ICE’s mortgage technology unit has 60-year history in Jacksonville (Courtesy of the Jacksonville Daily Record) — A year ago, Intercontinental Exchange Inc. spent $11.9 billion to buy a mortgage technology company that dominates its field and has been entrenched in Jacksonville for almost 60 years.
Now ICE could be seeking city incentives to keep the business in Jacksonville and make it the national headquarters for its mortgage technology business.
An Office of Economic Development document released Oct. 4 said a code-named company is seeking $21 million in incentives and while the company has not been identified, ICE fits the description.
ICE, with headquarters in New York and Atlanta, is best known as operator of the New York Stock Exchange but it acquired Jacksonville-based Black Knight Inc. in September 2023 to expand its mortgage technology division.
With the addition of Black Knight, ICE’s mortgage technology revenue doubled in size to $1 billion in the first six months of 2024. ICE’s total revenue in the period was $5.7 billion.
ICE had a subsidiary that provided mortgage lenders with loan origination software but Black Knight dominated the business of providing technology for processing existing home loans.
Black Knight’s final quarterly report before the acquisition said it had a 63% market share of processing all U.S. first mortgage loans.
Predecessors to Black Knight have dominated that business for decades. It began in the 1960s in Jacksonville as a company called Computer Power Inc.
Alltel Corp. acquired Computer Power in 1991 and continued to operate the business in Jacksonville until 2003, when title insurance company Fidelity National Financial Inc. bought Alltel’s financial processing services business.
Fidelity was so impressed with the Riverside Avenue offices of the mortgage processing business that it decided to move its corporate headquarters from Santa Barbara, California, to the riverfront site after completing the acquisition.
Fidelity spun off its financial processing businesses into a separate company called Fidelity National Information Services Inc., or FIS, in 2006. Two years after that, FIS spun off the mortgage processing business into a separate company called Lender Processing Services Inc.
Fidelity bought LPS back in 2014 but spun it off again as an independent company with an initial public offering in 2015, calling it Black Knight.
Fidelity National Financial, FIS, and Black Knight were all separate public companies headquartered at the same Riverside Avenue campus.
Fidelity National Financial and FIS are Fortune 500 companies and Black Knight was by far the smallest of the three, in terms of revenue.
But because of its legacy in Jacksonville, it was by far the largest in terms of local employees with more than 2,000.
ICE and Black Knight would not say what the employment level was when the buyout was completed, but ICE said in February it was planning to upgrade the former Black Knight headquarters at 601 Riverside Ave., without giving details.
The OED document said the unnamed company is planning for offices to house more than 1,500 current employees and add 500 over seven years.
With the business’s long and significant history in Jacksonville, it would be quite a shock if ICE decided to consolidate its mortgage technology headquarters in another city.