This doesn't look like a great time to make bullish wagers on the mortgage market, what with rates hitting two-decade highs, and a vertiginous fall in originations following the post-pandemic bonanza. But Jeff Sprecher, founder and CEO of commodities and securities trading colossus Intercontinental Exchange (market cap: $64 billion), just made the biggest acquisition in his enterprise's 23 year history on the conviction that streamlining and digitizing the paper-intensive, time-devouring task of securing the loans on the nation's ranches, colonials and condos, and revolutionizing the staid way these staples are marketed represents, as he told Fortune, "The biggest untapped opportunity in financial services." On September 4, ICE bought home loan servicing and data analytics provider Black Knight for $11.9 billion, a price that exceeded the $8.2 billion Sprecher paid for his most famous deal, the 2013 purchase of the New York Stock Exchange.
In an exclusive interview with Fortune, Sprecher discussed how onboarding Black Knight "adds the final piece in the mortgage manufacturing process" and enables ICE to create never-before-seen platforms that provide homeowners with everything from an AI-calculated estimate of the price their dwellings likely command that very day to constant updates on the best new products, government sponsored and private, available for refis.
