Benjamin Jackson
President at Intercontinental Exchange
Thank you, Warren, and thank you, all, for joining us this morning. Please turn to Slide 9.
We are pleased to report another record year for ICE. Our strong 2023 results were in part driven by a dynamic macroeconomic environment. But more importantly, underpinning that performance are long-term secular tailwinds that will continue to drive growth across asset classes in a variety of macroeconomic environments.
Across our energy markets the depth and breadth of our global platform not only drove records across volumes and revenues in 2023, but it positions us well to capture secular tailwinds across our energy complex, including the globalization of natural gas and the clean energy transition. In our oil markets, we've invested in building a global platform that positions us well to provide the critical price transparency across the energy spectrum that will help enable participants to navigate the clean energy transition. Most recently, ICE's Brent benchmark underwent its latest evolution with the addition of Midland WTI into the Brent basket. This latest evolution contributed to record Brent volumes in 2023, surpassing the record last set in 2021 and demonstrating that the market depends on its ability to reflect global fundamentals. At the same time, our WTI contract reached record volumes and continues to gain share.
In addition, as trade dynamics evolve and become increasingly complex, customers are not only seeking liquidity in the major global benchmarks, but also in products that provide greater hedging precision. This trend is illustrated by the record trading activity in our other crude and refined products in 2023, with volumes up 35% year-over-year. This strong performance has carried into 2024 with January ADV surpassing the record last set in March of 2020, and at the same time, Open Interest is up 36%.
In our natural gas markets, we've adopted a similar playbook, building a global platform that spans benchmarks across North America, Europe, and Asia. As energy supply chains evolve and globalize, the quality of our expansive range of benchmarks is evident, with our global gas business delivering record revenues in 2023 increasing 44% year-over-year. This strong performance was led by record volumes and participation in our TTF benchmark contract, which we have positioned as the Brent of natural gas and plays a critical role in providing global natural gas price signals.
A similar dynamic is playing out in our Asian JKM complex with volumes up 17% in 2023 and continued participation growth, including our highest fourth quarter ever. In addition, we continue to see robust Open Interest trends through January, including record total gas Open Interest of nearly 38 million lots on January 25, surpassing the record set in 2012. This strength continues to underscore the significance of our contracts to the price formation of global natural gas.
We were also early to diversify into environmentals, recognizing the importance of carbon price transparency over a decade ago. As we look out over the longer term, governments, corporates, and market participants remain committed to environmental policy to reduce carbon emissions. As such, valuing externalities such as placing a price on pollution, carbon-free electricity as well as carbon sequestration and storage will continue to increase in importance. This is illustrated by continued growth in active market participants up double-digits in the fourth quarter. At the same time, 2023 marked another record year in our North American environmental markets with volumes up 7% year-over-year. Importantly, because ICE has one of the largest networks of environmental products to value such externalities across the carbon cycle, this is a growth trend that we are uniquely positioned to capture.
In summary, the globalization of natural gas and the energy transition are trends that we began investing in over a decade ago. And today, cleaner energy sources, including global natural gas and environmentals, make up over 40% of our energy revenues and have grown 17% on average over the past five years. The strong performance has contributed to an average annual revenue growth rate of 9% in our energy platform over that period, including 28% growth in 2023.
With our Brent crude oil contract serving as the cornerstone of our energy network, we've expanded the range of content that we offer to our customers. We have built and continue to enhance our global energy network that delivers comprehensive risk management solutions, provides capital efficiencies, and is positioned to grow alongside the continued evolution of global markets, while providing the critical price transparency across the energy spectrum needed to navigate the energy transition. This large suite of energy risk management tools, combined with our ags portfolio, which saw record volumes in 2023 and has hit consistent Open Interest records through January, makes up our global commodity network of more than 1,000 products and services to help our customers manage risks around evolving supply chain issues, acts of nature, and acts of man.
Moving to our fixed income and data services business. Market volatility, higher interest rates, and secular trends such as the need for increased automation, demand for flexible delivery solutions, and growth in passive investing contributed to another year of record segment revenues in 2023, up 6% versus a year ago. This strength was once again driven by both transaction and recurring revenue growth, highlighting the strength of our all-weather business model. Higher interest rates and our continued efforts to build institutional connectivity across our platform drove another year of record revenues in our ICE Bonds business, up 23% in 2023, and that performance was on top of a nearly 100% increase in 2022.
In addition, we continue to see returns on past investments we've made in our other data and network services business, where revenues grew 7% in 2023. Within desktops, investments we've made to reduce friction across the workflow directly contributed to double-digit revenue growth in 2023. In our consolidated feeds business, past investments we've made to elevate and enhance our offering led to a number of wins driven by displacements of larger multi-asset class incumbents, a key driver of the high-single-digit revenue growth in this area in 2023.
Finally, as we move forward, our enthusiasm is focused on continuing to expand and evolve the products and services, which add transparency to both commonly understood risks as well as emerging risks that make up our fixed income and data services business. Our climate analytics, for example, leverage our strength in the fixed income market with third party geospatial data to help market participants better manage climate risk as part of their overall investing and risk management processes.
Turning now to our mortgage business. Similar to the playbook we operate across our global energy and fixed income businesses, in mortgages, we are leveraging market-leading technology, mission-critical data, and our network expertise to build innovative solutions that drive workflow efficiencies. Our mortgage network spans from point of consumer acquisition all the way through to the secondary market, providing a true life of loan offering that positions us to lead the transformation of an industry that is moving analog to digital. In this regard, we're pleased to share that we closed 37 new Encompass clients in the fourth quarter and four new MSP clients, contributing to a record for new sales on Encompass and the highest in the last five years for MSP and Encompass combined.
Building on the Encompass wins mentioned on the last call, such as M&T Bank, we added Raymond James Bank for their retail and correspondent channels. We also brought back Carrington, a significant non-bank lender and servicer, onto the Encompass platform from a third party. For MSP, building on the four wins we had in the fourth quarter, such as Fifth Third that was mentioned on the last call, we closed Capital Mortgage Solutions of Texas and an existing Encompass client, CapEd Credit Union, to start 2024.
As we enter 2024, we remain focused on the successful integration of Black Knight and executing on our strategy of relieving the pain points and inefficiencies that exist across the mortgage workflow. Importantly, our approach remains consistent with the blueprint we've applied across our other networks, one of investing behind secular growth while enhancing the value proposition of our network. A near-term opportunity to drive greater transparency and efficiency includes integrating Black Knight datasets such as our closing fee data, tax, flood, and valuation models into our Encompass and MSP systems.
Another near-term example is integrating our data and document automation platform into MSP, building a digital bridge from origination straight through to servicing, reducing costs, time, and errors to onboard loans to the MSP system.
A third example builds upon our lead providing compliance solutions fully integrated into every aspect of the mortgage origination process and moving towards servicing as well. At the same time, a near-term opportunity is our continued investment in our product and pricing engine, further strengthening the mortgage ecosystem by providing additional options and greater efficiencies to lenders, servicers, and partners.
In parallel to these near-term opportunities just mentioned, we are executing on our investment commitments to continue to advance our market-leading SaaS-based MSP servicing platform following a similar successful process that we have executed against with other companies that we have acquired. Simultaneously, we see an opportunity to advance our digital document vault service that is offered for documents such as e-notes and to extend this as the golden record for other origination and servicing documents to help reduce duplication, improve quality, and reduce costs for our customers.
In summary, we are pleased to see that the value of our solutions delivered by our comprehensive technology platform is resonating in the marketplace. The demand we are seeing across our platform gives us confidence that we can grow a business, that at $2.1 billion in revenue today, is only a fraction of the $14 billion addressable market that's in the early days of an analog-to-digital conversion.
With that, I'll turn the call over to Jeff.
