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 ICEs exchanges around the world. Now, let's go inside the ICE House. Here's your host, Lance Glinn.
Lance Glinn:
Each month on the Inside the ICE House podcast, we engage in insightful conversations with business leaders, CEOs of NYSE-listed companies, entrepreneurs and visionaries. We explore their journeys, the challenges they've overcome, and their aspirations to shape the future. You can tune in every Monday on all major podcast platforms to catch these discussions and watch full video episodes on tv.nyse.com and on the NYSE YouTube channel.
Inside the ICE House in May, we aired four new episodes covering a diverse range of topics, including public policy, mortgage data and analytics, the global shipping industry and specialty insurance. We kicked off with episode 469 featuring Joan Woodward, President of the Travelers Institute, the public policy division of Travelers. That's NYSE ticker symbol TRV. Travelers established the institute to actively engage in public policy dialogue on issues impacting the property and casualty insurance sector and broader financial services industry. Joan joined me, Lance Glinn, inside the ICE House to discuss the entity's focus on policy, mental health, and the Forces at Work initiative.
So in addition to celebrating the Institute's 15th anniversary, ringing the opening bell on April 7th, you also rang it to mark the launch of the Travelers Institute Forces at Work initiative. And before we dive just into the details and what is included within that initiative, can you just share the overall purpose behind it and what goals you hope to achieve through Forces at Work?
Joan Woodward:
Yeah, and we are so pleased to be able to really dig into this issue of workforce trends and workforce risks. And so, we published a paper on this, we have lots of educational resources. We're focused on five key areas. One is the labor market. Look, demographic shifts, the baby boom generation's retiring. 10,000 of us every day retire. The birth rate is down. And so the labor shortages that we're seeing in this macroeconomic environment really does influence the workforce, the employee, as well as the employer. That's number one, labor market. Number two is leadership and management. We really try to highlight the stories and strategies for effective leadership in this time of rapid change and uncertainty, if you will. Third is talent development and getting your skillset right for your labor force, attracting, retaining, and developing that talent. Talent is your most important asset in any company. So that's number three.
Number four is employee well-being, promoting mental wellness, stress management, another aspect of holistic employee care. And when you show you care about your employees, they really are highly engaged, and more productive. And then lastly, risk management and insurance, offering those risk management strategies obviously through our workers' compensation program. We have about 500 nurses on staff at Travelers. So when someone has a workers' compensation claim, it's not just about the physical well-being of that person, but the mental well-being. Think about if you go out on a worker's comp claim, you're sitting at home alone and want to be back in the game, but you can't physically, your mental health is really important to get right for your recovery.
Lance Glinn:
Episode 470 featured Julian Grey, Senior Director of Mortgage Data and Analytics for Intercontinental Exchange. That's NYSE ticker symbol ICE. As businesses increasingly rely on large datasets, data analytics now supports everything from customer insights to operational efficiency and risk management. Julian joined Varun Pawar, Chief Product Officer of ICE Data Services inside the ICE House to discuss how ICE is combining technology and data to position itself as a leader in the mortgage technology industry.
Julian Grey:
It's actually a fun, fascinating culture now being part of ICE, because if you think about it, ICE has had this deep experience in data and analytics for a long time in a really kind of intense, urgent way. I mean, they own exchanges, they have the fixed income business, we've got clearing and sustainable finance and energy. And in each one of these spaces, you need to have not only comprehensive data analytics, but you have to have it at the highest level of quality and accuracy as well as with urgency and pace. And so it's fascinating in this own way.
So joining this organization means that not only are we really thinking about how we bring together all the data assets that we have in a really comprehensive way, and I would definitely say the ICE strategy has been really to make sure that we have all of the legs of the stool, meaning everything about the property, everything about the mortgage, everything about the groups of mortgages, meaning the mortgage-backed securities, whether they're agency, non-agency CMOs, and then all of the ancillary information that can impact the performance and value of those assets. So that's the first piece that I noticed that's really unique at ICE, which is that we're looking at things in a really holistic, comprehensive way, that the idea of having deep expertise is commonplace here. The expectation is that the data will be at the highest quality, at the fastest frequency and as complete as possible.
But moreover, what's really unique is the fact that there's a lot of ambition and curiosity around where we go next. Meaning, how do we bring together datasets so that we have even more powerful prepayment indicators? How do we bring together datasets so that our models are comprehensive for every zip code in the United States with zero-day lags when we're measuring things like home prices? And that's something you only see here at ICE, hands down.
Lance Glinn:
The shipping logistics industry is the lifeblood of global trade, moving goods efficiently across oceans and borders. Yet, outdated infrastructure creates costly bottlenecks. On episode 471, Gordon Downes, CEO of NYSHEX, that's the New York Shipping Exchange, joined ICE COO Stuart Williams inside the ICE House to share how NYSHEX is uniting industry stakeholders and how, in partnership with ICE, it's launching a new series of freight rate indices to reshape how the world moves goods.
Gordon Downes:
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. Again, these indices have started to become widely respected. The indexing contracts, for the most part up until now, have been linked to the SCFI indices. 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 NIFI indices.
There are, say, three really critical components to that. The first component is that the NIFI indices are based on the actual moving rates. 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 ship 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.
Lance Glinn:
For episode 472, our last of May, Vince Tizzio, the CEO of Axis Capital, that's NYSE ticker symbol AXS, joined me inside the ICE House. Specialty insurance is emerging as one of the most dynamic and vital segments of the insurance industry. As traditional policies struggle to keep pace with fast evolving risks like cyber threats, climate events, and geopolitical volatility, specialty insurers are stepping in with tailored high impact solutions. In our conversation, we discussed the transformation Axis has undergone since his time as CEO began and how he's positioning the company for long-term leadership in the specialty space.
Speaker 6:
Quite a bit comes to mind. The first was, recall, I had served the company six months before my appointment as CEO. And so I got to become acquainted with people, and I learned quite a bit about the frustrations, the disappointments. Recall, please, when I took the CEO appointment, we were still in one of the best specialty insurance markets in the last 100 years. It was incredibly competitive. And we had missed out on quite a bit of that growth, that profitability. And so there was some frustration that I really wanted to address in our company.
The way that I set out to change our trajectory was first realize that we had an EXCO, a leadership team that needed to understand its responsibility within the company. Ultimately, we had to restate our underwriting strategy. What was our ambition? We had to hold ourselves accountable, but we had to do it in a way that led our people with a level of knowledge and inclusion in why we're doing the things we're doing and what we thought would result from it. And as you point out, we've enjoyed almost 95% total shareholder return in the last two years. We've increased our market cap almost 70% in the last two years. And so our engagement scores of our people, our financial metrics really support our care of our colleagues, but also meeting our clients' needs. So we're quite pleased.
Lance Glinn:
You can listen to these episodes along with all past and future Inside the ICE House episodes wherever you get your podcasts. Be sure to check out our other podcasts, the ETF Central podcast with Bilal Little and Market Storylines with Michael Rankin. Full video episodes are also available on tv.nyse.com and on the NYSE YouTube channel. Be sure to join us every Monday for inspiring conversations with leaders, entrepreneurs, and visionaries. Thanks for listening.
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.