By Nina Trentmann

Scott Hill helped lead dozens of acquisitions during his more than 14 years as finance chief of Intercontinental Exchange Inc. as the marketplace operator spent over $30 billion on expanding its portfolio.

Companies acquired by ICE during under his tenure include the New York Stock Exchange in 2012, market-data firm Interactive Data Corp. in 2015 and mortgage-processing firm Ellie Mae Inc. last year.

Mr. Hill, who retired last week, talked to CFO Journal about the changing role of the chief financial officer, how to integrate an acquisition and the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on the mortgage market. Edited excerpts follow.

WSJ: What has changed since you became CFO in May 2007?

Mr. Hill: I really don't feel like I've been the CFO of the same company for 14 years. I've been the CFO of probably four or five distinctly different organizations. We started out in trading, moved into clearing futures and options, into cash equities, branching out into the data business as we moved into fixed income, and then really leaning on our [qualifications and capabilities as a technology company] as we moved into the U.S. mortgage space. What used to be 300 people are now close to 9,000 people; $150 million in revenue is now over $7 billion in revenue.

WSJ: CFOs at public companies these days manage more than just the numbers.

Mr. Hill: Any...financial person can make the numbers work and make the model tell you the output you want. But you would never walk into the boardroom with a deal if you don't understand the strategy that leads to the numbers. I wouldn't have been comfortable saying we should spend $8 billion buying the New York Stock Exchange if I didn't understand what the strategy was and how we were going to integrate the business.

WSJ: How do you successfully integrate a business?

Mr. Hill: Prior to this job, I spent 16 years at [ International Business Machines Corp.] and saw a lot of mergers and acquisitions...Some weren't integrated enough. Sometimes, it was almost bearhug to death. I think the most important element is we've gone into every deal with a very crisp integration plan. It doesn't matter how good your strategy is, it doesn't matter what the numbers tell you, if you can't execute the integration.

WSJ: Your bid to acquire the Chicago Board of Trade, a futures and options exchange, failed. Instead, CME Group Inc. merged with CBOT in 2007. What were the lessons you learned?

Mr. Hill: [It was] a failure in the sense that we didn't win the deal. We learned a lot in terms of how deals get made and the way how public companies come together. And so if you forward to the next deals we did, we were able to look back and...approach it a little bit differently, coming over the top of a deal versus [being] the first person to make the offer.

WSJ: What do you mean by "coming over the top"?

Mr. Hill: CBOT was our first public deal and it was hostile. We learned that with public deals, you have to control the message and we learned with a hostile bid, you have to be incredibly crisp in publicly positioning why your deal is superior.

WSJ: ICE recently spent $11 billion on Ellie Mae. What was the consideration for the deal?

Mr. Hill: The tipping point for the U.S. mortgage space was [Covid-19]. What was happening was that people were in their cars, handing documents through windows, and trying to work through the stack of papers. And when that work was finally done, it was equally hard to get to the county office and get that mortgage filed because nobody was in the county office because of Covid. It just screams for automation.

Write to Nina Trentmann at Nina.Trentmann@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

05-20-21 0903ET