue with this incredible strain on the Texas power markets during the cold snap last year and what you were basically telling the committee?
Chris Edmonds:
So the fear I had when I went down to Texas to testify was really the future damage they might do. If they had repriced power after the fact, and we can talk about the what led to that, and there was a series of issues. Decisions made under the idea of becoming far more renewable.
Chris Edmonds:
Let me give you one example. Texas full of natural gas. You move natural gas on pipelines. Historically, and I began my career in natural gas, historically there's a small compressor on the side of ever so many feet on the pipeline that maintains pressure.
Chris Edmonds:
And there's a little valve off of it that siphons gas off the natural gas pipeline to run the compressor and you maintain a constant pressure.
Chris Edmonds:
And what happened in the Texas freeze, in winter storm Uri, was they had converted all of those compressors on the side of the pipeline to wind energy. And when the wind stopped blowing, the compressors stopped running and the pressure on the pipelines failed.
Chris Edmonds:
And that's why you couldn't move gas to the electricity plants in order for them to come online, heat the homes and give us power. That was a decision made by lots of folks in Texas well, before winter storm Uri. We dealt with the aftermath of that.
Chris Edmonds:
So just as they were having to deal with that during the hearing, had they made the decision at the time to reprice power what you would've ended up with is every single time you're going to have any financial contract in the state of Texas, someone's going to fear you're running the risk that the government will come back after the fact and reprice it.
Chris Edmonds:
Okay. Well, what does that mean? Well, how about if we issue bonds for the state of Texas? And what about if the bond price goes to a place that the government doesn't want it to go to? They going to change that price too?
Chris Edmonds:
And so that enormous impact and change of behavior on a go forward basis had large future consequences that I felt like they needed to understand that what seemed like a very plausible, meaningful response to the great people in Texas would have much longer consequences.
Chris Edmonds:
And they would regret that just like they regretted at the end of the day not having a backup fuel source on those compressors in the pipeline. And that was the debate we were having that day.
Josh King:
So Jeff gives you this job as chief development officer with this mandate to get the company, this message out, make sure we stay accurate.
Josh King:
Another way of thinking about it, based on the clip that we just heard and what I've seen you do in Washington, is you're ICE's explainer in chief.
Josh King:
And I'm curious the way you look at it, whether you're in Austin or Washington or Chicago or London. Why do we have to do this? Why do we have to make sure that a different part of our message is that to make sure that regulators know how the markets really work?
Chris Edmonds:
There are a lot of stakeholders in the marketplace today. They all have very defined jobs or opinions of the jobs that they have and where their responsibilities begin, maybe evolve or morph into or end along the way.
Chris Edmonds:
My history in the markets, I didn't necessarily go to school to become some market expert. This has been a lot by trial and error to get to where we are today on that.
Chris Edmonds:
But the one thing that's served me well is I find these markets to be widgets. There's a value, that value's determined when there's a buyer and a seller coming together and agreeing upon a price under a certain set of terms and conditions or rules if you want to think about it that way.
Josh King:
Mm.
Chris Edmonds:
I've never really thought about the different asset classes. When I was in the natural gas business, I understood we were moving natural gas, molecules and natural gas.
Chris Edmonds:
I had a bit to do with move of the industry into central clearing energy derivatives and the failure of the energy merchant sector on the early part of this century.
Josh King:
That's Enron.
Chris Edmonds:
Enron and many others that were there.
Josh King:
Yeah.
Chris Edmonds:
And so growing up in that process and it was by necessity to get to the point where we could have a much more functioning market.
Chris Edmonds:
You understand that it's a widget? Well, then I take a job. I leave the brokering business and I take the job here in New York to build a similar function for interest rate derivatives.
Chris Edmonds:
I didn't know anything about interest rates and the person who hired me to do that job said, "That's all right. I got a whole lot of people that don't know anything about clearing."
Josh King:
Yeah.
Chris Edmonds:
And then when I came to work at ICE and Jeff says, "Hey, I want you to run a limited purpose trust vehicle," I.e Bank. "And I want you to run our CDS clearing business in 2010."
Chris Edmonds:
I'm like, "Jeff, I don't even think about CDS." And he goes, "Yeah. Someone buys, someone sells. You can figure out how much margin to collect."
Chris Edmonds:
And I think the simplicity of keeping the conversation around it's a buyer and a seller has served us well. They are very sophisticated people in all of those markets that can tell you all the intricate moves and all the idiosyncratic behavior, whatever. And that's great.
Chris Edmonds:
That's not what we do. And I think that sometimes gets lost. What we're doing is refereeing not the value, but the performance.
Chris Edmonds:
And that's an important piece of it because as the contracts expire, mature, whatever the right word based on the asset class would be, those contracts, there are going to be winners and losers. Some are going to win on those transactions and some are going to pay on those transactions or you might say lose.
Chris Edmonds:
Getting to that point in time and making sure that it is consistently arbitrated, that's our role. And very smart people on both sides of the transaction.
Chris Edmonds:
We sit in the middle and provide a very valuable service to make sure that whatever opinion they expressed and the transaction is what is delivered at the moment in time when the value is settled.
Josh King:
So not the value, but the performance of both sides of a contract. You were just in London last week at the FIA's IDX Conference.
Josh King:
You tweeted right before the conference got going that, "We have all worked diligently to increase the robust resiliency of our industry and I look forward to sharing our early progress," was your tweet.
Josh King:
Now, this is basically a story, Chris, that goes back to the global financial crisis of 2008, 2009. For our listeners who are probably not familiar with the topic, can you give us a little primer on the role that clearing plays in our economy and where things stand as of your report last week to IFA Operational Efficiency Task Force?
Chris Edmonds:
Sure. If we go back in time, the role of a bank or financial institution is to provide you or a client with access to manage the risk that the client has.
Chris Edmonds:
And then they'll aggregate that up and they'll syndicate that through the market and that's what creates the capital markets that we have today. And I'm not talking about IPOs, but I'm talking about the trading venues that many institutions are involved in.
Chris Edmonds:
And so for a number of asset classes that typically happens bilaterally between bank and client, and then that builds up a position that the bank has to manage the risk on. And that's again, the syndication.
Chris Edmonds:
What we do from a clearing standpoint is pretty simple. We give them a multilateral facility to do that. And over time, especially coming out of '08, '09 and Dodd-Frank legislation and the implementation of Dodd-Frank in '11, '12, and early part of '13, we begin to open up those scenarios and give a wider point of access for firms to directly engage in that.
Chris Edmonds:
And what we were talking about last week in London was really what we saw happen in the pandemic. So in '08, '09, we have a financial crisis and we realized that at the time the real estate market was opaque, or I should say really more importantly, the mortgage backed security market was opaque.
Chris Edmonds:
There was insurance being sold against it without reserves, credit default swaps. And all of a sudden it all came due at one point in time.
Chris Edmonds:
The MBS didn't perform. Credit default swaps came due. No one had the reserves. There's not enough money to go around. And we find ourselves in a world of hurt.
Chris Edmonds:
I'm fairly certain, and I have just taken a multiple hour movie and made into a 30 second thing, but that's where we were.
Chris Edmonds:
We get to the pandemic, we have central clearing, it's hardened, we've got new prudential requirements and the clearing members, they have more capital. Their balance sheets are stronger, bigger fortress and things of that nature.
Chris Edmonds:
We get to this in the pandemic, and we realize that when it really hits the fan and you have the amount of volume, and you played the clip earlier that Lynn talked about the number of messages, there was a problem industry wide with processing.
Chris Edmonds:
So we're issuing margin calls because we know the transactions being posted to us, but the allocations from the asset manager to the clearing member had not yet been reconciled.
Chris Edmonds:
So they didn't know how much margin they should be paying because they didn't know exactly what position, we knew the positions.
Chris Edmonds:
And so this operational tax force at FIA was really about let's recognize what those issues are. Let's find opportunities for there to be greater efficiency, that we can help contribute that.
Chris Edmonds:
And we've taken the leadership stake in that to make sure that we understand where it goes, make sure that we keep it in our roadmap, but also to provide some thought leadership.
Chris Edmonds:
It's great to go out and talk about efficiency and transparency and all of those are wonderful terms, but what do you do with it? What are you doing with that transparency?
Chris Edmonds:
If it's just because I can sky ride it and everyone can see it walking down Broadway, that doesn't do anything at the end of the day.
Chris Edmonds:
And that's really what that task force from my perspective is really what can we do that if we hit those levels again, that we can be better next time around?
Chris Edmonds:
And I applaud the industry. A lot of folks have taken this very seriously, but we're hurting a lot of cats. You're you're talking about exchanges, clearing houses, FCMs, asset managers, end users, executing brokers, give up accounts.
Chris Edmonds:
There's this long list of things that no one ever knows that are out there.
Josh King:
Yeah.
Chris Edmonds:
That when you do the transaction with your financial advisor, you just assume it works. And most of the time, almost all the time, it does. The pandemic gave us some opportunities that we can be better.
Josh King:
And if you thought there were complexities in clearing and margin calls of traditional commodities, futures trades gets probably exponentially more complicated when you're talking about Bitcoin and other digital assets.
Josh King:
And the always quotable, Matt Levine, writing his daily money stuff column for Bloomberg recently wrote, and I'm going to quote him, "The basic philosophical difference between the traditional financial system and the cryptocurrency system is that the traditional finance is about the extension of credit and crypto is not. That is an exaggeration in various ways, but I think it's essentially true."
Josh King:
What's Matt getting at?
Chris Edmonds:
The crypto markets as a whole are a fully collateralized institution. When you talk about credit you're talking about extending liquidity under certain terms and conditions in order to drive the activity, the economic activity that you may be focused on.
Chris Edmonds:
I testified in front of the House AG Committee earlier this year. And I made the statement at that time that our system, the traditional future system, is a pay as you go.
Chris Edmonds:
So you have a position on, the position moves against you, you put up more collateral against it, the position continues to go forward.
Chris Edmonds:
In the traditional cash world of crypto, which that market's attempting to challenge the thoughts of traditional finance, is go as you pay.
Chris Edmonds:
Meaning you've already given the money, the money's already there, or the collateral, let's call it collateral. The collateral is already there. And if your collateral's insufficient, your party's over.And we're seeing that a little bit this week specifically.
Chris Edmonds:
So those are two very different things. It's a role that we play today, and we are firm believers there's a version of the world within crypto.
Chris Edmonds:
You look at our creation and then continued investment in backed. You look at some of our products that we have trading today, both in Singapore and the US, we believe there is a future. It's not us to determine the value, right? It's us to determine the performance.
Chris Edmonds:
We said that a little bit earlier, and we want to make certain that they continue in a world that we understand today, and a set of rules that we understand today. That's what's called regulation. So we don't need to change the regulation of the world at the end of the day to get there.
Chris Edmonds:
We need to make sure that the products can work within the regulation. And then after some very careful thought, if they can't and there's better regulation than we get to, we'll get to that point.
Chris Edmonds:
That's how we have done that without taking or creating additional systemic risk. Our biggest failures in the financial markets, in my opinion, of when we've missed that mark, we've gone too fast or too slow one way or the other. Financial crisis '08, '09, being a different example of that.
Chris Edmonds:
So I think really what Matt's saying at the end of the day is, what side of the fence do you want to be on? Are you trying to come out and create an opportunity where credit provides that, just think about it, this example.
Chris Edmonds:
You want to go out to a really nice dinner. You're a person living in middle America and you know next month you're getting your bonus. You have a credit card, you want to take your wife out and your family.
Chris Edmonds:
You use that credit card and you know you're going to pay it off responsibly next month. That's extended you credit to go have an experience, right?
Chris Edmonds:
That's an incredible opportunity to go and right now get the benefit, knowing that you have responsibly planned for how you're going to pay for that in the future. Perfect. We're pay as we go.
Chris Edmonds:
If next month you don't pay the credit card, you don't get to do it a third time, right? Credit's hurt, whatever. Massive consequences along that.
Chris Edmonds:
In the world being proposed, in some cases if we were to apply what has historically been the crypto standard to the traditional world, you would never get to go to dinner.
Chris Edmonds:
And I'm not sure that's a world that people, when they understand it, truly want to live in. And it's been easy in a very rising market. That trajectory has been very positive.
Chris Edmonds:
We're obviously dealing with the aftermath of that now. And if you look at the headlines and you'll report them better than I will. If you look at the headlines, some people are not having dinner.
Josh King:
We all want to have dinner, but at some point, the market has to perform in a responsible way for all parties when people's assets are at stake.
Josh King:
And it's not an easy topic to cover in one humble episode of a podcast, but to frame it up, I wanted to play another clip from a movie from our distant past years in mind, 1983's War Games.
Josh King:
And to set the scene two operators of 10 Air Force Intercontinental ballistic missiles played by the great John Spencer and Michael Madsen are given what seems like a valid launch order. But Spencer becomes human in the final seconds before launch, let's take a listen.
Speaker 16:
Sir.
Speaker 17:
T minus 40.
Speaker 20:
Enable missiles.
Speaker 16:
Number one enabled, two enabled, three enabled, four, five, seven, eight, nine, 10. All missiles enabled.
Speaker 17:
Minus 30.
Speaker 18:
Get me wing command post on your direct line.
Speaker 16:
That's not the correct procedure, captain.
Speaker 18:
SAC. Try SAC headquarters on the HF.
Speaker 16:
That's not the correct procedure.
Speaker 18:
Screw the procedure. I want somebody on the phone before I kill 20 million people.
Speaker 17:
T minus 20.
Speaker 16:
I got nothing here. It might have been knocked out already.
Josh King:
So Chris, John Spencer wants someone on the god damn phone before he kills 20 million people. I want you to draw a line between the conflict that Madsen and Spencer faced in that missile silo, and a couple miles away at a farm, a farmer's asleep in the middle of the night with some hedging instruments in place against future crop prices.
Josh King:
And his position is liquidated in the middle of the night because the launch order was invalid or in some ways a mistake.
Chris Edmonds:
I think the War Game movie is an interesting parallel for us to consider. In a world of auto liquidation, you're doing exactly what the airman says. That's not the procedure and we push the button and whatever the consequences are they are.
Chris Edmonds:
Your farmer question at the end of the day, much more telling, because markets continue to move up and down, right? And so if I have X amount of collateral on deposit at some venue, and it's an auto liquidating venue, and I am now under my collateralized amount and my position is auto liquidated on a Saturday morning at three o'clock, an hour before I get up to go tend to the fields, if you will.
Chris Edmonds:
And then I'm up an hour later and the price has recovered and I'm now, actually we'll call it in the money, or have positive equity in my account. I no longer have a position.
Chris Edmonds:
So John Spence, "Before I kill 20 million people," the part here is he can't turn that back. And that's a little bit the story here on these ideas around, we'll just auto liquidate under collateralized positions.
Chris Edmonds:
If you do, you can't turn back. And so now the real economic cost to the farmer to reestablish that hedging piece is more capital they may not have. Well now, what am I doing? So I had it all.
Chris Edmonds:
Now, in a traditional model, they would've had a margin call on Monday. They would've paid the margin call or not, and they would've been in the same position, or they would've had a relationship with their financial institution.
Chris Edmonds:
They understood that because there are physical assets there. There's crop coming out, their buildings, their tractors, their, whatever, right? None of that exists in a world of auto liquidation.
Chris Edmonds:
And so to me that's the parallel that we have to be concerned about because to think that we can always just put the position back on at a later moment in time is not a real world, real economy decision at that point. And I think that's why we've stuck to markets the way we have.
Josh King:
So what is the role of the human being, the person at the clearing house who realizes the farmer's position on Saturday afternoon or Sunday and makes the call on Monday morning to say, "Bill, we need more margin."
Chris Edmonds:
So specifically we're not calling Bill. Ultimately we're calling the member that sponsors Bill and his risk. And it is certainly our responsibility and we take it very seriously to make sure that we're always collateralized at appropriate or more appropriate amounts depending on market volatility and things of that nature.
Chris Edmonds:
And I think the market understands that. There's a bit of a consensus. If we were to call outrageously numbers, the member would step in and say, "Bill, can't owe that much."
Chris Edmonds:
And we would either explain why. We would realize that maybe there's been an error somewhere. All good intentions, errors happen, we know that.
Chris Edmonds:
John Spencer can't have an error. He's got to press the button, right? That's the other airman. Press the button. That's not protocol.
Chris Edmonds:
Here we want to make sure that we're doing no harm in the clearing space. And especially when operational errors take place and they happen, payment systems go offline technology failures, Hurricane Sandy, long list of things that have impeded the normal business as usual environment.
Chris Edmonds:
Our job on the human side is exercise professional discretion to make sure that we're not becoming pro cyclical and adding to the stress of the market. If you're just an algorithm, as great as AI is, we're not there yet.
Josh King:
Talking about an algorithm. Here's a very different set of launch orders from the CFTC round table that you participated in a few weeks ago.
Josh King:
The first voice we're going to hear is that of Robert Steigerwald, the senior policy advisor of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago addressing Sam Bankman-Fried the CEO of FTX.
Robert Steigerwald:
So Sam that's one way of approaching the problem. And I'd like you now to explain how this hypothetical process would work if it followed the protocols that are essential to the stylized design.
Speaker 23:
Absolutely. And I'm just going to put some hypothetical numbers on this and walk through this, stepping back from before there is a margin call.
Speaker 23:
I'm assuming it's the largest participant on the exchange, they have a very large position on, so all these margin numbers are going to reflect increased margin requirements because those do scale up with position size.
Speaker 23:
And I'm going to use something like what would happen on FTX International, separately there's an application related to FTX US derivatives, put that aside. Although I anticipate similar answers to this.
Speaker 23:
So some customer, our largest customer, our largest two but let's just go through one of them to start with, has a position on it is some number of billions of dollars of notional.
Speaker 23:
And let's say that given the position they have on our risk engine assesses an initial margin requirement of 40%, a maintenance margin requirement of 25% and an auto close margin fraction of 15%.
Speaker 23:
And I'll get through what each of these means as we go down this waterfall.
Josh King:
Chris, it's a pretty steep waterfall. Right before Robert put that question to Sam, you had gone through this exhaustive description of what you had just told me really, this human engagement, this mixture of technology and judgment that creates the modern market.
Josh King:
What's Sam talking about with the waterfall?
Chris Edmonds:
So what Sam was explaining there is the way their algorithm works of when to define when an account is under collateralized and how they would behave if it were under collateralized, right?
Chris Edmonds:
And the assumption that is made is you're going to have a bunch of collateral sitting there to hold the position because you don't know how the market's going to react or how it's going to move and things of that nature.
Chris Edmonds:
Well, I probably take a little issue of that because there's not an unlimited amount of capital. Capital has a cost and we certainly deal in a world where people want the right amount of capital but they don't want to just leave capital laying around, nor do we.
Chris Edmonds:
We've become accustomed to a just in time economy and we've become accustomed to just in time finance in some respects. And I think that applies uniformly even across the crypto assets to get that one.
Chris Edmonds:
Would be some supporters in the world that says, "Yes, but we can put a little bit more there." But let's just assume for a moment, if he's talking about 40% or whatever the numbers that he went through in the clip, you're not going to leave 140% of your requirement there.
Chris Edmonds:
That's dead money. You can't use it. There are other opportunity costs that you're missing and things of that nature.
Chris Edmonds:
So he's explaining exactly how the computer is going to identify that you are under collateralized and what it's going to do to alter that behavior.
Chris Edmonds:
And he's, I believe based on my recollection of what he went through that day, and what's in the public venue, he's going to auto liquidate in certain clips until the par value of the risk you have in his world is appropriately capitalized based on his standards.
Chris Edmonds:
And so not dissimilar to what we would do. The issue here is that happens automatically and there's no human discretion. And if the reason that you can't get more money in is because there's an operational issue, you haven't left enough capital there, your position will cease to exist.
Josh King:
The regulators are wrestling with this, Chris. You said Jeff Sprecher said it in different ways at different times that you are okay with new technology. You're okay with new processes, just not one specific technology and process for one type of asset. And every other set of asset gets treated a different way.
Josh King:
Or the slippery slope is that other assets, other traditional assets, start being treated this way. Where do the regulators fall in this? What is their responsibility?
Chris Edmonds:
Look, I think the regulators are wanting to put a good foot forward and they want to show that they can provide for innovation in the system and things of that nature.
Chris Edmonds:
And those are all very laudable goals. We can't have multiple standards and especially when there's the opportunity for contagion to take place.
Chris Edmonds:
And so if you have a standard for a given type of asset class, we'll just say crypto in this case, that then can through certain regulatory pass, be applied to we'll call them traditional instruments, you now have two standards.
Chris Edmonds:
And at the moment in time there's a crisis they will be against each other. And we are creating a risk element because in the world of markets and they are a very needed role in markets, there are arbitrages that are out there. They're going to bridge the gap between those two.
Chris Edmonds:
In the moment the arbitrages do their job, we will, at the end of the day, find ourselves at a point where these lines and these two standards blur and we haven't tested that.
Chris Edmonds:
And that is a level of systemic risk that if it all works great on paper, it may not work great in reality. And we have to live in a world of reality.
Chris Edmonds:
And I think that's ultimately the job of the regulator to determine, can they administer the role of reality how this comes out and is consistent with the protections they've put in place to build confidence in the markets to make sure that individual investors know exactly what's going to happen to their capital, to their risk positions, and in their ability to manage those positions.
Chris Edmonds:
And that's ultimately what the core of the debate is. And look I applaud FTX and others for challenging the question and bringing technology out.
Chris Edmonds:
We can debate whether it's new technology, we can debate whether it's good technology, we can debate whether traditional's good, whatever, that is a very fair debate, and we'll continue to have it.
Chris Edmonds:
And I'm sure that's not the last time I'll be in front of a congressional body to get there. Our job at the end of the day is to make sure the regulators have all of the information.
Chris Edmonds:
I don't want to see a position, and Jeff and I have had this conversation, I don't want to see a position where the regular wakes up and goes, "Oh, we didn't know."
Josh King:
Yeah.
Chris Edmonds:
And that is our responsibility. We don't know everything. We're not the smartest people in the room, but what we do know, we have an obligation to share so we can learn from that.
Chris Edmonds:
I said Jeff let's us take a lot of risk here. This is a risk that you're going to take eyes wide open, and you're not going to give a regulatory body the ability to say, "Oh, well, we didn't think about that."
Chris Edmonds:
No, in the public forum, we've been thinking about this. This is an actual conversation that we're getting to. And I think really what's driving that at the end of the day is the cost of capital is growing so high that can the industry continue to support itself?
Chris Edmonds:
And we can debate whether or not there's too much capital, not enough capital, those are all moment in time conversations based on certain market conditions and products coming to pass.
Chris Edmonds:
Is this a debate we have to have? If I say anything about the history of our company, we've lived in the world of innovation, but we've done it within the regulation that was provided.
Chris Edmonds:
It wasn't we were asking for a separate set of rules that only applied to a certain asset class. And I remember when the CDS problem was revealed in '08, '09 and Jeff was toying with the idea of building the clearing house that's become ICE Clear Credit and run by our colleagues, Stan Ivanov.
Chris Edmonds:
We were looking at that. My mom, I tell my mom, "I'm going to move to Chicago." Moved the family to Chicago. "I'm going to work for ICE, an Atlanta based company. And I'm going to run a clearing house for credit default swaps."
Chris Edmonds:
My mom says very clearly on the phone, she's a retired principal, and she goes, "You can't take that job." And I'm like, "I'm sorry?" And she goes, "Warren Buffet called those weapons of mass destruction this morning." I'm like, "Well, maybe in a previous life. We're going to be okay."
Chris Edmonds:
And if you look at the collateral supporting those positions today, and you look at the compression, the multi lateral netting, the efficiency that was created out of that, great success story, like many others across the sect.
Chris Edmonds:
Electronic trading for commodities and things that Jeff and Chuck and the others that have worked with and preceded us, have brought to the table.
Chris Edmonds:
Not everyone understood it, including the regulators. But the regulation was crystal clear and we delivered on that. And it's a great business for us today.
Josh King:
Living in a world of innovation, living in a world of reality, with all that as prologue, let's take a quick break.
Josh King:
When we come back, Chris Edmonds, ICE's Chief Development Officer, and I will discuss potentially the best steps that the clearing industry can take to prepare itself for an increasingly digital future. And that's all coming up right after this.
Speaker 24:
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Speaker 25:
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Speaker 25:
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Speaker 25:
Available in two row, three row and four by E. The legacy lives on.
Josh King:
Welcome back. Before the break, Chris Edmonds, ICE's Chief Development Officer and I were talking about what's really beginning to shake up the clearing industry. Let's continue the conversation before we address other key issues that are impacting clearing.
Josh King:
Chris, ICE's written testimony to the CFTC, all of which is publicly available to read, is that FTX lacks the financial resources to cover its potential losses in the event of a downturn.
Josh King:
We're experiencing the downturn this week, as you said. Can you expand on this? And what would this mean in practice in the event of a default and what might the ramifications be to society if we could find ourselves in a situation like that?
Chris Edmonds:
Well, we may learn a lot about what the ramifications of society are as the self-defined crypto winner. I think they call it the fourth crypto winner is among us at the moment.
Chris Edmonds:
But the comment and the testimony is really around our regulatory standard of making sure that cover two, okay, that's the failure of your largest two institutions.
Chris Edmonds:
Now we see that as a clearing member. So you're talking about that would be global systemically important banks, or what's known as a GSIB to fail on the same day. That is an industry standard that is well known through the CPM-IOSCO process, has been incorporated in a number of national regulatory functions, both at the CFTC, as well as things like ESMA under the EMIR legislation in Europe and now in the UK.
Chris Edmonds:
And so $250 million is a lot of money. We understand that, that's the proposed guarantee fund that FTX put in their application. Also available at the CFTC if you wanted to go read that.
Chris Edmonds:
And the question is, how do we know that $250 million is sufficient to cover the simultaneous failure of the largest two positions they hold? We don't know the answer to that. Okay.
Chris Edmonds:
And then there's a little bit of unknown around that and certainly their model, I think they would argue, and I don't need to make their position for them, I think they would argue that their automated liquidation protocols would prevent them from ever sustaining that type of piece.
Chris Edmonds:
But that's the part that is just too much unknown. And we have to know whether the CFTC is going to accept a different protocol.
Chris Edmonds:
And a lot of our global recognition comes from the fact that we have the CFTC in this case. And other global jurisdictions recognize the systemic importance of the CFTC and say that they oversee venues like ours effectively.
Chris Edmonds:
And so they allow investors from their local jurisdiction to use our products because of what's called comparable compliance or understandings through memorandums of understandings and things of that nature.
Chris Edmonds:
You start developing separate standards. You may call into question whether that comparable compliance is viewed the same way on a global basis. So there's a real risk around that.
Josh King:
Speaking recently at the Piper Sandler conference, Jeff Sprecher, our founder and CEO posed an interesting question. When he was asked about FTX's proposals for disintermediated clearing.
Josh King:
Here's Jeff's conversation with Rich Repetto of Piper Sandler.
Jeff Sprecher:
On the clearing model, the thing that we've been talking to regulators about is that the entire clearing model that we use, that we built our business around, assumes that there is a third party who is providing credit and credit intermediation to the end user.
Jeff Sprecher:
And in the event of a default, that that lender does the workout. And that lender is a member of the clearing house. But when we do stress tests, and the governments now do global stress tests of all clearing houses together, it assumes there is this intermediation model.
Jeff Sprecher:
And so none of us have ever seen how to stress test our society, where there's an algorithm that does an auto liquidation simultaneously across markets.
Jeff Sprecher:
And that is really the issue for it. It's not whether you can do it or not. Of course, you can do that. You can write an algorithm that's. It's actually easier than the existing system.
Jeff Sprecher:
And I understand why people say it would be cheaper, but does it work? Because products and societies are interrelated, would we just create a global crash with an algorithm? And that really needs some thorough testing.
Josh King:
As we wrap up our conversation on clearing, where do you think this all goes from here?
Chris Edmonds:
It's going to be a very active debate. I believe the regulators will look at the current activity in the market and ask more tough questions.
Chris Edmonds:
I do believe there will be changes that we all as an industry take some advantage of, adopt, things of that nature. I began the conversation this afternoon, we talked about the round table and operational efficiencies and things of that nature.
Chris Edmonds:
If there are operational efficiencies, rest assured that we will make those investments and bring those to the market, but that is after we understand exactly what standard we're going to be held to.
Chris Edmonds:
And right now the debate is about the standard and the debate in the future will come about the new standards if there are so, or how do we create additional efficiencies from the standards we have and what have we learned from these introductions of new technologies and things of that nature?
Josh King:
We had the MF Global default in 2011, which occurred about a year after you joined ICE. FTX has said that its model would lead to more defaults but maybe smaller sized defaults. Why is that not a good thing in your view?
Chris Edmonds:
The word default by itself has very negative connotation. So you wake up and I could see publications coming out and saying, "Today's number of defaults are X and tomorrow's number of faults are Y."
Chris Edmonds:
Defaults in and of their nature decrease confidence in market structure. I think the point made about there will be more defaults, but they will be smaller in scale. We assume that's the case because of the type of customer who might want to be involved in the markets that have been proposed today.
Chris Edmonds:
In some cases they're using their credit card, so they use your credit card and all of a sudden you have no limit left. I think Jeff growing up in Madison, Wisconsin, and me just outside of Birmingham, Alabama, and others on our team, we have a real understanding of what it means to come from the middle class of America.
Josh King:
Hmm.
Chris Edmonds:
And we have worked tirelessly and hopefully smartly sometimes, maybe not so much for me, but we've worked to find our way to that next level.
Chris Edmonds:
And you never forget where you came from. And I think that as long as we keep that perspective in mind, that ultimately what we're doing has real impact on the real economy and on folks who have maybe lesser means than some of us individually, we got to have that guiding principle.
Chris Edmonds:
And I know it's certainly in Jeff's mind and when we think about things, how do we create that? We can't go back and necessarily understand all the individual decisions we made to get here as an individual.
Chris Edmonds:
We can't collectively as a company and as an industry understand the decisions we make to govern where people may go in the future.
Chris Edmonds:
And I think that's an important responsibility we all will owe each other. That's part of how we maximize the most good for the most amount of people or what I consider the definition of utilitarianism
Josh King:
Following our guiding principles, Chris, definition of utilitarianism and that's what we do at ICE. But let's end, if we can, on maybe perhaps a little lighter, perhaps a little more optimistic note.
Josh King:
Beyond all of the other stuff that you manage at ICE, you're also overseeing as we talked about at the beginning of the show, marketing communications.
Josh King:
One of the things that comes with that job is interacting with some of the organizations we sponsor. One of which is McLaren Racing.
Josh King:
Here's a clip from a recent podcast that we did with Zak Brown, CEO of McLaren.
Speaker 27:
From a 30,000 foot view, how does data help you make winning decisions?
Zak Brown:
Data drives all of our decisions. We pull down 1.5 terabytes of data every race weekend. We have over 12 billion data points over the course of a year.
Zak Brown:
So things are happening so rapidly in Formula One, we're cutting edge technology. That the key for us is capturing data.
Zak Brown:
We have over 300 sensors on the car analyzing that data and making split second decisions, whether that's on driver, pit stop, tire wear reliability, how to use our power unit. So data drives all of our decisions.
Josh King:
What's it been like, Chris, managing this very different function device and really explaining too much broader audience than clearing members about the many uses of data like Zak was just talking about like ICE and McLaren used regularly and how ICE connects with people with opportunity?
Chris Edmonds:
It's been a great honor and privilege to get to know Zak during this partnership and where we're going. I think he sums it up really well.
Chris Edmonds:
And for me, whether we're talking about what we're doing on the trading side, the clearing side, or our data business, or recently our expanding mortgage business.
Chris Edmonds:
At the end of the day, data is driving the outcome that you experience. Zak makes the comment 1.5 terabytes for every race. The average viewer of an F1 race doesn't understand that, they just understand is the car going faster or slower? So they're looking at the barometer.
Chris Edmonds:
Zak and the team understand that that data is helping them. Am I going to finish place one or as they say, P1, P3, whatever. And they're going to go back and look at the data if they don't finish in a place they want.
Chris Edmonds:
And find the opportunity in the future to create a better experience for all of their fans, all of their team and ultimately their sponsors.
Chris Edmonds:
And so I think that is ubiquitous across the entire space of everything we do. I can't tell you when I go to McDonald's today and I go to the kiosk and I order a meal, there's a lot of data being transmitted.
Chris Edmonds:
But what I care about is, did I get what I ordered and was it ordered correctly? And I think what Zak did in that clip is really captured the value of that data and how that data helps drives, helps you drive your user experience and the opportunity to create more user experiences on a go forward basis.
Chris Edmonds:
And being part of the campaign with the marketing and communications team here, no one who knows Chris Edmonds would say, "Hey, Chris Edmonds is the guy in the world that needs to go sit here and talk about marketing."
Chris Edmonds:
Okay. I tend to have a personality that's a bit more black and white. Maybe not as compassionate as some would want me to be. And maybe that's a shout out to my family, we'll see.
Chris Edmonds:
But what I've learned through this process of working with you all, is understanding how that piece of it really translates and when I say that piece, the understanding of our message and how we choose to tell our message connects with people.
Chris Edmonds:
And we don't get it right all the time. And that's the greatest opportunity, is to get it right more than we get it wrong.
Chris Edmonds:
And every day we get to start at zero and say, "Did I make a positive contribution or have I got more work to do tomorrow?" And ultimately that's what drives me a bit.
Josh King:
Well, Chris, thank you. Let's get back to the starting grid and keep focused on making sure ICE comes in at the end of the day in P1.
Chris Edmonds:
You got it. Thanks for the time.
Josh King:
That's our conversation for this week. Our guest was Chris Edmonds. ICE's Chief Development Officer. If you like what you heard, please rate us on iTunes so other folks know where to find us.
Josh King:
And if you've got a comment or a question you'd like one of our experts to tackle on a future show, email [email protected] or tweet at us at icehousepodcast.
Josh King:
Our show is produced by Rebecca Mitchell and Veronica Slumpka and Pete Ash with production assistance from Ken Abel and Ian Wolf.
Josh King:
I'm Josh King, your host signing off from the library of the New York Stock Exchange. Thanks for listening. Talk to you next week.
Speaker 1:
Information contained in this podcast was obtained in part from publicly available sources and not independently verified.
Speaker 1:
Neither ICE nor its affiliates make any representations or warranties, express or implied as to the accuracy or completeness of the information and do not sponsor, approve or endorse any of the content herein.
Speaker 1:
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.
Speaker 1:
Some portions of the proceeding conversation may have been edited for the purpose of length or clarity.
