Founder and CEO, Intercontinental Exchange
UW Major: Chemical Engineering
Jeff Sprecher ’78, founder and CEO of Intercontinental Exchange, is a trailblazer when it comes to digital networks and applying them to trading and marketplaces. He approaches challenges big and small — from fixing a toaster to rebuilding a Toyota to developing global trading technology — with an engineer’s mindset. “I’ve always been a problem solver; I’m just wired to fix things,” he says.
His entrepreneurial spirit and talent for troubleshooting led to a career transforming how energy, data, and mortgages move through the global economy.
Sprecher arrived at UW–Madison as an engineering major on a premed path. He says the university had — and still has — a strong reputation in engineering, and the discipline fit his personality. As a kid, he spent hours dismantling gadgets in the garage to see how they worked. As a student, he was more interested in understanding systems and solving complex problems than spending hours memorizing facts.
One of the UW’s biggest impacts on Sprecher? Lifelong friendships. “The closest friends I have are classmates from the UW,” he says. “We still get together every year.” He pledged the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity and recalls long winter walks from Langdon Street to the Engineering Building — which made the offer to start his career in sunny California even more appealing.
Before Sprecher could continue pursuing a career in medicine, he was courted by recruiters and accepted a job with Trane to design thermal-energy storage systems. He then spent more than a decade at Western Power Group, developing and financing power plants during a wave of energy deregulation. Seeing how fragmented the markets had become, he seized the chance to buy a failing energy-trading platform in 1997 and build something better.
Three years later, he launched Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), which grew into a Fortune 500 digital infrastructure firm. Strategic acquisitions and technology extended its reach. When the company acquired the New York Stock Exchange in 2013, Sprecher became the first leader in its then-232-year history without a background in brokerage or banking — an outsider’s perspective that strengthened a tradition-bound institution.
ICE’s work expanded beyond trading floors. In 2015, it entered the financial data and analytics space, providing pricing, risk, and market data to clients ranging from banks to governments. In 2020, it moved into mortgage technology, digitizing and streamlining key parts of the home-loan process. The platform now powers an estimated 90 percent of all U.S. residential mortgages. What once took weeks of paperwork now involves a mostly seamless digital workflow.
Today, the company Sprecher and his team have built spans the U.S., Europe, and Asia, touching nearly every part of the global economy.
Despite the scale of ICE’s global influence, Sprecher has maintained close ties to his roots. He visits family in the Midwest and served as a Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation trustee from 2014 to 2020.
“When you’re a student, you’re focused on assignments and exams and having fun,” he says. “It wasn’t until I returned years later that I saw how much the university contributes to the world.”
