ICE capped a landmark 2025 with record full-year adjusted EPS of $6.95 (up 14%), record net revenues of $9.9 billion, and record adjusted operating income of $6 billion, and carried the momentum into a fourth quarter that saw adjusted EPS rise 13% to $1.71. The Exchanges segment posted record Q4 net revenues of $1.4 billion with January volumes up 23%, while Black Knight synergies exited the year ahead of target and the NYSE won the largest transfer in its history with AstraZeneca. ICE returned capital via $1.3 billion of buybacks and a 6% dividend increase while cutting leverage to 3.0x. Offsetting factors included lower ICE Bonds retail/corporate/treasury activity, reduced CDS member-interest income on rate cuts, and lower mortgage renewal minimums plus disclosed client attrition.
Good morning. ICE's fourth quarter 2025 earnings release and presentation can be found in the investor section of ice.com. These items will be archived and our call will be available for replay. Today's call may contain forward-looking statements. These statements, which we undertake no obligation to update, represent our current judgment and are subject to risks, assumptions, and uncertainties. For description of the risks that could cause our results to differ materially from those described in forward-looking statements, please refer to our 2025 Form 10-K and other filings with the SEC. In our earnings supplement, we refer to certain non-GAAP measures. We believe our non-GAAP measures are more reflective of our cash operations and core business performance. You will find a reconciliation to the equivalent GAAP term in the earnings materials. When used on this call, net revenue refers to revenue net of transaction-based expenses.
Adjusted earnings refers to adjusted diluted earnings per share. Throughout this presentation, unless otherwise indicated, references to revenue growth are on a constant currency basis. Please see the explanatory notes on the second page of the earnings supplement for additional details regarding the definition of certain items. With us on the call today are Jeff Sprecher, Chair and CEO, Warren Gardiner, Chief Financial Officer, Ben Jackson, President, Lynn Martin, President of the NYSE, and Chris Edmonds, President of Fixed Income and Data Services. I'll now turn over the call to Warren.
Thanks, Steve. Welcome to the call. I'm glad to have you leading Investor Relations for us going forward. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. I'll begin on slide 4 with our exceptional full year 2025 results, which demonstrate the strength of our diversified business model and the consistency of our execution. 2025 was a landmark year for ICE. We delivered record adjusted earnings per share of $6.95, a 14% increase year-over-year, marking the best performance in our company's history. This achievement reflects both the resilience of our franchise and our team's relentless focus on operational excellence.
Full year net revenues reached a record $9.9 billion, up 6% year-over-year, with balanced growth across our platform, including 5% growth in recurring revenues, providing durability and visibility, and 8% growth in transaction revenues, which demonstrate robust customer engagement and growing demand for risk management tools. Our disciplined approach to expense management continues to drive operating leverage. Adjusted operating expenses totaled $3.9 billion, reflecting our commitment to cost discipline while also investing strategically. I'm particularly pleased to report that an annualized expense synergies from our 2023 Black Knight acquisition exited the year at an annualized rate of approximately $230 million, exceeding the updated $200 million target that we set early last year.
Based on this momentum, we now expect total expense synergies to reach $275 million by the end of 2028, a $75 million increase, or nearly 40% above our initial commitment when we announced the transaction back in 2022. This outperformance underscores our integration capabilities and our proven ability to identify incremental value creation opportunities. These results drove record adjusted operating income of $6 billion, up 9% year-over-year, demonstrating the quality and scalability of our business model. Turning to capital allocation, our record operating performance generated $4.2 billion of, in adjusted free cash flow, which we deployed strategically to enhance shareholder value.
We repurchased $1.3 billion of stock, increased our dividend by 6%, and reduced our leverage ratio from 3.3 at year-end 2024 to 3 times as we closed 2025, all while funding strategic investments across our business. This balanced approach reflects our confidence in both our core operations and our ability to capitalize on future growth opportunities. Moving to slide 5, let me walk you through our strong fourth quarter performance, which provides excellent momentum as we enter 2026. Fourth quarter adjusted earnings per share totaled $1.71, up 13% versus the prior year. Fourth quarter net revenues of $2.5 billion increased 7% year-over-year, with transaction revenues growing 8%, and recurring revenues advancing 6%.
Fourth quarter adjusted operating expenses totaled $1.01 billion, coming at the midpoint of our guidance range and reflecting our continued focus on balancing cost discipline with investments in future profitable growth. Now, let's turn to slide 6 for our exchange segment, which delivered outstanding results. Our exchange business achieved record fourth quarter net revenues of $1.4 billion, up 9% year-over-year. Notably, this compounds on 9% growth in 2024 and 14% growth in 2023, demonstrating sustained business momentum. Transaction revenues grew 8%, led by our global Oil Complex, which increased 12% year-over-year. Our Natural Gas and Environmental Products, which represent nearly half of our energy revenues, grew 10% in the quarter and 15% for the full year, reflecting strong structural demand for energy risk management and the ongoing energy evolution.
Importantly, these positive trends accelerated into January. We saw record monthly volumes up 23% year-over-year, including a record month for energy ADV. Further supporting momentum into February is robust open interest, growing 19%, including 7% growth in global energy and 48% growth in our interest rate complex, reflecting heightened volatility, increased hedging demand, and the mission-critical nature of our markets.... Our recurring revenue streams, comprised of our exchange data services and our NYSE listings franchise, reached a record $391 million, up 11% year-over-year. Growth was driven by a 16% expansion in exchange data and connectivity services. After adjusting for a one-time true-up in Q4 2024, exchange data services grew 11% in the quarter, as customers increasingly rely on our comprehensive market data and technology.
Our NYSE listings business continues to attract the highest quality companies from around the globe. While only about 40% of global IPOs met our rigorous listing standards in 2025, the NYSE facilitated $25 billion in new IPO capital formation, welcoming 71 new operating companies, including 7 of the top 10 IPOs. In addition, our retention rate remained above 99%, while we also welcomed several transfers, including Virtu, Etsy, and the largest transfer in NYSE history, AstraZeneca, who officially transferred to the NYSE this week. This performance reflects the enduring value proposition that combines the NYSE brand with our leading-edge technology. Looking to 2026, we expect exchange segment recurring revenues to grow in the mid-single-digit range, driven by continued growth in exchange data services and expansion in our listings franchise. Turning to slide 7, our fixed income data and services segment delivered another quarter of strong execution.
Fourth quarter revenues totaled $608 million, including $101 million in transaction revenues. Within ICE Bonds, continued growth in municipal bond revenue was offset by lower retail, corporate, and treasury activity, while strong CDS clearing results were offset by lower member interest income following the FOMC's rate reductions in 2025. Importantly, recurring revenues reached a record $507 million, growing 7% year-over-year. Our fixed income data and analytics business achieved record revenues of $318 million, up 5%, driven by our pricing and reference data offering, which posted its best quarter for net new business since 2020. Our index business, which ended the year with a record $794 billion in ETF AUM, tracking ICE indices, up over 20% versus last year.
This growth reflects the increasing adoption of our data and indices, as well as the quality of our benchmark products. Data and network technology reached record revenues, increasing by 10% in the fourth quarter, reflecting strong demand for our ICE Global Network, Consolidated Feeds, and desktop solutions. As customers integrate artificial intelligence into their workflows and require ever-increasing volumes of high-quality data, we're uniquely positioned as a critical technology provider. For 2026, we anticipate fixed income and data services recurring revenue growth in the mid-single-digit range, with growth expected to trend towards the high end of that range, underpinned by another year of high single-digit growth in our data and network technology business. Please turn to slide 8 for our mortgage technology segment results. Fourth quarter mortgage technology revenues totaled $532 million, up 5% year-over-year.
On a pro forma basis, including Black Knight, this represents our strongest quarterly performance since Q3 2022. Recurring revenues totaled $391 million and were in line with our expectations. As we discussed in prior quarters, some customer renewals came in at lower minimums. Importantly, these renewals are paired with higher per-transaction pricing that becomes increasingly beneficial as origination volumes normalize. The impact from lower minimums was largely offset by strong implementations and product expansions, particularly within origination technology. Transaction revenues totaled $141 million, up an impressive 20% year-over-year. This was driven by a significant increase in transaction revenues from Encompass closed loans, as customers increasingly exceed their minimums in an improving origination environment, along with double-digit growth in MERS registrations, which was supported by strong fourth quarter refinancing activity.
Turning to 2026 guidance, we expect total mortgage technology revenues to grow in the low- to mid-single-digit range. The high end of our range assumes the number of loans originated across the industry grows in the low teens, while the low end assumes flat to modest growth. Importantly, at both ends of this range, we anticipate continued growth in recurring revenues in 2026. Several factors underpin this confidence. First, revenue synergies have nearly doubled from $55 million at year-end 2024 to approximately $100 million at year-end 2025, with further runway ahead. Second, we substantially re-worked through the 2020 to 2022 vintage contract renewals, reducing but not yet eliminating the headwind from Encompass minimum adjustments. Third, we continue to see strong product adoption and implementation momentum.
These positives will be partially offset by previously disclosed client attrition related to certain M&A activity in 2025. Please return to slide 9, where I'll provide additional context on our 2026 guidance and outlook. We expect 2026 adjusted operating expenses to grow between 4% and 5%, or between $4.075 billion and $4.14 billion. This includes approximately $25 million in accelerated stock-based compensation related to adjustments to our compensation plan. As a result, we expect less incremental stock compensation expense in both 2027 and 2028. Additionally, we currently expect depreciation in the euro and pound to add roughly $15 million to $20 million, so note it's more than offset by incremental revenue.
Thank you, Warren, and thank you all for joining us this morning. Please turn to slide 10. Across ICE's derivatives platform, we've built technology that scales with our customers' needs, combining deep liquidity, global participation, and transparent price discovery into a single connected marketplace. 2025 was another record year for our global derivatives markets, with 2.3 billion futures and options contracts traded, surpassing the prior record set in 2024 by 13%, and record average daily volumes of 9.3 million contracts, up 14% year-over-year. This momentum translated into our 13th consecutive year of record futures revenue in 2025, which grew 11% for the year and 8% in the fourth quarter. Performance was broad-based across our multi-asset and geographically diverse platform, reflecting the depth of liquidity and participation on our platform.
Building on that breadth, our energy complex continued to lead in 2025, with strength across oil and gas. Volumes increased year-over-year in Brent, up 11%, WTI up 9%, and Gasoil up 8%, each setting full-year records in 2025. While our global natural gas markets advanced with record TTFs and Japan Korea Marker, or JKM volumes, up 21% and 36% respectively. The strength has continued into 2026, as January marked the strongest month for trading activity in our history, and trading in energy achieved record average daily volume, up 27% year-over-year. At the core of this strength in our energy business is our oil complex, which gives customers precise tools to manage exposure across grades, regional flows, and the spread relationships between them.
In crude oil, ICE operates the most liquid futures benchmarks across every major producing region in the world. From west to east, that includes the only Canadian crude futures market, ICE WTI at Cushing, the only physically deliverable Midland WTI contract in Houston, which itself is deliverable into the Brent benchmark, and our two leading Middle Eastern benchmarks, ICE Murban and ICE Dubai. Surrounding these benchmarks is a deep set of differential contracts, allowing market participants to price dislocations across grades and locations globally. In an environment shaped by Iran-related tensions, uncertainty around Venezuelan production, ongoing Russian sanctions, and broader geopolitical flashpoints, this global network has proven essential for managing supply risk, arbitrage flows, and price volatility. Second, in refined products, ICE provides an equally integrated global complex.
U.S. heating oil and gasoline link directly into ICE Gasoil, the most liquid middle distillate futures contract in the world, with further connections into Asia and the Middle East. These markets, spanning diesel, jet fuel, gasoline, and petrochemicals, are tied back to crude through our refining margin and crack spread futures, enabling refiners to lock in margins amid volatile feedstock and product demand. Third, as the energy mix evolves, ICE continues to lead in renewable fuels and renewable credit markets. As regulatory frameworks broaden and renewable adoption accelerates, our ability to offer a unified risk management ecosystem across traditional and renewable energy remains a powerful structural growth driver.
Turning to natural gas, our blueprint has built a benchmark-led complex where TTF's deep liquidity and price transparency attract a diverse mix of physical and financial participants, providing reliable price signals and serving as the leading benchmark for global gas pricing that influences LNG contracts and hedging strategies. Against that backdrop, December was the strongest month of the quarter for TTF, with ADV up 30% and OI up 18% year over year. That strength has carried into 2026, with elevated January participation evident, as OI was up 16% year over year, and average daily volumes doubled versus 2024.... Finally, with global energy demand rising, driven in part by the rapid expansion of data centers, electrification, and AI infrastructure, capital-efficient risk management is critical.
Thus, we delivered another significant milestone last year through the rollout of our ICE Risk Model 2 margin methodology across more than 1,000 energy contracts, extending a VaR-based portfolio approach that captures relationships across oil, natural gas, power, emissions, and freight. IRM 2 is designed to be resilient against stress events and correlation breakdown, as well as adjusting for seasonality where appropriate, which in turn allows us to offer customers greater margining benefits when the portfolio is diversified or hedged. As a result, customers have seen collateral efficiencies across hedge portfolios. In combination, these factors, geopolitical complexity, rising demand, and the need for sophisticated risk management, continue to play to the strength around our energy franchise for sustained growth in the years ahead. Beyond commodities, our global interest rate franchise also delivered strong results in 2025 as participants responded to shifting policy paths and cross-market signals.
Activity across our rates complex reached record levels in 2025, in which ADV was up 19% and OI was up 54% at the close of the year, reinforcing how customers use a single technology platform to align exposures across assets. The output of our markets, high-quality price signals and liquidity, also become inputs in our Fixed Income and Data Services segment. The platform's compounding engine, where proprietary data, indices, and network connectivity power customer decision-making and automation. Moving now to our Fixed Income and Data Services segment on slide 11. 2025 was a milestone year. Pricing and Reference Data remains our foundation, and our index franchise continued to scale alongside ETF adoption and customization, driving record index AUM of $794 billion at the end of 2025.
We continue to expand our differentiated offering through new data partnerships, including our recent deal with Reddit. Here, we are now offering real-time historical signals and sentiment scores integrated with our data sets to enhance market insights and risk management capabilities. In turn, uncovering new investment opportunities for clients. Our fixed income workflows, electronic execution, and clearing set new records in 2025, validating our role helping clients manage risk. On execution, ICE Bonds saw record revenue, with our secondary MBS trading growing well year-over-year. In clearing, CDS volumes reached record levels across index, single name, and options. Underpinning this is our ICE Global Network, which provides secure, low-latency connectivity and data distribution that customers rely on as they modernize their trading workflows. Demand for connectivity and co-location also remains strong as we've more than doubled capacity since 2020 as client demand continues to grow.
More broadly, the growth of AI continues to be an enabler. Our ICE Aurora platform, paired with our high-quality proprietary data with controlled, secure distribution into customer workflows, is where ICE differentiates. We provide fit-for-purpose data sets, delivered securely and integrated directly with customer decisioning tools. In practice, that includes ICE Aurora AI-assisted capture and validation of reference data, enhancements to evaluated pricing, and secure entitlement-based access into valuation, risk, and regulatory systems. This way, customers can adopt AI with confidence in the quality and permitted use of the data powering their models. Where FIDS turns market data into workflow intelligence, mortgage technology applies those capabilities across the life of a loan. Moving to our mortgage business on slide 12. Mortgage technology is another expression of ICE's core capability: automating complex, regulated workflows through high-quality data, secure delivery, and governed automation.
In 2025, we continued to execute on reducing inefficiencies across the mortgage workflow. Automating legacy workflows for our customers through applying state-of-the-art technology and innovation has been foundational to ICE since inception. The application of AI with agents that automate multi-step manual workflows is driving our engagement with our clients across ICE Mortgage Technology. So here, just as in FIDS, AI is an enabler and an accelerator to deliver workflow efficiencies. Both Encompass and MSP, as core systems of record for lending and servicing of mortgages, today support modern access and data delivery options that are plugged into the AI layer. These systems of record understand the data ontology and orchestrate highly regulated, compliance-laden business processes in a trusted manner, as errors have a near zero level of tolerance. Applying our ICE Aurora platform and agents to workflow automation remains the most effective lever.
Moving manual stare and compare tasks to exception-based workflows, where people focus only on what needs human judgment. This enables us to deliver efficiencies to maximize productivity per full, full-time employee, reduce costs per loan, and enable scale without proportional headcount increases. We are in the process of rolling out the following ICE Aurora AI-enabled agents for our IMT business in the first half of this year. First, we've extended our ICE Business intelligence capabilities by accelerating cycle times and improving loan quality with our agents analyzing data, identifying errors, and highlighting bottlenecks and inefficiencies in our clients' workflows. Second, is the launch of our virtual and text-based agents in servicing, capable of executing real actions such as payment scheduling, so borrowers can self-service within our Servicing Digital application, as well as resolving issues, answering questions, and interfacing directly with borrowers to reduce the need for a call.
This capability is already in beta with a handful of clients. Third, AI-powered customer service agents that shorten turnarounds, improve customer satisfaction, and lower costs by summarizing notes, predicting call context, and responding to questions to help representatives resolve inquiries and close tickets faster. Fourth, business intelligence and exception-handling agents used by processors, underwriters, and servicers that can respond to ad hoc queries in natural language in real time and facilitate exception handling with approved steps and guardrails. These capabilities also permit executives and line of business owners to derive actionable insights from their data real time, rather than using ad hoc queries, thus reducing overhead associated with research and reporting. We continue to see strong customer adoption, with wins and implementations that reflect the value of standardizing data and automating workflows across origination and servicing.
Thank you, Ben. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us. Please turn to slide 13. For over two decades, ICE has been built around the simple idea that markets function best when their infrastructure is trusted, neutral, and engineered to work in all environments. Our job has never been to predict outcomes or to direct capital. It's been to build and operate the systems that allow capital to move efficiently, allow risk to be transferred, and allow price discovery to occur regardless of market conditions. As a result, we've deliberately placed ICE at the intersection of markets that respond to different forces. Some react to acts of God, such as weather events or energy supply disruptions. Others react to acts of man, including central bank policy and regulatory frameworks.
By operating across both, and by connecting them through technology and clearing infrastructure, we've built an all-weather model that performs through cycles rather than around them. In 2025, that model once again proved its resilience. Market participants across asset classes continued to turn to ICE to manage risk, allocate capital, and access trusted data as they navigated geopolitical tensions, rate uncertainty, and evolving regulatory landscapes. While the macro environment remains dynamic, our performance reflects the value of our mission-critical networks that customers rely upon. Over time, we've consistently invested in areas where markets were operating with friction, opacity, or manual workflows. We did this in energy markets, where global pricing lacked transparency, in fixed-income markets by building institutional-grade data and analytics that brought structure to historically fragmented markets, and again, in consumer credit markets by digitizing core workflows throughout the home mortgage ecosystem.
Across each of these, the common thread has been the same: combining technology, data, and operating expertise to rewire critical financial infrastructures that customers can rely upon. We're taking the same approach into the next phase of market evolution. Last month, we announced the development of a tokenized securities platform for NYSE, following our investment and distribution partnership with Polymarket. While tokenization has attracted significant attention across the industry, our approach is grounded in the same principles that have guided ICE since our inception. We are not pursuing tokenization as a novelty or as a substitution for how markets operate today. We're exploring tokenization as a potential evolution of existing market infrastructure, one that could further improve capital efficiencies, broaden access-...
Advanced settlement processes, such as our recent announcements with BNY and Citi to accept tokenized collateral, all while preserving the safeguards, governance, and neutrality that institutional markets require and that ICE is known for. In fact, ICE plans to apply for regulatory approval for NYSE tokenization from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission under existing federal law and existing SEC authorities. ICE plans to seek foreign distribution under our existing securities passporting relationships. This NYSE tokenization initiative is not dependent on the passage of the U.S. Clarity Act or any other foreign legislation. Our intent is to tokenize regulated securities that attach contractual rights and interests to their holders, just as they occur under existing securities laws, such as ownership rights, dividends, and voting privileges. Importantly, tokenization is not a standalone initiative.
It sits alongside the infrastructure that we already operate across exchanges, clearing houses, data platforms, and our networks. Our experience running global markets, managing collateral, and supporting trillions of dollars in daily notional activity gives us a clear view on how new technologies may be integrated into the financial system. We believe this approach positions us well to support innovation while maintaining the stability that customers and regulators expect from ICE-operated venues. Just last week, ICE received approval from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to launch a new clearing service for U.S. cash treasuries, almost a year in advance of the January 2027 treasury clearing mandate. This is another example of our ability to position ourselves to meet the needs of an evolving market. Importantly, this approval is accretive to our existing fixed income clearing services, where we've provided global leadership since the great financial crisis.
We're excited about the fixed income market evolution and the choice that this initiative will provide to our clients. Looking ahead, we continue to see secular forces reshaping global markets. The digitization of financial markets is ongoing. Regulatory frameworks continue to evolve. Capital moves globally, even as policy is set locally. Against this backdrop, the need for trusted infrastructure that can perform under stress becomes more important. ICE's role is to remain a trusted operator through this change, investing in technology where it removes friction, expanding our networks where it creates efficiency, and maintaining discipline in how we allocate capital. That consistency is what has allowed us to grow through every business cycle, and it's what underpins our confidence as we look forward. I'd like to conclude today's prepared remarks by thanking our customers for their business and for their continued trust.
I want to thank my colleagues at ICE for their efforts that contributed to yet another record year at ICE. I'll now turn the call back to our moderator, Drew, to conduct the question and answer session until 9:30 A.M. Eastern Time.