MarketAxess Holdings Inc. (MKTX) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

All right. We're going to go ahead and get started here. For important disclosures, please see the Morgan Stanley disclosure website at www.morganstanley.com/researchdisclosures. Note that taking of photographs and use of recording devices are not allowed. If you have any questions, please reach out to your Morgan Stanley sales representative. That out of the way, good afternoon. Thanks for sticking with us here on day 1 of Morgan Stanley's Financials Conference. I'm Mike Cyprys, equity analyst covering brokers, asset managers and exchanges for Morgan Stanley Research. And welcome to our fireside chat with MarketAxess. And I'm excited to welcome Ilene Fiszel Bieler. There we go. CFO of MarketAxess. MarketAxess, as many of you know, is an electronic fixed income trading venue that started with a primary emphasis on credit markets and has since expanded into new geographies and new asset classes. Ilene, thank you for joining us, and welcome back.

Thank you for having me.

Great. So why don't we start with a little bit of a quick intro, Ilene, it's been a year since you joined MarketAxess and also a year since your first appearance at our conference. I think at the time, you were just a couple of days new on the job.

Yes, I couldn't believe you guys decided to put me on stage.

I thought that was Chris' decision. It was a game day moment when you decided to join us on stage. I think everyone was a little surprised. But now it's you. It's been a year. Maybe talk a little bit about your transition to MarketAxess and where you're spending most of your time and focusing now.

Great. Thank you so much again for having me. And it has been a really interesting and exciting year. I would say that the firm has evolved so much since I started. And my focus has really been in, I would say, 3 different areas. The first area, and then I'll kind of go through it a little bit. But the first area has really been on execution of the strategy and really being able to furnish our businesses with the right metrics, the right data and the right analytics to be able to drive execution. And what we're doing is we're taking those measures and those metrics, and we're driving them down further into the firm. And that's something that has been an evolution since I've been there, and we think it's been really helpful as we continue to roll out our new protocols, and we can talk more about that as we go along. But I would say, so the first area of focus for me has really been on helping the business to execute, like giving them the tools they need for decision management and to drive performance. So that's been one of the key things we've worked on. And I have a great team. I was very lucky, and they've been great with driving this forward. The second place that I spent a lot of time, and this I did very early on was really around capital deployment. And you may recall that pretty soon after I joined MarketAxess, I went to the Board and asked for a larger repurchase authorization than the firm had ever had. And I really wanted the optionality. We are such a cash-generative model, and I think historically, the share repurchase philosophy had really been more about offsetting dilution from issuing employee shares for compensation. And that's great. But I also felt like I wanted to have a bit more in my arsenal in terms of what we could do to return capital to shareholders. And so what you've seen, for instance, through May was about we've already repurchased this year like $60 million in buybacks. And that compares to just $24 million last year. And so I think all of last year, we did about $75 million in buybacks. So I really wanted to have that optionality. And I still have about $160 million on that authorization. It doesn't have an end date. We can do it over time, et cetera. But capital deployment, really looking at how we were utilizing our capital and making sure it's as accretive as possible for shareholders was a key area of focus for me. And so those are the first 2. The third area was really what I think of as good corporate hygiene. MarketAxess for a long time has been investing, which is great. This is a business that you need to keep investing in, and we will continue to invest in that business. But I also wanted to look at a way that you started to see us last year really practice good expense discipline and expense management. And how can we do more of that? So one of the things you saw us do is we brought on Pragma. We have top-notch technologists from Pragma. And what that's allowed us to do is really be able to flex their expertise across the firm in a way that allows us not to perhaps maybe hire more people to do some of the engineering and things that we're able to do with Pragma. And so really making sure that we're looking at our talent and utilizing our talent in the best way has been an important part of that. But even just regular way sort of vendor management and looking at what can we do? Are there places where we can switch out in our technology vendors, for instance, and our team has really been looking at that from an efficiency perspective. So how can we continue to free up dollars to invest so that we can move forward, but do it in a way that is very productive and efficient for the firm.

Great. Why don't we shift and talk about volumes, market share. On the first quarter conference call back in May, you noted the macro environment remains supportive for volumes and market share into early May. Can you talk about what we saw in April in a period of heightened uncertainty, how that fared into the month of May as the environment normalized? And what are you seeing so far here in June?

Yes. So I think everybody who's in the Market world and is watching what's been happening knows that in April, we saw a real uptick in vol right? If you looked at where the CVX was on average in April for high grade, you saw that at about 56. High yield was about 390. I mean you saw some really, really high numbers for vol relative to what we've seen in the prior 2 years, right? So that was something that in April was very clear. Now in May, interestingly enough, you saw that normalized some. Now we're still at levels that I would say were elevated from what we had seen for the prior 2 years. But for instance, that CVX 56 number came down to about 33, which has been about the median this year in terms of what we're seeing in vol on high grade. And then for high yield, that came down to about 190. So you definitely see a difference in volatility. But what has been so interesting to me in terms of the macro environment is even with this difference in vol, what you're also seeing is an incredible amount of velocity going through the system, right? Volumes have been up pretty much across the board. And while they ebb and flow month-to-month, you're still seeing elevated levels of volumes. And a lot of that is being driven by what you're seeing in terms of the turnover and what's happening in velocity. So I think from a macro perspective, we saw through May still really nice volumes and elevated velocity. And then I think probably the last thing that we've been looking at and that we pay a lot of attention to is what's sort of happening in the rate environment because that obviously helps to drive what traders do in terms of how far out on the curve they're trading. And that -- the forward curve has kind of been all over the place, right? I mean it's -- we started the year, people thought there would be 3 or 4 cuts than it was 2 or 3. And I think the most recent probabilities were giving you 1 or 2, right? And so we're looking at those differences as well and kind of put all of that together, spreads, I think, the only thing I haven't commented yet in terms of macro is spreads. We obviously saw spreads widening considerably in April. That came back in a little bit in May, but not as low as we had necessarily seen previously. So -- but definitely a step down in terms of tightening of spreads. So all in all, I think the conditions that we saw were -- have been relatively favorable, although we obviously saw a significant change between April and May.

Your comment on velocity and turnover being a bit more elevated and sort of sustaining into May is an interesting one because people have been talking about prospects for a pickup in velocity for many years now. I guess how do you think about the prospects for that to sustain as we move forward? And were you surprised that it sustained in May?

I mean I think if you look at the volumes, we know they came down a little bit in May, but they were still elevated from what you saw the...

Particularly on a year-on-year basis...

On a year-over-year basis for sure. And so I think what has happened is, in some ways, the electronification of these markets has made this possible, right? And that, I think, is a big driver. And that bodes well, right? We'll have to -- obviously, we always have to wait and see how things go. But I do think that having the electronification that we've seen is allowing that velocity to stay at perhaps levels that are higher than what you would have seen just a few years ago.

Great. Why don't we shift and talk about market share, the implications we talked about volumes now market share. I guess what are the biggest needle movers here for accelerating your investment-grade market share? Again, it was pretty robust in April. I think it was flat sequentially into May.

Actually, in May, market share was up high grade.

Up on a year-on-year basis. Yes, but flat sequentially month-on-month. And then rebounding in high yield, how do you think about the prospects for that as well in terms of the time frame there to see even continued strength in investment grade. What sort of backdrop would you need for that?

Yes. And I would just say even in high grade, though, I just want to say we did almost get to 20%, 19.9% in high grade in May versus it was about 19.4% in April. So we were even up on a month-over-month basis, just saying. But -- and that's actually an important point that I'll come back to later. But what -- here's how I think about the business and how when I came in, in the first year, I think I needed to get a real sense for how do I structurally think about growth and how we're driving things forward. Because there's a lot of protocols and there are certain things that are coming online that are very exciting, but I wanted to understand how does it work sort of by client channels? How does it work by -- if you think about there's horizontals and there's verticals, and folks have heard me say this before. The verticals are high grade, high yield, EM, EU, and that's where you see share most readily. But what we've been doing is really driving our business through channels that horizontally across all of them. And that's important also from a technology rollout perspective because we are building technology now that can cross all of those asset classes or markets within credit. And so you've got the client-initiated channel, right? And that is our bread and butter, what we've been so good at for so long, RFQ, Open Trading, and then one of the key pieces and protocols that will help drive -- we expect to help drive continued share there is our block trading protocol, and I know we can talk more about that in a bit. And that's sort of part of -- we think about as part of the client-initiated horizontal. Then you've got portfolio trading and portfolio trading in and of itself is also -- could be considered part of client initiated. But because there's been so much focus on it, we like to break it out and look at it separately and really measure it and focus on it as its own channel. And then there's dealer initiated. So think of those 3 areas. If you think of client-initiated as being maybe 60% of the market in high grade and you think of PT as maybe 10% and then dealer as 30%. We've got opportunity in the high-touch block protocols that you've heard about us rolling out within the client-initiated channel to help with market share there to drive market share. We are now at a place with PT, and I'm happy to go into more on this in a bit, where we feel we are feature complete. We've had to sort of get ourselves into a place where we can be really competitive with our functionality, and we feel very good about that now with PT. There's always going to be more to do, but we feel like we're now on the front foot there. And then dealer is a place where we have a lot that we can still achieve, right? We're very nascent in the dealer market. So that -- those are areas where we think there's still quite a bit of market share growth for us.

Great. And we're going to dive into each of those. But maybe just first on automation. In the first quarter, we saw record automation volume, nearly 250 companies -- clients, excuse me, have onboarded so far. So maybe just remind us how these algos work and how this is changing trader behavior and your outlook for further adoption?

Yes. So automation is really interesting. And someone in one of the meetings earlier today said to me that they're talking about -- we've always seen systematics in the -- in other marketplaces, right, like in the equities market and other -- and now you're starting to hear about systematics in credit. And what do systematics need to be successful on the other side, they need the algos. They need automation. And that's really great to hear that you're getting sort of that -- the buy side of the systematics becoming more and more excited about the algos and automation on our side. So if I think about how our automation suite works, there's sort of 3 main areas right now for us. There's Auto-X, which is our kind of first-generation automation. That's the 250 clients that you're talking about. And that's really where people are able to request for quote and really do it in an automated way, and we see great data insights that are very helpful for them with that. And data is such a key differentiator for us across all of these different protocols we're talking about. It really makes a difference for MarketAxess is our data. And then the next generation of that is what we call Adaptive or ADX, and that's really a smart router system of algo where you can place your order and then the algo will tell you the best place to go with it. Where you're going to get the best price? Where is -- are you seeing the deepest liquidity? And that -- think of it almost as like your self-driving automation, self-driving algo. And that's a place where we feel good we've got about 80 clients now that are onboarded there. And then we've got kind of the dealer algos is like the next component. So you're seeing a lot of consistency and synergies between all of these different protocols and things that we're doing. And that's also exciting is that the business model is really coming together, and that is something that we think is also going to help us drive where we want to get to.

Great. Why don't we shift and talk about blocks. You referenced that earlier. Your high-touch block trading solution has shown some early success in EM and also on eurobonds, which you had launched late last year and earlier this year. What specific features or elements there would you say have resonated in the marketplace with your clients? And can you talk about the further rollout ahead for other geographies and products, including your recent launch here in the U.S. for a high-touch block solution in U.S. credit?

So Chris has probably been talking to you guys about blocks for a while. It has been a real focus for him, particularly when you think about the electronification and the next stage of electronification of the credit market. And that block space is really the next frontier for us in terms of electronification. And what we've done with blocks and just to your point about EU and EM, which has been very exciting in what we've seen in volumes. So euros, obviously, eurobonds on a much smaller base. But even in May, we saw a 116% increase in volume in Eurobonds locks. We saw about a 24% increase in EM. And that was after sort of 88% increase in April and about maybe 27% or something like that increase in EM in April. So you're seeing some pretty nice consistent numbers of increases in volumes in our block protocols. And so what did we do in EM and EU that is helping to drive that? Well, we launched just at the end of last year. So this is still relatively new. You know that these things take time for adoption and rollout. But we did it in a way that I think was very, very smart. We went into markets where we took time, we worked with our clients and we said, okay, what are their needs? Well, they want to know what the Axess are, right? What are the dealers' Axess? What are the inventories, what do they have? And we worked with dealers in those markets to get the Axess, and we worked on that for quite some time. So you've got sort of 3 components to why block works. You've got the Axess and having that information. You've got the technology and making it so that they could go target it to just a few dealers through our platform, which is something we hadn't had in the past. It was new technology that allowed them to feel more confident that we were minimizing the possibility for information leakage, and that's something you hear about in blocks, as though, we don't want to do the block because as I am trying to say because everyone will know what it is. Well, we've now created a protocol that helps minimize that concern through our targeted block solution. And then the third piece, which is really, I think, kind of the thing that really wraps it all together, the functionality that wraps it all together is our ability to truly give them best pre-trade analytics, the best data through CP+. CP+ really does an incredible job of looking at what's on our platform, what's happening in trades, what's happening in other places to really give as close to real-time pricing as you can get in the credit markets. And so it has been -- when you put all of that together, we've seen very, very good reactions from clients in EU and EM. And I think those numbers that I just told you kind of merit that out. So in the U.S., what's exciting, we've only launched it 2 weeks ago in the U.S. It's small still. We're working with our clients. We're building the Axe content. We obviously -- the really great data and analytics that we have is already in place. So we're really excited about the opportunity set in the U.S. It's early days, but we've learned a lot, I think. And for instance, one of the things we also learned in the U.S. that's a little bit different than in the other markets is that in the U.S., they may want to go just to one dealer. So we've created the functionality that they can do that, click one dealer, one dealer. So we really did everything to replicate what it would mean to be on chat. So that it's comfortable for people to change behavior into a more efficient workflow by doing this electronically through us through our block solution. So we're pretty engaged on this.

And curious why start in EM and Europe versus the U.S.?

I think it's just -- we decided to go to those markets. It's where we had good Axe content. It's where we felt that we had sort of all 3 of those components that I was mentioning were in good -- it was in a good place, and we just thought that, that was a good market to -- those were good markets for us to start in.

And maybe CP+ being a big part of the EM business, too, to your point. Okay. Why don't we talk about portfolio trading. You alluded to that earlier in terms of area of focus, and it sounds like you've completed the build there, which is great to see. Your market share, I think, has grown to over 20%, but it can be a little volatile, I think, on a month-to-month basis. What's driven the success there? And how does your portfolio trading protocol today stack up versus the competition? Where is there room for further innovation that could help expand market share from here and also further adoption?

So I think for us with portfolio trading, it's certainly no new news that we needed to play catch up there. And it is -- we are at the place now where we feel we are feature complete. And that doesn't mean, by the way, that there won't be enhancements, right? I think the one thing we know for sure is that there's always going to be innovation, and we want to stay ahead of that innovation curve. But what we're hearing now from our clients is that we are at a place where we are feature complete and they have what they need, whether it be net hedging, whether the variety of different things that benchmark PT. There were certain things that we needed to add on, and now we're at a place where we have what they need. And that's been great. And as you mentioned, you're seeing that come through in the numbers. What is really important to us, though about our -- all of the investment and everything we've done in PT because to be frank, PT is not your biggest revenue TAM. It's just not, right? The TAMs we have for blocks, the TAMs for dealer are multiple x of what it is for PT. But why PT is important besides the fact that it's -- we want to be there for our clients, which is very critical. If they want to use it, we want to provide it, right? We have talked about being protocol agnostic, and that is really, really critical for us. So we want to make sure that regardless of the macro environment, whether it's low vol, high vol, lots of velocity, sustained or not, what our clients need to trade, we want to be their go-to platform for that. And we want -- and that's what we mean when we say protocol agnostic that however they want to trade, we've got the right protocol for them. And if that's the tee, we're going to be there. The other thing that's really important to us though about PT is those traders who are trading PTs are often the same traders that are trading the blocks. And so we want to be on their desktop. We want to be giving them what they need. We want that functionality to be easy for them and direct. And so that's also a lot of why we spent so much investment and focus in portfolio trading. And to your point, it's -- we're seeing really, really nice results there. I do think what is different for us, again, it's our data, right? We still have the ability to give them the best insights, the best pre-trade analytics, the best data that you can get through CP+. And I think that's also making a difference. So we needed to build the functionality. We have the data. We needed to build the functionality and now we've got both.

Anything from a feature standpoint? I know you're feature complete, but further enhancements you alluded to, anything sort of comes to mind on that front over the next couple of years?

I mean I think we're going to continue to see if there are other tweaks and things that our clients are looking for. The guys in product are really on top of this and looking at it. You probably have seen we have announced a number of new hires over the last few months. We have Spencer Lee, who joined us as the Head of Product. He comes from an EMS as well as from a large dealer in his background, right? We know that we're seeing 90% of PTs over X-Pro now. And for instance, right under Spencer, we also hired a new head of client solutions, who is really focused on X-Pro. He also comes from the dealer. And so that is for us a big focus. Is on making sure, we've got the right people in the seats who can be on top of innovation and are also very well connected to both the buy side and the sell side. That you are seeing a lot of focus on talent for us as well?

And is there more to go in terms of key hires?

We actually keep going. We hired as when we start to talk about dealer we hired a new person to dealer business for us that has a new area. We are calling it DealerAxess, which is another area that we didn't have before. He's been us for probably a little less than a year now, maybe 6 months. So that's another new hire. And you probably also saw we hired a new chief operating officer. He hasn't started yet. He is going to be in London. We're very excited about that. I think...

He is from a very large London-based...

Correct. Correct. And he'll also be running the EMEA and APAC businesses for us. And he's fantastic. We also hired a new co-head of North America Sales. She has incredible depth of knowledge in the credit markets, and she's joining up with someone who's already at the firm who also has incredible relationships in the market to co-head it. And so I think what you're seeing is us looking at people who are truly innovative on the technology side as well as people who are good on the credit side. I mean that's what we need. We need to put that together. So we've made a lot of really -- as I said when I started, we've made a lot of positive change over the last year.

Right. Maybe just final thing on PT. You mentioned net hedging. That was something I think you guys rolled out within the PT suite earlier this year. Just anything to speak of in terms of notable traction, uptake on that? I know it's probably a little early...

It's a little early. I mean people have been positive on it, but it's -- again, it's just another thing that we wanted to have to really round out the offering. And so far, we've just been hearing positive feedback.

Okay. Another offering or sort of new offering from you guys is the Mid-X platform is expected to relaunch in the U.S. in the second quarter using the Pragma technology. So I guess the question here is, how is the revamped version going to compare to what you've had in the market previously? What's different with this? And what differences might we see in terms of reception uptake in the U.S. versus the Mid-X solution that we've seen from you guys in Europe for many years that has been successful over there. And Mid-X, just to clarify for everyone is the sessions-based. It's mid-market matching amongst dealers, dealer solutions.

Amongst dealers -- so it's in that dealer-initiated horizontal channel that I was talking about, right? So we keep talking about what's within client initiated, that's RFQ, Open Trading, blocks, then we talked about PT and now dealer. You've moved on to dealer initiated. So thank you for following my rubric of how I think about driving the business forward. So we think it's going to be a third quarter later this year launch for Mid-X. And we are -- we also by the way launched it in Asia as well recently. And so we really see this as we've been working with the dealer community, really understanding what they need, what they're looking for. And that has been the driving force behind what they're looking from a mid-market matched protocol. And we're excited for the rollout there. It is an area where there is opportunity for us, and we're really -- we have dealer RQ, but it's just not a space that we have played in a big way. So it gives us a really good opportunity to continue to drive forward. And so that's exciting. Again, we'll be able to provide great data. We're really going to be able to help dealers with getting out of risk. They have [ exhaust, ] they have risk, if they want to get out of. They don't want to cross spread and we're going to be able to provide them with a protocol that will do that for them.

Great. Maybe shifting gears to emerging markets, which has become a larger part of the business today. I think probably your second.

It is our second largest...

Largest business now. Which countries are the biggest contributors, would you say to that? How does the business portfolio look sort of when you peel under the hood there? And as you look out over the next couple of years, which countries could see a meaningfully larger contribution and talk to some of the steps you're taking?

So EM is a great business for us. I love that business. That's actually another place where we hired and he's been there for about as long as I have. We also have a new head of EM over. He sits in London, and he's fantastic, and he has a very good partner that he works with in Asia as well. And we are in about 30 local currencies there. And if you think about what it takes to be successful, right, our biggest currencies for the most part that you asked about are Mexico, Brazil, South Korea, Argentina, Malaysia are probably some of the biggest ones.

Malaysia?

Yes. Yes, we are. And so think about how we've created a real network and relationships on the ground. So the EM business is broken up into hard currency and local. Hard currency for us is about 60% of the business. Local currency is about 40% currently. There is more opportunity in local. And hard currency, as you're probably aware, is think of that as I'm a local corporate and I'm issuing in dollar, euro, yen, right? That's hard currency. And then there's all the local currency opportunities for us. And we -- we're there. We've been there. Think about every time you're trading in one of these markets, you need a certain license for the most part, depending on how you structure it. None of these things are overnight. It takes a while to build up the kind of EM franchise that we have. And we have a great network. We've got great liquidity. Think of it this way, too. Let's say you have dealers in investment grade, maybe you need 5. That in EM, because you're dealing with -- to make it happen with local currencies, you need to have relationships with all those local dealers. And so this is not hard and fast, but I'm just giving you order of magnitude. So for the 5 in investment grade, you need 25 in local, right? And so we've been building those relationships for years, for years. We have great relationships with our clients. You've seen our growth. I think volumes year-to-date are up 14% in emerging markets after a few years of things being -- EM had a tough road for a while. And then, I think, our most recent May numbers were up about 18% in volumes. So we've got a block protocol that we talked about. We've got a PT protocol. We have something really, really interesting in the market that is, in some ways, they'll tell you if you talk to our guys over there, the [ gem ], which is request for market versus request for quote. Request for market is you might be asking about a certain bond at a certain price, but you're not saying what direction you're going in. So you're not necessarily divulging I want to buy this, I want to -- and it's yet another protocol that works incredibly well in that market from a client perspective. And that's been, in fact, a driver of some of the block activity as well. So overall, I could go on and on about the EM business. It's a great business. We always are looking for ways to see what we can do there to expand and do more, but we're really very happy with that business.

Just curious on the topic of EM, when you sort of peel under the hood in terms of the volumes, is it emerging market clients trading with each other? Or is it a lot of the volume coming out of like Europe and the U.S. that's trading amongst each other for emerging market? Or like who's on the other side...

Yes, yes. I think -- I mean I think it's certainly...

Mystery there.

Yes. No, it's a good question. I think there's more to be done on the locals. There's more to be done there. It's certainly -- for us, if you think about hard currencies and you think about the fact that we're a global firm, you have a lot of global players as well. So I just think there's kind of opportunity across the board.

Got it. I know we have just a few minutes left. Just wanted to see if there's any questions in the room from anyone. If not, we can keep going and talk about competition and pricing, big topic.

For the last 2 minutes...

People's mind. Just curious how you see the competitive landscape evolving as you look out over the next 3 to 5 years, whether it's newer players, new technology solutions, dealers trying to establish direct connections. And maybe we could tie in there how you're seeing pricing evolve. I know one of the competitors out there recently made some changes to dealer pricing in credit. I guess, in what scenario might MarketAxess sort of reassess and adjust?

Yes. So I think, obviously, pricing has certainly been a question that we've received and understandably so. And again, I look at pricing as pricing within the channels that we talked about, right? So client-initiated portfolio trading and dealer. And pricing within client initiatives and client initiated in our core traditional RFQ business and Open Trading has been very steady. And you have a certain amount of fluctuation that you'll see based on, in particular, high-grade macro-driven duration trade, right? And so we know that weighted average years to maturity, if we see an additional year in high grade on the platform, that can be worth, call it, $15 in fees per million. And for -- if yields if we see those come in about 100 basis points, that can be worth call it, 3 to 5. So you're always going to get some fluctuation from the macro in terms of what you see in high grade. But that's not pricing pressure, right? That's fluctuation based on the [ DDO1 ] and what we need to see in understanding how to translate a spread-based business into dollars so that we have the fee protocol there. And our pricing has been very, very steady beyond, for the most part, that situation of the macro piece of it. What I think you've heard Chris say before and is certainly not new news is some of these other newer protocols. They come in at different prices than that traditional business. And so we know that PT comes in lower. And so as you know, this is a little bit of the irony, I would guess you could say is that you want to see the market share in PT. Now for us, we also actually want to see PT because of the opportunity in block trading, and that's where the revenue opportunity is for us. But we also know that PT comes in at a lower fee capture. And dealers are sensitive, and so you're going to see some sensitivity within that space as well in those protocols. But what I think is really critical to keep in mind is that is a mix. That's about mix. That's about bringing on new products, new protocols within these channels that we have not been in before, that we haven't been doing before. So it's the opportunity for incremental revenue. And that's about mix. That's not about sort of fee pressure. Those are very different concepts to me. If you're keeping your rate card for the most part on your core business relatively static and the fluctuations there are based on macro and could go up as well as down, but also you have opportunity based on the macro, that's not fee pressure, right? That's not -- but these other pieces are about mix. But we are very excited about the opportunity to have incremental revenue in those particular protocols.

Great. I'm afraid we'll have to leave it there. We're out of time. Please join me in thanking Ilene for joining us.