Jeffrey Sprecher, head of Intercontinental Exchange, the Atlanta company that owns the New York Stock Exchange and several other key securities markets, got a $10.7 million pay package last year, down 1 percent from 2015.
Sprecher's pay has stayed about the same over the last three years, according to the company's proxy filing. Meanwhile, the company's stock price, revenue and profits have risen by roughly 45-50 percent over the same period, partly through a string of acquisitions. ICE, as the company is better known, last year reported a $1.4 billion profit, up about 12 percent from the previous year.
The 62-year-old founder and chief executive has won a number of “best of” awards in recent years, including being named last month as one of the nation’s best CEOs by the financial newspaper Barron’s.
Last year, Sprecher’s pay included a $1.05 million salary and $6.9 million in stock-based pay (same as the previous two years), a slightly smaller bonus of $2.6 million, and $160,878 in perks.
Other top executives at ICE also saw a slight dip in pay last year and generally flat pay for the last three years.
That was partly because ICE made few changes to the top executives’ pay formulas, although most except Sprecher got salary increases of roughly 3-4%.
Meanwhile, ICE significantly boosted its 2016 revenue and profit targets over the previous year’s goals for setting top executives’ pay awards. ICE hit the profit and revenue targets within a percent or so last year, according to the company, resulting in little change in the executives’ stock awards and bonuses.
Not that any of this means Sprecher needs to get by on ramen noodles and peanut butter sandwiches. As of last month he owned almost 1.3 million shares of ICE stock, currently worth about $393 million.
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