ITEM 1.      BUSINESS

Introduction

We are a leading global operator of regulated exchanges, clearing houses and listings venues, and a provider of data services for commodity, fixed income and equity markets. We operate regulated marketplaces for listing, trading and clearing of a broad array of derivatives and securities contracts across major asset classes, including energy and agricultural commodities, interest rates, equities, equity derivatives, exchange traded funds, credit derivatives, bonds and currencies. We also offer end-to-end data services and solutions to support the trading, investment, risk management and connectivity needs of customers around the world across major asset classes.

Our Global Execution, Clearing and Data Businesses

Our business is currently conducted as two reportable business segments: our Trading and Clearing segment and our Data and Listings segment. The majority of our identifiable assets are located in the United States, or U.S., and the United Kingdom, or U.K. For a summary of our revenues, net assets and net property and equipment by geographic region, see note 17 to our consolidated financial statements included in this Annual Report.

Trading and Clearing Segment

Our Trading and Clearing segment includes revenues generated by our execution venues and our clearing services, as well as other revenues. Our exchanges include derivative exchanges in the U.S., U.K., European Union, or EU, Canada and Singapore, and cash equities, equity options and bond exchanges in the U.S. We also operate over-the-counter, or OTC, markets for physical energy and credit default swaps, or CDS, trade execution as well as two electronic fixed income alternative trading systems, or ATSs. To serve global derivatives markets, we operate central counterparty clearing houses in the U.S., U.K., EU, Canada and Singapore. Our Trading and Clearing segment generated revenues of $2.1 billion in 2017 and accounted for 46% of our consolidated revenues.

Derivatives Exchanges: Our regulated futures and options exchanges provide a means for trading and managing risks associated with price volatility, securing physical delivery of certain commodities, as well as enabling investment, asset allocation and diversification. Futures and options on futures contracts are cleared through one of our seven central clearing houses. We conduct our derivatives markets through the following regulated exchanges:

Some of the key products offered on our derivatives exchanges include:

• Energy Futures Contracts: We operate regulated markets for energy futures contracts and options on those contracts through our subsidiaries: ICE Futures Europe, ICE Futures U.S., NGX, and ICE Futures Singapore. Our core products include contracts based on crude and refined oil, natural gas, power, emissions, coal, freight, iron ore and natural gas liquids. In aggregate, we offer approximately 2,000 energy futures contracts in our markets. Our largest energy contract is the ICE Brent crude futures contract. The contract is a deliverable contract based on an Exchange for Physical, or EFP, delivery mechanism with an option to cash settle against the ICE Brent Index price on the last trading day of the futures contract. The Brent complex, which includes ICE Brent crude futures, is a group of related benchmarks used to price a range of traded oil products, including approximately two-thirds of the world’s internationally-traded crude oil. The ICE Low Sulphur Gasoil futures contract is a European diesel oil contract that offers physical delivery and serves as a middle distillate pricing benchmark for refined oil products, particularly in Europe and Asia. We also operate the world’s second largest market for trading in WTI crude oil futures, as measured by the volume of contracts traded in 2017 according to the Futures Industry Association. The WTI crude futures contract is the benchmark for pricing U.S. crude oil. ICE also operates markets for North American natural gas and power futures contracts, as well as global coal and European and U.K. natural gas, power and emissions contracts.

• Agricultural Futures Contracts: Our agricultural commodity contracts are offered on ICE Futures U.S., ICE Futures Europe and ICE Futures Canada. The prices for our agricultural contracts serve as global benchmarks for the physical commodity markets, including Sugar No. 11 ^® (world raw sugar), white sugar, Coffee “C” ^® (Arabica coffee), robusta coffee, Cotton No. 2 ^® (cotton), U.S. and London cocoa and frozen concentrated orange juice. ICE Futures Canada is a regulated commodity futures exchange in Canada and it facilitates markets for futures and options on futures contracts for canola.

• Financial Futures Contracts: ICE Futures Europe provides markets for a range of financial futures and options on futures contracts, including interest rate, equity indices, and currency derivative products. Core products are short-term interest rate, or STIR, contracts, with ICE Futures Europe’s STIR contracts principally-based on implied forward rates denominated in euro and pound sterling, such as Euribor, short-term Sterling, SONIA (based on the Sterling Overnight Index Average) and Gilt contracts, as well as U.S. rates including Eurodollar and GCF repo futures. ICE Futures U.S. offers financial futures and options on futures contracts in currency, equity index and credit index markets, including contracts on certain MSCI indices, most notably the Emerging Markets and EAFE indices and the benchmark U.S. Dollar Index (USDX®) futures contract.

• Equity Options: We provide markets for trading securities options. NYSE American Options trades options on more than 2,600 equity securities (including exchange traded funds, or ETFs) and NYSE Arca Options trades options on more than 2,200 equity securities.

OTC Markets: Our OTC markets include both regulated and unregulated platforms for the execution of cleared and bilateral, or non-cleared, CDS instruments and energy contracts. Through our brokerage services, including those offered through the recently acquired Shorcan Energy Brokers, Inc., or Shorcan Energy, we provide OTC brokerage services to the North American energy markets. And through ICE Swap Trade, which operates our swap execution facility, we provide execution services to the global credit default swap market. We are the leading venue for OTC clearing of CDS as measured by cleared notional value.

Key products offered on our OTC venues include:

• Credit Default Swaps: We offer electronic trade execution for CDS instruments through Creditex U.S. and U.K., and through ICE Swap Trade, the operator of our Commodity Futures Trading Commission, or CFTC, registered swap execution facility, or SEF. We offer clearing services for the CDS markets through ICE Clear Europe and ICE Clear Credit. Both CDS clearing houses are open-access and therefore accept qualifying trades for clearing that are executed on other venues or bilaterally.

We also operate ICE Link, which is an automated trade workflow and electronic connectivity platform for affirming credit derivatives transactions. It also provides connectivity between industry participants, facilitating straight-through processing between trading venues, trade repositories, swap data repositories or trade warehousing and legal confirmation platforms, or to a clearing house for CDS transactions that are clearing eligible.

• OTC Energy Products: Our OTC energy markets comprise bilaterally-traded energy contracts. We operate our financially settled bilateral energy markets through ICE Swap Trade and we offer electronic trading of contracts based on physically settled natural gas, power and refined oil contracts through ICE U.S. OTC Commodity Markets. As of December 31, 2017, approximately 1,000 OTC energy contracts were listed on our electronic trading platform for bilateral trading. A substantial portion of our OTC volume relates to approximately 70 contracts in North American natural gas and power, and global oil.

Alternative Trading Systems: Through Creditex Securities Corporation, we operate two ATSs, serving the fixed income markets. ICE Credit Trade, which is our dealer-to-dealer venue, offers electronic corporate bond trading solutions. BondPoint, which we acquired from Virtu Financial on January 2, 2018, offers dealer-to-client electronic execution services across an array of fixed income securities including corporate, municipal and government bonds.

Clearing Services: We operate seven clearing houses, each of which acts as a central counterparty that becomes the buyer to every seller and the seller to every buyer for its clearing members. Through this central counterparty function, the clearing houses provide financial security for each transaction for the duration of the position by limiting counterparty credit risk. Our clearing houses are responsible for providing clearing services to each of our futures exchanges and certain of our clearing houses clear contracts traded outside of our execution venues. Our clearing houses are:

Our clearing houses have never experienced an incident of a clearing member default which has required the use of the guaranty funds of non-defaulting clearing members or the assets of the clearing house. We have extensive risk management procedures and governance in place to ensure we protect the interests of our clearing members and clearing houses. Each of our clearing houses has instituted a multi-layered risk management system of rules, policies and procedures to protect itself in the event of a clearing member default, starting with membership criteria and continuing to powers of assessment (other than for NGX) in the event of a clearing member default, generally as follows:

To ensure performance, our clearing houses maintain extensive technology and quantitative risk management systems, as well as financial and operational requirements for clearing members and minimum margin requirements for our cleared products. Our clearing houses use software based on industry standard margining conventions and on our proprietary models uniquely

customized to our products to determine the appropriate margin requirements for each clearing member by simulating the possible gains and losses of complex portfolios based on price movements. Our clearing houses’ margin methodologies are independently validated on an annual basis.

In the event of a payment default by a member, the default procedures specified in the rules of that clearing house would apply. In general, the clearing houses would first apply assets of the defaulting member to cover the obligation. These include original/initial margin, variation margin, positions held at the clearing house and, other than for NGX, guaranty fund deposits of the clearing member. In addition, the clearing houses could make a demand for payment pursuant to any available guaranty provided by the parent or affiliate of the defaulting clearing member. If that is not sufficient, the clearing houses would use any designated contributions held by the clearing house itself, as applicable, the guaranty fund contributions of other non-defaulting members and funds collected through an assessment against all other non-defaulting members, to satisfy the remaining deficit, if any. As part of the powers and procedures designed to backstop financial obligations in the event of a default, each of our clearing houses may levy assessments on all of its clearing members if there are insufficient funds available to cover a deficit following the depletion of all assets in the guaranty fund.

Our risk management framework that applies to the clearing services for the CDS markets through ICE Clear Credit and ICE Clear Europe is separate from that of our futures and options or non-CDS clearing operations. ICE Clear Credit only offers clearing services with respect to the CDS markets. With respect to the ICE Clear Europe CDS clearing offering, we have established separate CDS risk pools that feature a separate guaranty fund and separate margin accounts, meaning that the CDS positions are not combined with futures and options positions. The CDS clearing houses have risk management systems that are designed specifically for CDS instruments and have independent governance structures. Our CDS clearing houses are open-access, consistent with regulatory requirements, and we accept qualifying trades for clearing that are executed on other venues. As of December 31, 2017, our CDS clearing houses collectively clear 499 single name instruments and 145 CDS indexes.

Other than for NGX, which we acquired on December 14, 2017 and which provides electronic execution, clearing and data services to the North American natural gas, electricity and oil markets, our clearing houses require that each clearing member make deposits to the guaranty fund. The amounts in the guaranty fund serve to secure the obligations of the clearing members to the clearing house. The amounts in the guaranty fund are mutualized in that a clearing member’s deposit serves to secure both its own obligation to the clearing house as well as the other clearing members’ obligations to the clearing house.

In addition, we contribute a limited amount of our capital to the guaranty fund of each of our clearing houses. This capital contribution is commonly referred to as clearing house "Skin-In-The-Game". As of December 31, 2017 , we have made combined contributions to our clearing houses’ guaranty funds of $254 million . ICE Clear Europe has contributed $100 million of its own cash as part of its futures and options guaranty fund as of December 31, 2017 and has also contributed $50 million of its own cash as part of its CDS guaranty fund as of December 31, 2017 . ICE Clear Credit has contributed $50 million of its own cash as part of its CDS guaranty fund as of December 31, 2017 and ICE Clear U.S. has contributed $50 million of its own cash as part of its futures and options guaranty fund as of December 31, 2017 . ICE Clear Canada, ICE Clear Netherlands and ICE Clear Singapore have each also contributed a combined $ 4 million in cash to their respective guaranty funds. Each of these amounts are reflected as long-term restricted cash in the consolidated balance sheet.

NGX maintains a guaranty fund utilizing a $100 million letter of credit that has been entered into with a major Canadian chartered bank and backed by a default insurance policy underwritten by Export Development Corporation, or EDC, a Canadian government agency. In the event of a participant default, where a participant’s collateral becomes depleted, any remaining shortfall would be covered by a draw down on the letter of credit following which NGX would pay the first $15 million in losses per its deductible and recover additional losses under the insurance policy up to $100 million. We have provided a parent guaranty of $100 million in favor of the major Canadian chartered bank and we voluntarily reserved $100 million of our Amended Credit Facility (defined below) to backstop that parent guaranty.

To provide a tool to address the liquidity needs of our clearing houses and manage the liquidation of margin and guaranty fund deposits held in the form of cash and high quality sovereign debt, ICE Clear Europe, ICE Clear Credit and ICE Clear US have entered into Committed Repurchase Agreement Facilities, or Committed Repo. Additionally, ICE Clear Credit has entered into Committed FX Facilities to support these liquidity needs. As of December 31, 2017 the following facilities were in place:

ICE Clear Europe:    $1.05 billion in Committed Repo to finance U.S. dollar, euro and pound sterling deposits.

ICE Clear US:    $250 million in Committed Repo to finance U.S. dollar deposits.

Securities Exchanges: We currently operate three securities exchanges for cash equity securities, including ETFs as well as fixed income securities. One of the primary functions of these markets is to ensure that orders to purchase and sell securities are executed in a fair, orderly and efficient manner. In addition, through our listings operations, we offer corporate and ETF issuers access to the U.S. capital markets. We currently conduct our securities trading and listings business through the following exchanges and marketplaces:

On January 31, 2017, we acquired 100% of National Stock Exchange, Inc., now named NYSE National. The acquisition gives the NYSE Group a fourth U.S. exchange license. NYSE National is distinct from NYSE Group’s three listings exchanges because NYSE National will only be a trading venue and will not be a listings market. NYSE Group’s three listings exchanges, NYSE, NYSE American and NYSE Arca, have unique market models designed for corporate and ETF issuers. After closing the transaction, NYSE National ceased operations on February 1, 2017. Subject to regulatory approvals, NYSE Group anticipates re-launching operations on NYSE National, Inc. in the second quarter of 2018.

Data and Listings Segment

Our Data and Listings segment includes a range of data services for global financial and commodity markets, including pricing and reference data, indices, exchange data, analytics, consolidated feeds, desktops and connectivity solutions as well as corporate and ETF listing services on our cash equity exchanges. Our Data and Listings segment generated revenues of $2.5 billion in 2017 and accounted for 54% of our consolidated revenues. Revenues in our Data and Listings segment are largely subscription-based and recurring in nature.

Data Services: ICE Data Services offers a broad range of data, analytics and connectivity solutions across global commodity, equity and fixed income markets. ICE Data Services provides our customers comprehensive, flexible information services and solutions to meet their operational, compliance and risk management needs. The diversity and quality of the data we distribute, together with our technology and connectivity services, are crucial to supporting liquidity, price discovery, trading and investing, risk management, compliance, reporting and other operational activities across global financial markets. We intend to continue to invest to expand our data distribution offerings across asset classes, data types and services to serve the evolving needs of our global customer base.

We have defined our data business in three main categories of services: Pricing and Analytics; Exchange Data; and Desktops and Connectivity.

• Pricing and Analytics: ICE Data Services’ Pricing and Analytics service provides global securities evaluations, reference data, risk analytics, derivative pricing and other information designed to meet our customers’ risk management, reporting and regulatory compliance needs. For example, we provide fixed income valuations including independent evaluated pricing services on over 2.7 million fixed income securities and other hard-to-value financial instruments. Our evaluated pricing spans approximately 145 countries and covers a wide range of financial instruments including sovereign, corporate and municipal bonds, structured products, leveraged loans, and our Fair Value Information Services for international equities, options, futures and fixed income products. Our reference data complements our evaluated pricing services by offering our clients a broad range of descriptive information, covering over 11 million financial instruments across 210 markets. This data is used by clients to enhance risk management, support compliance needs and improve operational efficiency. We also offer a range of multi-asset class analytics which provide valuation services for OTC derivatives and structured products, best execution, liquidity indicators and fixed income and equity portfolio analytics to help analyze risk and return exposures. These offerings are delivered over our secure technology platforms and are used by investment professionals to simulate various market environments to help forecast performance, construct portfolios, validate investment strategies, conduct stress testing, generate dynamic risk measures, analyze asset cash flows and support regulatory compliance requirements. ICE Data Services also

designs and distributes many of today’s leading indices and benchmarks across equities, fixed income and derivatives markets. Following the acquisition of the Bank of America Merrill Lynch, or BofAML indices in October 2017, we are the second largest fixed income index provider with nearly $1 trillion of assets under management, or AUM, benchmarked to our indices. Our ETF Valuations and Index Construction offering provides clients with independent and objective operational outsourcing, including design, support, maintenance, calculation and distribution of indices across fixed income instruments, currencies, equities, and commodities. ICE Benchmark Administration, or IBA, is the regulated administrator of a range of benchmarks including LIBOR, the ICE Swap Rate, the LBMA Gold and Silver Price, and the ISDA SIMM Crowdsourcing Utility. IBA has implemented processes, governance, systems and technology that enhance the transparency and security of benchmarks and services relied upon globally.

• Exchange Data: Our exchange data business provides unique real-time and historical pricing, order book and transaction information related to our exchanges across global commodity and financial markets. We publish a broad range of prices and other transaction data and related content from our electronic futures trading platform. The data is disseminated directly and through data vendors to market participants. In addition, we develop unique equity market data solutions, which is known as proprietary data. We package this exchange proprietary market data as real-time products and as historical products, which are used for analysis by market participants and observers. These products are proprietary, and we do not share the revenues that they generate with other markets. Proprietary data that provides real-time quoting or trading information from our securities exchanges is filed with the SEC and the pricing for these market data products is subject to review by the SEC. Finally, we receive a share of revenue from the National Market System Plan, or NMS Plan, consolidated data products. All SEC-registered securities exchanges send their trades and top-of-book quotes in exchange listed securities to a central consolidator, which then distributes the data pursuant to SEC requirements. The majority of our market data revenue from consolidated data products is for trades and quotes in NYSE-listed, NYSE American-listed, and NYSE-Arca securities traded on our securities exchanges. We also receive a share of the consolidated market data revenues from trades and quotes in Nasdaq-listed securities.

• Desktops and Connectivity: Our Desktop and Connectivity business provides the connection to our exchanges, clearing houses and data centers and facilitates the distribution of our ICE Data Services data as well as data from a broad array of trading venues and news feeds through our consolidated feeds offering. Our Desktop service offers a range of products and services to support commodity and energy traders, financial advisors, wealth managers, Investor Relations Officers and Chief Financial Officers. These applications deliver real-time financial market information and decision-support tools to help clients analyze financial markets and make investment decisions. Similarly, our web-based financial information solutions consist of market data, decision-support tools and hosting services. Our robust instant messaging, or IM, system protects the privacy of clients’ business information while allowing collaboration with other market participants in the industry through a secure, compliant channel. In 2017, we launched the ICE Connect Platform. ICE Connect provides integrated access to global markets and price discovery solutions. ICE Connect provides integrated access to trading, messaging, news, data and analytics, with single sign-on functionality to streamline workflow and leverage data.

We also offer connectivity solutions to access markets and data through highly secure, resilient and low latency network options, as well as global colocation services, and Direct Market Access to over 150 venues and 600 market data and news feeds. Our consolidated feeds solution provides cost-effective access to a range of real-time data sources to over 17 million instruments and over 1,000 entitlement options. Clients who have agreements with any of over 600 global exchanges, trading venues and data sources covering listed and OTC securities can receive consolidated real-time and/or delayed feeds of such financial data. Our Consolidated Feed service is complemented by our Tick History service, which provides access to tick and trade data for global securities to assist clients with “best execution” requirements, transaction cost analysis and advanced charting applications. Our connectivity solutions provide secure, purpose-built, private multi-participant connectivity to global exchanges and content service providers via dedicated data circuits with a design that ensures no single point of failure exists across the platform. We operate purpose-built data centers in Basildon and Essex in the U.K. and Mahwah, New Jersey, and we manage systems in a third-party data center in Illinois to meet the needs of a largely electronic customer base. We offer server colocation space at our data centers for market participants to house their servers and applications on equivalent terms. The acquisition of TMX Atrium and our announced partnership with Go West, once launched, will mean our Secure Financial Transaction Infrastructure, or SFTI, wireless networks will offer the most extensive ultra-low latency network connectivity solutions among the New York, Chicago, Toronto and Tokyo metro areas. We are already experiencing customer interest in our Go West partnership and expect to go live in the first half of 2018.

Listings: Through our listings services, we offer corporate and ETF issuers access to the U.S. capital markets. Our listing venues allow companies to list domestic and international equity securities, corporate structured products, convertible bonds, trackers and debt securities. In 2017, the NYSE was the global leader in capital raised for the seventh consecutive year, with $128 billion raised in total IPO proceeds and follow-on offerings from 454 transactions, almost twice the capital raised by any other exchange in the world.

Product Development

We leverage our customer relationships, global distribution, technology infrastructure and software development capabilities to diversify our products and services. New product development is an ongoing process, and we are continually developing, evaluating and testing new products for introduction into our markets to better serve our client base. The majority of our product development relates to evaluating new contracts or new markets based on customer demand. New contracts often must be reviewed and approved by relevant regulators. Outside of third-party licensing costs, we typically do not incur separate, material costs for the development of new products - such costs are embedded in our normal costs of operation.

While we have historically developed our products and services internally, we also periodically evaluate and enter into strategic partnerships and licensing arrangements to develop meaningful new products and services.

Technology

Technology is a key component of our business strategy, and we regard effective execution of our technology initiatives as crucial to our success. Where feasible, we design and build our software systems and believe that having control over our technology allows us to be more responsive to the needs of our customers, better support the dynamic nature of our business and deliver the highest quality markets and data. Our proprietary systems are built using state-of-the-art technology. A significant number of our employees work in technology, including product management, project management, system architecture, software development, network engineering, information security, performance, systems analysis, quality assurance, database administration and customer technical support.

ICE Trading Platform and Technology

The ICE trading platform supports trading in our cleared futures and options markets as well as our bilateral OTC markets. We also offer voice brokers a facility for submitting block trades for products that are eligible for clearing.

Speed, reliability, scalability and capacity are critical performance criteria for electronic trading platforms. Connectivity to our trading platform for our markets is available through our web-based front-end, as well as multiple independent software vendors, or ISVs, and application programming interfaces, or APIs.

NYSE Trading Platforms and Related Technology

The NYSE electronic trading platform features an open system architecture that allows users to access our system via one of the many front-end trading applications developed by ISVs. For equity options, we offer a hybrid model of electronic and open outcry trading through NYSE American Options and NYSE Arca Options. We have developed a new integrated trading platform and matching engine known as NYSE Pillar and have migrated NYSE Arca Equities and NYSE American to this platform. In the future, we will complete the migration for the remaining U.S. cash equities and equity options markets which currently operate on distinct platforms. The single specification will improve performance and reduce the cost and complexity of operating multiple equity and options trading systems.

ICE Data Services Technology

ICE Data Services technology supports solutions for mission-critical information, analytics and connectivity. Our technology centers on integrated platforms for the capture, maintenance and synthesis of information. This platform includes a single configurable data capture mechanism, a common data model and a flexible multi-format delivery capability. The platform enables real-time processing and delivery of information, accelerates new product development, improves production reliability, and yields operating and cost efficiencies as the pre-existing heterogeneous environment is retired. Our information is delivered via real-time messaging protocols, files, web services and other on-demand facilities and state-of-the-art front-ends.

Clearing Technology

A broad range of trade management and clearing services are offered through the integrated technology infrastructure that serves our clearing houses. ICE Clearing Systems encompass a number of integrated systems, including post-trade position management, risk management, settlement and treasury and reporting functions.

A core component of our derivatives clearing houses is the risk management of clearing firm members. Our extensive technology and rules-based risk system provide analytical tools to determine margin, to determine credit risk, and to monitor risk of the clearing members. The risk system also monitors trading activities of the clearing members.

Cybersecurity

Cybersecurity is critical to our operations. We employ a defense-in-depth strategy, with leading-edge security technology and processes including encryption, firewalls, virus prevention, intrusion prevention and detection systems and secured servers. Where our services are accessible via the Internet, we have implemented additional restrictions to limit access to specific approved networks. We also maintain insurance coverage that may, subject to the terms and conditions of the policy and payment of significant deductibles, cover certain aspects of cybersecurity issues. We monitor physical threats in addition to cyber threats and continuously review and update physical security and environmental controls to secure our office and data center locations.

Business Continuity Planning and Disaster Recovery

We maintain comprehensive business continuity and disaster recovery plans and facilities to provide nearly continuous availability of our markets in the event of a business disruption or disaster. We maintain incident and crisis management plans that address responses to disruptive events at any of our locations worldwide.

Intellectual Property

We rely on a wide range of intellectual property, both owned and licensed, for our electronic platforms. We own the rights to a large number of trademarks, service marks, domain names and trade names in the U.S., Europe and in other parts of the world. We have registered many of our trademarks in the U.S. and in certain other countries. We hold the rights to a number of patents and have made a number of patent applications in the U.S. and other countries. We also own the copyright to a variety of material. Those copyrights, some of which are registered, include software code, printed and online publications, websites, advertisements, educational material, graphic presentations and other literature, both textual and electronic. We attempt to protect our intellectual property rights by relying on trademarks, patents, copyrights, database rights, trade secrets, restrictions on disclosure and other methods.

This Annual Report also includes references to third party trademarks, trade names and service marks. Our use or display of any such trademarks, trade names or service marks is not an endorsement or sponsorship and does not indicate any relationship between us and the parties who own such marks and names.

Employees

As of December 31, 2017 , we had a total of 4,952 employees, with 1,627 employees in New York, 884 employees in Atlanta, 713 employees in the U.K. and a total of 1,728 employees across our other offices around the world. Of our total employee base, less than 1% is subject to collective bargaining arrangements, and such relations are considered to be good.

Our History

Our Competitive Strengths and Competition

Competitive Strengths

We operate global markets in the asset classes in which we compete, including futures, cash equities, equity options, fixed income and OTC markets. We believe our key strengths include our:

We are a leading global operator of regulated exchanges, clearing houses and listings venues and a provider of data services for commodity, fixed income and equity markets. Our global data services business consists of unique information derived from our various execution venues and clearing houses, as well as analytics, valuation services, reference data, desktops, indices and connectivity solutions. Our acquisitions of the BofAML Indices, SuperDerivatives, Interactive Data, Securities Evaluations and Credit Market Analysis have served to expand our data services based on rising demand for independent, real-time information, which is being driven by regulation, market fragmentation, passive investing and indexation, and increased automation. We provide data to global financial institutions and asset managers, commercial hedgers, corporates, traders and consumers across virtually all asset classes. We believe our data services are relevant to our clients’ business operations regardless of market volatility and price levels due to the need for continuous information and analysis.

Our regulated exchanges and our trading and clearing platforms offer qualified participants access to our markets and risk management services, covering a range of asset classes, including interest rates, equities, bonds, energy, agriculture, metals, equity indices, environmental, currencies, CDS and equity options. By operating several markets and offering thousands of products we provide our participants with flexibility to implement their trading and risk management strategies on a common technology with integrated clearing and data solutions.

Many of our futures contracts serve as global benchmarks for managing risk relating to exposure to price movements in the underlying products, including financial, energy and agricultural commodities. For example, we operate the leading market for ICE Brent crude oil futures, as measured by the volume of contracts traded in 2017 according to the Futures Industry Association. The ICE Brent Crude futures contract is the benchmark for pricing light, sweet crude oil produced and consumed outside of the U.S. It is part of the Brent complex, which forms the price reference for approximately two-thirds of the world’s internationally-traded physical oil. Our oil complex has expanded since its inception in 1988 to include more than 500 contracts for hedging related oil products. In addition, we operate a leading market for short-term European interest rates contracts, with our principal contracts based on implied forward rates on European Money Markets Institute Euribor rates and a short-term Sterling contract based on the ICE LIBOR rate, as well as Gilts and the Sonia contract, based on the Sterling Overnight Index Average as published each business day. We also offer markets in soft commodity benchmark contracts, including sugar, cocoa, cotton, coffee and canola, which serve as global price benchmarks.

We offer a range of central clearing and related risk management services to promote the liquidity and security of our markets in jurisdictions around the world to meet local regulatory and operational needs in key financial market centers. The credit and performance assurance provided by our clearing houses to clearing members is designed to substantially reduce counterparty risk and is a critical component of our exchanges’ identities as reliable and secure marketplaces for global transactions. We believe the range of products cleared and the risk management services offered by our clearing houses are a competitive advantage and attract market participants. Our clearing houses are designed to protect the financial integrity of our markets by maintaining strong governance and rules, managing collateral, facilitating payments and collections, enhancing capital efficiency and limiting counterparty credit risk.

We operate the leading global listings and trading exchanges for equities and ETFs, and offer our customers access to the U.S. capital markets. Our listing venues allow companies to list domestic and international equity securities, corporate structured products, convertible bonds, trackers and debt securities. In 2017, the NYSE was the global leader in capital raised for the seventh consecutive year, with $128 billion raised in total IPO proceeds and follow-on offerings.

Competition

The execution markets in which we operate are global and highly competitive. We face competition in all aspects of our business from a number of different enterprises, both domestic and international, including traditional exchanges, electronic trading platforms, data vendors and voice brokers. We believe we compete on the basis of a number of factors, including:

• depth and liquidity of markets;

• price transparency;

• reliability and speed of trade execution and processing;

• technological capabilities and innovation;

• breadth of products and services;

• rate and quality of new product developments;

• quality of services;

• stability of services;

• distribution and ease of connectivity;

• mid- and back-office service offerings, including differentiated and value-added services;

• transaction costs; and

• reputation.

We believe that we compete favorably with respect to these factors, and that our deep, liquid markets, breadth of product offerings, new product development, customer relationships and efficient, secure settlement, clearing and support services distinguish

us from our competitors. We believe that in order to maintain our competitive position, we must continue to develop new and innovative products and services, enhance our technology infrastructure, maintain liquidity and offer competitive costs.

In our derivatives markets, certain exchanges replicate our futures contracts. For example, CME Group lists our futures on agricultural and energy commodities, currency and equity index contracts. Nasdaq Futures, Inc., or NFX, an energy platform operated by Nasdaq has also listed certain of our energy contracts. We compete in European interest rates and equity derivatives with Eurex, which is the derivatives exchange operated by Deutsche Börse and Curve Global, a consortium of banks and exchanges that lists interest rate futures. In the European utilities markets, we compete with the European Energy Exchange.

In addition to venues that offer futures products, we also face competition from electronic trading systems, third-party clearing houses and technology firms. Additional ventures could form, or have been formed, to provide services that could potentially compete with certain services that we provide.

We compete with voice brokers active in the credit derivatives markets, other electronic trading platforms for derivatives, clearing houses and market data vendors. ICE Swap Trade and Creditex compete with other swap execution facilities and large inter-dealer brokers in the credit derivatives market.

We face significant competition with respect to equities trading, and this competition is expected to remain intense. Our current and prospective competitors include regulated markets, dark pools and other ATS, market makers and other execution venues. We also face competition from large brokers and customers that may assume the role of principal and act as counterparty to orders originating from retail customers, or by matching their respective order flows through bilateral trading arrangements, including through internalization of order flow.

Our principal competitor for listings in the U.S. is Nasdaq. For ETF listings, we compete with Nasdaq and CBOE Global Markets. We also face competition for foreign issuer listings from a number of stock exchanges outside the U.S., including the London Stock Exchange, Deutsche Börse, Euronext and stock exchanges in Hong Kong and Toronto. As other liquidity venues seek exchange status, we may face more competition for listings.

NYSE Arca and NYSE American Options face considerable competition in the equity options markets. Their principal U.S. competitors are the CBOE and Nasdaq.

Our fixed income trading venues, which include ICE Credit Trade, BondPoint and NYSE Bonds, compete with other electronic trading venues such as those offered by Bloomberg, TradeWeb and MarketAxess. Our platforms also compete for volume traded bilaterally or trading activity that is not done through an electronic venue.

ICE Data Services operates in a competitive environment for all of its constituent parts. Our Exchange Data products compete with similar offerings by other exchange groups. That competition and the competition for order flow among the exchange groups creates a competitive pricing environment for our proprietary data products. Pricing and Analytics competes with information obtained from informal industry relationships and sources, such as broker quotes. It, along with the Desktop and Connectivity business, competes with purchased third-party information and services from large global suppliers of financial market data, such as Bloomberg, Thomson Reuters Corporation and IHS Markit. One of the many offerings in our Connectivity business, SFTI competes with other extranet providers such as CenturyLink and Colt Technology Services. Our ICE Data Indices business competes with a number of other index providers with significant index offerings including Bloomberg, IHS Markit, MSCI, FTSE Russell, and Standard & Poor’s.

Our Growth Strategy

Throughout our history, we have expanded our core execution, clearing and data businesses both organically and through acquisitions, developed innovative new products for global markets, and provided services to a larger and more diverse participant base. In addition, we have completed a number of strategic alliances to leverage our core strengths and grow our business. We seek to advance our leadership position in our markets by focusing our efforts on the following key strategies for growth:

The record consolidated revenues and trading volume we achieved in 2017 reflect our focus on the implementation and execution of our long-term growth strategy.

Expand our Data Offerings to Address the Rising Demand for Information

With the growth of our ICE derivatives markets and NYSE equity markets, we have strengthened and enhanced our data services due to demand for more data solutions. This has been driven by many factors, such as increased automation, regulation and demand for independent, secure, real-time information. To build on our exchange data and connectivity business, we have acquired multiple assets in the past two years, including Interactive Data, Securities Evaluations, Credit Market Analysis, TMX Atrium, and on October 20, 2017, BofAML’s Global Research division’s index business. The BofAML indices are the second largest group of fixed income indices as measured by AUM globally. The AUM benchmarked against our combined fixed income indices is nearly $1 trillion, and the indices have been re-branded as the ICE BofAML indices.

These assets are now part of ICE Data Services, supporting our growth strategy by expanding the markets we serve and adding new data, connectivity and valuation services to our platform. This allows us to serve the full trade life cycle from pre-trade, through-trading to post-trade activities through content such as more than 2.7 million fixed income evaluated prices and reference data on more than 11 million securities, which all help to power an array of multi-asset class analytics, indices and various reporting and performance tools. We also provide ultra-low latency network connectivity solutions. By bringing together a wide range of data and analytics as well as delivery mechanisms through our desktops and connectivity business, we offer customers a comprehensive and flexibile solution to address the need for more transparency, efficiency and information across their respective workflows.

We will continue to look for strategic opportunities to grow our data offerings and will also continue to pursue opportunities in markets we do not currently serve but where it expands the ways in which we can serve our customers. These new markets and demands have allowed us to grow using a balanced approach including new products and services, increased consumption, new customers, mergers and acquisitions, and pricing changes. This is supported by a general market growth in demand for these types of services including portfolio management and analytics, exchange data, real time and trading data, pricing, reference and valuation data.

Expand on our Extensive Trading, Clearing and Risk Management Capabilities

Our derivatives customer base has grown and diversified as a result of several drivers, including adding new markets and products, the move toward increased risk management and counterparty credit management, mark-to-market and margining services, and regulatory requirements. We continue to add new participants to our markets, which bring additional demand for new products and services. Our markets support price transparency and risk management, particularly in times of volatility and in many markets for products where there is less liquidity. In addition, the use of hedging, trading and risk management programs by commercial enterprises continues to rise based on the availability of technology to deliver more products, as well as the security and the capital efficiencies offered by clearing. We develop new products, but have also increased our capabilities through licenses and acquisitions of companies and intellectual property. Further, by acquiring, building and maintaining our own geographically diverse clearing operations, we are able to respond to market demand for central clearing and related risk management services across diverse geographic and regulatory jurisdictions. As new markets evolve, we intend to leverage our domain knowledge to meet additional demand for cleared products and related risk management solutions.

As requirements for regulatory compliance and capital efficiencies grow, the use of clearing, data and related post-trade services such as independent data providers and benchmark services also continues to grow. We intend to continue to expand our customer base by leveraging our existing relationships and our global sales and marketing team to promote participation in our markets, and by expanding our range of products and services.

On January 2, 2018, we acquired 100% of BondPoint from Virtu Financial, Inc. for $400 million in cash. BondPoint is a leading provider of electronic fixed income trading solutions for the buy-side and sell-side offering access to centralized liquidity and automated trade execution services through its ATS and provides trading services to more than 500 financial services firms.

On October 24, 2017, we acquired a 4.7% stake in Euroclear for €275 million in cash ( $327 million based on the euro/U.S. dollar exchange rate of 1.1903 as of October 24, 2017). During December 2017, we reached an agreement to buy an additional 5.1% stake in Euroclear for €243 million in cash ( $292 million based on the euro/U.S. dollar exchange rate of 1.2003 as of December 31, 2017) and expect to receive necessary regulatory approval during the first quarter of 2018. Upon closing, we will own a 9.8% stake in Euroclear for a total investment of €518 million ($619 million based on the exchange rates above). Euroclear is a leading provider of post-trade services, including settlement, central securities depositories and related services for cross-border transactions across asset classes.

On December 14, 2017, we sold Trayport to TMX Group for £550 million ($733 million based on the pound sterling/U.S. dollar exchange rate of 1.3331 as of December 14, 2017). The proceeds of the sale included a combination of cash and our acquisitions of NGX and Shorcan Energy, both wholly-owned subsidiaries of TMX Group, for £200 million ($267 million). NGX, headquartered in Calgary, provides electronic execution, central counterparty clearing and data services to the North American natural gas, electricity and oil markets. Shorcan Energy offers brokerage services for the North American crude oil markets. We recognized a gain of $110

million upon the closing of this transaction, equal to the gross proceeds received from TMX Group, less the adjusted carrying value and the costs to sell Trayport.

Maintain Leadership in our Listing Businesses

The following chart depicts 2017 global capital proceeds raised on various listings venues, in billions:

In our NYSE listings business, we will continue to focus on enhancing our product offerings and services to retain and attract companies of all sizes and industries to our listing venues. In 2017, demand for our listing services continued to be strong in terms of new listings and secondary offerings. A total of 464 new issuers listed on NYSE markets in 2017 and there are over 2,200 total companies listed on NYSE and NYSE American. NYSE was the leader in capital raised in 2017 with $128 billion raised in 454 transactions. NYSE listed 88 IPOs in 2017 raising total IPO proceeds of $31 billion, including the five largest U.S. IPOs of 2017. The NYSE has listed all 32 of the last 32 IPOs greater than $700 million in proceeds.

In ETFs, as of December 31, 2017, NYSE Arca’s listed ETFs had over $2.8 trillion in AUM representing nearly 83% of all U.S. listed ETFs. We strive to maintain our leadership position by offering ETF issuers:

Enhance Our Technology Infrastructure and Increase Distribution

We develop and maintain our own infrastructure, electronic trading platform, clearing systems and data and analytics platforms to ensure scalability and the delivery of technology that meets our expanding customer base’s demands for price transparency, reliability, risk management and transaction efficiency. We intend to continue to increase ease of access and connectivity with our existing and prospective market participants. We develop and maintain our trading and clearing systems, as well as our data solutions and many post-trade systems such as ICE Link and ICE Trade Vault, among others. We have developed and have begun rolling out a new integrated trading platform and matching engine known as NYSE Pillar that will eventually serve each of our U.S. cash equities and equity options markets to improve performance and reduce the cost and complexity of operating multiple trading systems. We also own and operate two data centers and offer connectivity solutions to global exchanges and content service providers via dedicated data circuits.

On May 1, 2017, we acquired 100% of TMX Atrium, a global extranet and wireless services business, from TMX Group. TMX Atrium provides low-latency access to markets and market data across 12 countries, more than 30 major trading venues, and ultra-low latency wireless connectivity to access markets and market data in the Toronto, New Jersey and Chicago metro areas. The wireless assets consist of microwave and millimeter networks that transport market data and provide private bandwidth. TMX Atrium is now part of ICE Data Services and is being integrated with our connectivity services.

Pursue Select Acquisitions and Strategic Relationships that Maximize Customer and Shareholder Benefits

As an early consolidator in global markets to build out our markets and services for customers, we intend to continue to explore and pursue acquisitions and other strategic opportunities to strengthen our competitive position globally, broaden our product offerings and service, and support the growth of our company while maximizing shareholder value as measured by return on invested capital, earnings and cash flow growth. We may enter into business combinations, make acquisitions or enter into strategic partnerships, joint ventures or alliances, any of which may be material. In addition to growing our business, we may enter into these transactions for a variety of additional reasons, including leveraging our existing strengths to enter new markets, expanding our products and services, addressing underserved markets, advancing our technology, anticipating or responding to regulatory change or potential changes in our industry.

Our Customer Base

Executive Officers of the Registrant

Information relating to our executive officers is included under “Executive Officers” in Part III, Item 10, “Directors, Executive Officers and Corporate Governance” of this Annual Report.

Regulation

Our markets are primarily subject to the jurisdiction of regulatory agencies in the U.S., U.K., EU, Canada and Singapore. Failure to satisfy regulatory requirements can or may give rise to sanctions by the applicable regulator.

Regulation of our Derivatives Business

Our regulated derivatives markets and clearing houses are based primarily in the U.S., U.K., EU, Canada and Singapore. Our U.S. futures exchange is subject to extensive regulation by the CFTC under the Commodity Exchange Act, or CEA. The CEA generally requires that futures trading in the U.S. be conducted on a commodity exchange registered as a Designated Contract Market, or DCM. As a registered DCM, ICE Futures U.S. is a self-regulatory organization, or SRO, that has instituted rules and procedures to comply with the core principles applicable to it under the CEA. In the U.K., ICE Futures Europe is a Recognized Investment Exchange, or RIE, in accordance with the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000, or FSMA. Like U.S. regulated derivatives markets, RIEs are SROs with surveillance and compliance responsibilities. ICE Clear Credit, ICE Clear U.S. and NGX are regulated by the CFTC as Derivatives Clearing Organizations, or DCOs. DCOs are subject to extensive regulation by the CFTC under the CEA. ICE Clear Europe, which is primarily regulated in the U.K. by the Bank of England as a Recognized Clearing House, or RCH, is also subject to regulation by the CFTC as a DCO. Both ICE Clear Credit and ICE Clear Europe are also regulated by the SEC as clearing agencies because they clear security-based swaps.

The Financial Stability Oversight Council, or FSOC, has designated ICE Clear Credit as a systemically important financial market utility under Title VIII of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, or the Dodd-Frank Act. As such, ICE Clear Credit has access to the Federal Reserve System and holds deposits of $ 18.5 billion of its U.S. dollar cash in its cash accounts at the Federal Reserve as of December 31, 2017 .

Regulation of our Securities Business

In our cash equities and options markets, NYSE, NYSE Arca, NYSE American and NYSE National are national securities exchanges and, as such, are SROs and subject to oversight by the SEC. Accordingly, our U.S. securities exchanges are regulated by

the SEC and, in turn, are the regulators of their members. As national securities exchanges, NYSE, NYSE Arca, NYSE American and NYSE National must comply with, and enforce compliance by their members with, the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, or the Exchange Act.

In our fixed income markets, Creditex Securities Corporation, which also includes the recently acquired BondPoint business, is a broker-dealer and ATS operator, and, as such, is subject to oversight by the SEC. Creditex Securities Corporation is also a member of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, or FINRA, and is registered with the Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board, self-regulatory organizations that regulate broker-dealers in the U.S.

Regulation of our Data Business

As a result of our evaluated pricing operations, we have U.S. subsidiaries that are registered with the SEC under the Investment Advisers Act of 1940, or the Investment Advisers Act, for their evaluated pricing services. The Investment Advisers Act imposes numerous regulatory obligations on registered investment advisers, including those relating to products and services, record-keeping, compliance management, operational and marketing requirements, disclosure obligations and prohibitions on fraudulent activities. Investment advisers also are subject to certain state securities laws and regulations. Interactive Data (Australia) Pty. Ltd. is licensed by the Australian Securities and Investment Commission, or ASIC, and provides certain financial services in Australia. Interactive Data Desktop Solutions (Europe) Limited is regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority, or FCA, and provides certain financial services in the European Economic Area.

Regulatory Reform

Domestic and foreign policy makers have undertaken ongoing reviews of their legal frameworks governing financial markets following the 2009 financial crisis, and have either passed new laws and regulations, or are in the process of debating and/or enacting new laws and regulations that apply to our business and to our customers’ businesses. Our key areas of focus on these evolving efforts are:

contracts. In certain cases, the position limits are lower than on U.S. trading venues and in certain cases position limits are higher than U.S. equivalent contracts. The FCA is actively reviewing the recently issued position limits. Conversely, in December 2016, the CFTC re-proposed the position limit rules as opposed to finalizing the rule.

See the discussion below and Item 1(A) “- Risk Factors” in this Annual Report for additional description of regulatory and legislative risks and uncertainties.

Corporate Citizenship

We strive to create long-term value for our shareholders and maintain high ethical and business standards. We are active in the communities where we operate and support charitable organizations through a combination of financial resources and through employee participation. We also operate the ICE NYSE Foundation that has a commitment to supporting our communities, financial literacy and veterans’ programs. We also host programs for our issuers on governance topics to provide a forum for advancing their efforts on environmental, social and governance matters. In 2018, we will engage in a survey of our employees to further monitor how as a company we are living up to our core values and to find additional ways to improve our employees’ work experience.

We provide additional information in our Corporate Responsibility Report, which can be located in the Corporate Citizenship section of our website.

With regard to environmental markets, we own Climate Exchange PLC and are today the leading operator of global emissions and environmental products markets, which enabled us to expand and support the development of emissions markets. We have invested further to develop new environmental products on our exchanges, including carbon emissions, aviation allowances, renewable energy certificate contracts, California carbon allowance contracts and biofuel products related to renewable identification numbers.

Available Information

Our principal executive offices are located at 5660 New Northside Drive, 3rd Floor, Atlanta, Georgia 30328. Our main telephone number is 1-770-857-4700, and our website is www.intercontinentalexchange.com.

We are required to file reports and other information with the SEC. A copy of this Annual Report on Form 10-K, as well as any future Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q, Current Reports on Form 8-K and any amendments to such reports are available free of charge, on our website (www.theice.com) as soon as reasonably practicable after we file such reports with, or furnish such reports to, the SEC. A copy of these filings is also available at the SEC’s website (www.sec.gov). The reference to our website address and to the SEC’s website address do not constitute incorporation by reference of the information contained on the website and should not be considered part of this report. You may read and copy any documents filed by us at the SEC’s Public Reference Room at 100 F Street, N.E., Washington, D.C. 20549. Please call the SEC at 1-800-SEC-0330 for further information on the Public Reference Room.

In addition, we have posted on our website the charters for our (i) Audit Committee, (ii) Compensation Committee, (iii) Nominating and Corporate Governance Committee and (iv) Risk Committee, as well as our Code of Business Conduct and Ethics, which includes information regarding our whistleblower hotline information, Board of Directors Governance Principles and Board Communication Policy. We will provide a copy of these documents without charge to stockholders upon request.