Intercontinental Exchange, operator of global exchanges and clearing houses and provider of mortgage technology, data and listing services, today announced that it has received regulatory approval and fully completed its $11 billion acquisition of Ellie Mae from the private equity firm Thoma Bravo.
“We are excited to begin the next important chapter in our journey to digitize the residential mortgage industry,” said Jeffrey C. Sprecher, Founder, Chairman and CEO of Intercontinental Exchange. “Ellie Mae’s industry leadership and best-of-breed technology will better enable us to further accelerate the automation of the mortgage origination workflow, which will benefit stakeholders across the production chain, including consumers.”
Ellie Mae was founded in 1997 with a mission "to automate and digitize the trillion-dollar residential mortgage industry. Through its digital lending platform, Ellie Mae provides technology services to all participants in the mortgage supply chain, including its more than 3,000 customers and thousands of partners and investors participating on their open network who provide liquidity to the market. Lenders rely on Ellie Mae to securely manage and facilitate the exchange of data across the ecosystem to enable the origination of mortgages, while maintaining strict adherence to various local, state and federal compliance requirements," according to a statement today.
Intercontinental Exchange’s efforts to help automate the mortgage workflow began with its majority investment in the Mortgage Electronic Registrations System (MERS) in 2016, which it fully acquired in 2018. The strategy continued with the acquisition of Simplifile in 2019, furthering a focus on digitizing the closing and post-closing process for U.S. mortgages. The core focus of Ellie Mae's technology, experience, and network is in the mortgage origination process, connecting brokers, underwriters and lenders. With all three of these entities, MERS, Simplifile and Ellie Mae working together as part of ICE Mortgage Technology, the expanded platform will, for the first time, bring together all of the key stakeholders from origination to final settlement in one digital mortgage ecosystem.
Also included in today's announcement, were key Q3 financial metrics:
"Based on a closing date of September 4, and an allocation to ICE based on the number of business days following completion, ICE currently expects the Ellie Mae transaction to contribute the following to its third quarter results:
Revenue of $67 million to $72 million
Adjusted operating expense1 of $34 million to $36 million
Interest expense of $11 million to $12 million
Approximately 5 million weighted average diluted shares outstanding, which are expected to result in total weighed average diluted shares outstanding of 551 million to 554 million in the third quarter of 2020.
Note: Adjusted operating expenses excludes the amortization of acquisition-related intangibles related to the Ellie Mae acquisition. At the time of this release, we cannot reasonably estimate the GAAP operating expenses due to the unknown amount of amortization acquisition-related intangibles, which are currently being valued by a third party and are expected to be disclosed when we report our third quarter results."