NASDAQ To buy or not to buy the share? NDAQ Analysis & Overview

AG

Ato Garrett executive

Good morning, everyone. So I've spoken to many of you, but for those of you who I haven't met or had the chance to speak with yet, I'm Ato Garrett, Senior Vice President and Investor Relations Officer. So thank you for joining us here at Nasdaq's 2026 Investor Day.

And before we begin, just a quick reminder for everyone could take a look at your phones and other electronic devices and put them to silent.

Now before we begin, I do have to read a disclaimer. So I would like to remind you that certain statements in this presentation and during Q&A may relate to future events and expectations and constitute future forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Actual results may differ materially from these projections. Information concerning factors that could cause actual results to differ from other forward-looking statements is contained in our periodic reports filed with the SEC.

This presentation also contains non-GAAP financial measures. And you will find the applicable reconciliations included as a separate file posted to our IR website, together with complete management presentation slides from today. Please take a quick minute to review the safe harbor language on the screen now. I'm sure you've all read that quickly. All right, all right. And thank you again for joining our Investor Day.

And we're going to start our presentation today with an overview video of Nasdaq before you hear from our Chair and CEO, Adena Friedman. Thank you.

[Presentation]

AF

Adena Friedman executive

All right. Well, that was a fun way to start the day. Well, good morning, everyone, and welcome to Nasdaq's Investor Day. Thank you all for being here, both in person and online as we spend the morning to talk to you about the power of the Nasdaq platform. We want to talk to you about our view of our vision, our strategy, our growth drivers and the execution priorities that are going to propel us forward into the future.

But before we do that, we want to talk about some of the themes that have underpinned our strategy over the last 9 years, starting with a speech that I gave 12 years ago when I first got back to Nasdaq. I'd run the data business for 9 years earlier in my career. So my first speech when I got back to Nasdaq was to a community of data professionals. And the title of my speech was Data is the New Fuel of the 21st Century.

Now 12 years ago, cloud technology was just starting to scale. And it was really unleashing the power of data because it was collapsing the cost of data storage and exponentially expanding compute capacity. But at that time, fewer than 12% of banks view cloud capabilities and cloud technology as the future foundation of their infrastructure. But there were some leading firms out there who had embraced cloud, and we're bringing data together in new ways with algorithmic AI to drive automated trading and investment decisions.

So my message to that community of data professionals was very clear. There's enormous power in the data that resides within the financial system. Data is the lifeblood of the financial system. It is a fact, I would say, that the financial industry is the most data forward industry in the world. But at the same time, with that, there's this unleashing of opportunity with these tools, there's also a risk that we had to manage. One bad drop of data could have huge ramifications across the markets.

So the data community, including Nasdaq, of course, we have to focus on resiliency, accuracy and security of that data to ensure that it truly can be unleashed in a safe and secure way to power the industry forward as technology was advancing.

Now that message 12 years later is just as important today as it was back then, if not more important. Now as the industry was moving forward, there are 3 technologies that we really have defined as being those that will transform the industry over time. And in fact, as part of our strategic framework, every single year, we ask ourselves the same question. What are the technology trends that are going to redefine the industry over the next 10 years? And 9 years ago and every year since then, there are 3 technologies that we've really focused on, although there are others that we've identified as well.

The most consistent though have been cloud, AI and blockchain. So 9 years ago, we started to accelerate our cloud efforts. We've been an early adopter of cloud, but we started bringing that technology across every one of our client-facing solutions and our markets as well as our internal operations to power our business forward.

With AI, we had just launched an AI team when I became CEO, but we've really started to scale the AI team and partner them with the business to create AI capabilities across our solutions in our markets, and we were able to accelerate that even further with the acquisition of Verafin. And with blockchain technology 9 years ago, we started experimenting with blockchain in our markets and started integrating digital asset capabilities into our market technology solutions.

So as these technologies are propagated across the industry, there are new themes that have emerged. And one of the most relevant themes is just the interconnectedness of the financial system today. Trading desks were suddenly starting to be merged, asset classes are converging, geographies, the world is becoming smaller. And really, the interconnectedness of the financial industry is quite different today than it was even a decade ago and certainly 20 years ago.

And so what does that mean? It means that our firms, our clients have new growth vectors, new ways to expand and drive value to their investors or to themselves. But at the same time, there's new risk and complexity that has come into the system.

The first is that there's been a convergence of markets and market structure. That creates regulatory complexity as our clients are going into new geographies, new asset classes, new ways of scaling their businesses. The second is that they have to think even harder about protecting themselves against very sophisticated bad actors. So that risk and complexity combined with the interconnectedness of markets and the financial system has really powered our strategy over the last 9 years, and we'll continue to power it into the future.

So what have we done over the last 9 years? Well, today, we sit fully scaled in cloud across our internal operations, our client solutions and our markets. We have scaled our AI team across our businesses and have integrated AI into our solutions, and you're going to hear a lot more about that today from our leaders who are really driving our product road maps with AI in really unique and powerful ways for our clients.

We have integrated blockchain and digital asset capabilities across our market technology solutions, and are now deploying that for our clients and we're ready for the next steps in terms of tokenizing equities of our markets and other markets around the world.

But they, our clients, are really focused on making sure that they have trusted partners as they manage their lives in this ever more complex and interconnected system. We, as a critical infrastructure provider, we are highly regulated. We stand in their shoes. And they, therefore, trust us to be their partners as they are transforming the business, and we are transforming with them.

So who are we today? Today, Nasdaq is the trusted fabric of the world's financial system. And we have 3 key pillars to our strategy. We architect the world's most modern markets. We power the innovation economy, and we build trust in the financial system. And as we have executed across this, we have really driven both the transformation of our business. We are a transformation to our partners and we have transformed our financial profile.

Back in 2020, so over the last 5 years, we've gone from $2.9 billion of revenue to $5.2 billion of revenue, a 13% revenue CAGR. And we have also generated an incredible and exceptional financial profile. With that $5.2 billion of revenue, we have a 56% operating margin, which has generated $2.2 billion in cash flow, 109% cash flow conversion, truly best-in-class in our industry and across the sector. And a really fun fact is that in 2025, we had $2.9 billion of operating income, whereas we only had generated $2.9 billion of revenue 5 years earlier.

And as we've gone further into the data and software space, we've also started to measure ourselves with that software metric of the rule of 40. In 2025, Nasdaq was a rule of 70 company. There are only 18 other companies in the S&P 500 that are a rule of 60 at scale, and we are one of them. And not only are we really in that, a great company within the S&P 500, but we also run well ahead of our peer groups in terms of across the software sectors and the data and information sectors.

And we have an enormous opportunity in front of us. We have a $38 billion SAM and an $86 billion TAM that powers our business, and both have strong growth vectors. And the growth of SAM could accelerate with AI as it pulls more of those manual workflows into an automated state. And that is one of the big opportunities that we see for Nasdaq. We are extremely well positioned to capture the SAM and the TAM with the markets we know, the clients we serve and the capabilities that power us forward.

So let's go further into those capabilities and those strengths. So we have our 3 key pillars of our platform, the trusted system, the innovation economy and modern markets. So we create the next generation of market infrastructure. We connect capital with opportunity by bringing data and analytics together to bring corporates and investors together in a more seamless way. And then we minimize risk and complexity with our regtech and other fintech solutions that really help our clients manage risk as they're going and managing their lives in the financial system.

And we bring 4 key strengths to our solutions every single day. The first is an embedded client community. The second is gold standard data that powers almost every solution across Nasdaq. We also have integrated client solutions that we've built that are fit for purpose and provide mission-critical capabilities to serve our clients. And it's underpinned by an amazing team with engineering excellence and a One Nasdaq culture.

So let's talk about each of those strengths, starting with our clients. Nasdaq serves almost every major constituent group in the entire financial industry at scale. We have 10,000 corporate clients, 5,000 asset managers and asset owners, 3,800 financial institutions and 135 markets and regulators, all of whom rely on Nasdaq for mission-critical capabilities to help power them forward. And we are their transformation partner. They're looking for precision and execution, absolutely, absolutely necessary. They're looking -- they know that their cost of failure is extremely high. So they want trusted partners who understand that resilience and security are paramount to anything that we offer them. They want to take the journey with us as we take it with them to power them into the future in a resilient, secure and modern way.

And we underpin that client community with this incredible intelligence platform. So Nasdaq has been working very over many years to modernize our data management and create an intelligence platform that really underpins the solutions that we offer our clients. And it starts with the data layer. We, of course, generate a lot of proprietary data within Nasdaq across our markets, our index businesses, and you'll hear more about this, but deeply embedded in the actual solutions that we offer, we have a lot of proprietary data that we've garnered to drive and to kind of underpin the logic and the capabilities of our solutions.

But we also bring in data from our clients in what we call contributory data, consortium data, those are 2 words that mean that we bring client data together across a solution and are able to drive intelligence and insights and capabilities within that solution because the data is brought together in a unique way. And that creates network effects within our solutions that drive better outcomes for our clients.

And then we also then go deeply embedded into our clients' internal operations to draw out certain client data that powers those risk management solutions, powers their trade operations, powers really critical components of their businesses, and they see us as a trusted partner to normalize that data through our orchestration layer to standardize it, to entitle it, to permission it to secure it and make it so that it is fit for purpose for the application layer that we then build to serve them in very specific needs across risk, across trading, across analytics, across investments. It's very, very, very exciting, what we are able to offer them with this modern capability.

And then on top of that, we have built an intelligence layer that we are going to hear about from our CTOs and from our businesses where we're really extracting more value out of the data by bringing data together in new ways to drive new insights and create predictive capabilities that really is kind of the next generation of what we're able to deliver to our clients. And that is, again, very exciting.

But we do all of this at tremendous scale. We bring in a trillion records into our surveillance solution every day. We process up to 1.8 billion banking transactions every week in our Verafin solution. We have 500 billion messages that flow through our markets every single day. And in our eVestment platform, we represent $90 trillion of assets under management with 110 funds and strategies -- I'm sorry, 110,000 funds and strategies that are within that platform.

So everything is at scale, everything is critical, and we're really, really proud to be able to serve our clients with great capabilities. So let's look at the core capabilities. So this slide represents the data and software solutions we offer our clients outside our markets, our indexes and our listings. These solutions represent about 40% of our revenue. And as we consider what is it that really makes them special, it starts with that gold standard data that cuts across the vast majority of our solutions.

We then provide mission-critical capabilities to our clients that allow them to get onto the field and stay on the field so that they can be successful. We deliver every solution in a hypersecure, hyper-resilient manner. We have depth of integration and connectivity with our clients that is really, really embedded across our platform and across the industry, and we have domain expertise engineered into these solutions that then ultimately, combined with everything, generates a very strong return on investment for our clients. And Sarah will provide you more details as to how we calculate that.

But we're really, really proud of everything that we do in a world where precision is absolutely critical. The cost of failure is very high and it is a highly, highly regulated business. So as we march into the next era, the era of AI, the question we have to ask, we have, first, we have an incredible team that underpins our business. And we have engineering excellence across network engineering, software engineering, data science, all of the key skills that we need to be able to be that transformation partner to our clients. We also have a great culture. We say we like to attract missionaries, not mercenaries to Nasdaq. We want people who are dedicated to the mission that we serve in our industry, and we want people to feel that they are here to build their careers.

And as a result, among our top executives, kind of our broader executive team, we have 13 years of average experience here at Nasdaq. And we bring in amazing talent every single year to drive the next generation of what we are creating, and we operate as One Nasdaq. We bring our capabilities across our 3 divisions to generate flywheels that drive our business forward because they drive client value. And you're going to hear about 3 flywheels today. One is in our listings business. By bringing in the most innovative companies in the world to Nasdaq, we are -- it provides benefits, tremendous benefits to our trading business, our data business. It then allows us to create these really unique index assets that drive incredible returns to shareholders that have grown and scaled and become a bigger and bigger part of our business, but also a bigger part of the investment landscape that then make it even more interesting for those great innovative companies to come list on Nasdaq.

In the regtech space in mission-critical solutions, we are the transformation partner across these solutions. But one of -- it starts the foundation of us being a critical infrastructure provider ourselves with the need for us to be -- we are highly regulated, we are highly resilient. And because we stand in the shoes of our clients, it changes the relationship we have with our clients. They see us as a partner. They see us as someone who can help them. They see us as someone who's really melded in with their mission. And that has really driven our cross-sells and upsells across our fintech solutions in really interesting and exciting and novel ways.

And then with the next generation of markets, 23/5 is our first step with tokenization of equities to create an Always-On market infrastructure for the future. And that will generate enormous flywheels across Nasdaq. It will open up access to new investors. It will drive that resilience in that market infrastructure across the world. It will make it so that we have more institutional engagements in other parts of the world, which then creates demand for our fintech solutions. And so that, again, is a new flywheel that we are really, really excited to talk about today.

So as we march into the future, we're ready to be that partner. The question that we always ask ourselves is, are clients ready? Because what's interesting is we have clients who are at very, very different stages of their own modernization journeys. And we are here to be their partner in every stage of that journey.

So the research that we've seen shows that 88% of our clients are -- really have started to use AI inside their organizations in some way, but only 7% of our clients have been able to generate AI capabilities at scale within their infrastructure. And the question is, what's holding them back? Well, the first one is a lack of confidence in securing the data and the outputs that the AI generates. The second is that they need to have a very clear return on investment in terms of their investments in AI. And they have not yet been able to generate that across every use case. And the third is just complexity, complexity within their own operations, complexity within their technology, complexity of the system that makes it harder for them to kind of bring that technology and harness it in a way that allows them to create value for themselves.

Their enterprise requirements are pretty high. So as I said before, precision is expected and the cost of failure is high. They want trusted partners for mission-critical capabilities with a strong return on investment. They want experts in secure, compliant and resilient infrastructure, and they want to be able to reduce complexity of their manual intensive workflows.

And Nasdaq is an incredibly well situated partner to serve their needs. We have authoritative data. We have a cloud-native and resilient platform. We have hyper focus on security. We have deep market expertise. We are built for speed and machine-to-machine capabilities, and we have trust with our clients. And that creates an opportunity for us to be that trusted transformation partner in their next leg of their journey into the world of AI.

And just as we are bringing AI across our solutions and to our clients, we're also implementing AI within Nasdaq to drive productivity and efficiency across our platform. Sarah will talk to you later today about our ambitions and our goals. And you'll hear more about what that means from our technology panel that comes right after me. But we are very excited to see AI. We call it AI on the business and AI in the products. Both of those are critically important to us, and we're very excited about the path forward.

So let's talk about that path forward. We have 3 key themes that you'll hear throughout the morning of how we're going to grow and expand our business. Well, the first one is expand. So the first theme is expand, the second is evolve and the third is transform. So in terms of expansion, we want to continue to drive our current solutions across more clients and geographies. That will underpin achieving or exceeding the $100 million in run rate revenue by the end of 2027 that comes from cross-sells. And Tal will provide you more details on our progress there.

It also -- we have so many of our solutions that are just tapping into these new markets, whether it's our data or index business. Our index business is really focused on driving institutional adoption and geographic reach. And all of those things are really sit squarely inside our expand pillar.

Within evolve, it's about creating new capabilities within our products to bring more of the TAM into the SAM. So automate those workflows inside our platform, create AI capabilities that make our clients more efficient so that we can be a bigger and better partner to them as they are managing their lives and driving more automation across their businesses. It's very, very exciting, and you're going to hear some really exceptional examples of how we're doing that today, leveraging AI, but we also have other ways to expand our capabilities, too, that you're also going to hear about.

And then the last one is transform. We are here to be a transformation partner, and we're here to transform the industry, transforming the industry with Always-On markets, starting with 23/5 trading and tokenization, bringing public market capabilities into the private markets to drive transparency, liquidity and integrity and then also continue to transform our client experience with AI over the longer term.

And as we execute across our growth pillars and as we bring this incredible platform to our clients, we're very excited to be able to raise our medium-term outlook on our solutions business again. It is the fourth time in 5 years that we're raising our outlook, and we're so excited and confident about our path forward and what we can do to drive more and new value to our clients that then, of course, benefits us and benefits our shareholders.

In addition to these great solutions businesses that are going to power us forward, we also have a lot of growth drivers within our markets business, and you're going to hear about that further today. First, just the power of being in exceptional markets and what that does in terms of our ability to manage our competitive positioning, our pricing and other things that really drive value. But then we have our proprietary index products. We have the 23/5 trading and tokenization and other innovations that we're bringing across the markets to grow and expand our presence around the world.

So together, across our solutions businesses, across our markets, we are extremely excited about our path forward and our future as we execute our strategy and serve our clients.

So as you leave here today, I'm hoping that you come away with 3 key messages. First, the fact is we have this incredible platform to win. So the first is that we are the trusted fabric of the world's financial system, and we have a powerful differentiated platform that allows us to operate in different market environments. We are our clients' transformation partner, and we have deeply integrated solutions underpinned by gold standard data that drives unique benefit to our clients and unique capabilities that we can deliver to our clients today and into the future. And we have an exceptional financial profile with financial strength and disciplined execution that should create long-term value for our clients and long-term shareholder value and compounding value to all of you.

So we cannot wait to continue the conversation. You're going to hear next from one of our clients. We have several test testimonials. The first is from Penny Pennington, the CEO of Edward Jones. She's going to talk about the power and the value of the partnership that Edward Jones has with Nasdaq.

And then we'll have Brad Peterson, our Global CTO, come up on the stage and have a panel discussion with our technology experts across Nasdaq.

So thanks again for joining us. I cannot wait to have this morning together. Thank you very much.

[Presentation]

BP

Bradley Peterson executive

Thank you, Adena, and welcome to the technology panel. On the panel today, we have Brenda Hoffmann, who runs our market services and fintech technology organization. And Hazel Dalton, who is running the Verafin technology organization. If you were here 2 years ago, you might have recognized them because they run our technology panel that time.

We have -- so welcome back. We have Don Beery, who's a long-term veteran of Nasdaq, running our global technology operations and infrastructure. But Don took a new job last year. So he's head of accelerating our AI innovation and implementation, working directly for Adena and with all of us.

Angie Ruan, she's a returnee to Nasdaq. So she had a stint as a technology executive at Chime. And while they were private, they're now a Nasdaq-listed company. And she's been back for 2 years running the Capital Access Platform Technology group.

So this panel represents all of the architects and builders who are building the platform, the Nasdaq platform that Adena referenced. So we're representing them. Let's do a great job. We've coordinated our -- we picked 3 technologies, and Adena talked about 3 technologies and we do look at a dozen technologies. We always refresh them. We picked these 3 for a reason because you'll see they go together quite well. But also, they have had significant material impacts to Nasdaq's business and to our strategy.

And it's well chronicled. The first one, so we call these our 3 technology vectors. We'll be referring to those, and we'll talk a little bit about each one. The first one, though is well chronicled, our leadership in cloud. We pioneered being able to store with our regulators, store regulated data in the public cloud. And we went on from there and moved all of our products and our internal systems, but the final frontier was really moving our markets to the cloud. And Verafin was not part of Nasdaq yet, but you are a cloud-native company, and we'll talk a little bit about that.

The second one, we haven't talked publicly about as much, which is data and our intelligence layer. And this is an investment that started actually by the same people who pioneered moving the data, the regulated data to the cloud. They're still with us today. They're still added today, and we first did this internally for our Market Services business and really got the scale out of all those messages Adena talked about. So it's been going on at the same time. And here, we've unlocked -- we've used this layer to unlock the value of the data that was really in products. So we've got tremendous value there. It's also how we create data consortia. And it's a great meeting place. If you think about the neutral meeting place, the cloud turned out to be -- before, if you wanted to share data, you had to figure out whose data center do you punch through their security firewalls. This is a great neutral zone. It allowed us to do that. And finally, it was the -- it prepared us for AI. It turns out both of these, and that's why they go so well together, are prerequisites for really unlocking the full value of AI, so we're well positioned there.

The third and final technology vector is AI. And Nasdaq formed an AI team 10 years ago, and we were motivated by the improvements in AI computer vision. And then we were further inspired when Google open-sourced Bird for language processing. And it's still -- it had rudimentary improvements, but it was -- the T is transformer, which is the invention that led to the ChatGPT moment. That's the same T in ChatGPT.

So we were -- of course, the world changed and everything is accelerated in November of 2022. But we really saw that the next phase of this, it's -- we've all been using these consumer search and answer chatbots, that enterprise agentic AI is very different. And it happens to be -- it happens that it need and require the same skills and capabilities that we perfected moving our markets to the cloud. So if you think about it, low latency, chatbots really have to be optimized. They are not performing when you're building autonomous enterprise agents that you're counting on. Second one is scale performance. Third one is world-class security. So think about it, you want to know where these agents are, what they're doing.

And then the other one is resiliency. We're now talking not about getting answers but about doing real work. So you want to make sure they're coming to work every day. You want to make sure that the last one is quality. And of course, that's chronicle the quality, you really have to engineer to get good quality. And so there's a lot of improvement there. So we're well positioned from the work we've done moving our markets to the cloud, we have the talent to thrive in this environment.

So what we're going to do is Adena talked about our first part of the last vector is going to be on the business. So how are we using AI to improve Nasdaq. And Don and all of us and the leaders are prioritizing so we get the most benefit as soon accelerated because the world is -- continues to go faster and faster and the capabilities improve every day.

So first off is how we build our products. And that is a big population, and it also our PDLC, we're applying it to get benefit there. The second one is really client success and support. And then ultimately, we'll get the whole business will -- every function will benefit from this.

The second area is in our products. So every Nasdaq product has an AI opportunities in their road map. We're talking about 2, but the business leaders are going to be talking about many more during their presentations.

BP

Bradley Peterson executive

So since the last one, Brenda, you're up first. You've been very busy having you. And so let's talk about modernization of our markets and moving to the cloud.

BH

Brenda Hoffmann executive

Absolutely. So since last time you were here with us, we have moved 3 more of our options markets to our Fusion platform. And for those of you who may not know what the Fusion platform is, this is our modern, state-of-the-art, most performant technology that we have, and we've built it for our markets. And we now have 7 of our 8 options markets running on that platform. We have 1 more to go this summer. And when we finish that this summer, it's going to mark a major milestone in our journey to have all of our markets running on the platform. So it's really great.

And if you think about the platform, and you're wondering why did Nasdaq choose the most challenging and difficult markets to take to the cloud first, why did we do that? And the answer is, from an engineering perspective, everything Adena said and Brad said, our organization is geared around excellence, engineering and to solve the most difficult problems. First, it allows us now to have a platform that we can use for any market anywhere in the world because of those performance metrics.

And our clients, let's talk about them. They really love the platform, not only for the best-in-class performance metrics that it has, 19 microsecond latency, and it's processing millions of messages a second. But why they like it is every market that's on the platform, their experience with connecting to it, writing to it, writing their algorithms, machine to machine to us, it's the same experience. So the clients like the consistency and standardization of how they connect to our markets. So it's been really great.

And that technology finally, and Kevin will talk to it later today, Kevin Kennedy, is it also has allowed us to capture the growth in the last 2 years. So the markets have performed really nicely.

BP

Bradley Peterson executive

Yes, great progress. So Don, I said you're a veteran. So let's talk about how important the cloud is to preparing us for AI. And Don was chosen because we really want to put AI into our core. We don't want to put this into the periphery of our business. We want to put it into the core because that's where the value is going to go. So I think you were the perfect candidate to lead this.

DB

Donald Beery executive

Thanks, Brad. So as part of the leadership in our 12-year journey to go to the cloud, I can share with you all that. Before you can realize the true value of AI, you have to be in the cloud. And we all remember that financial services was slow to adopt cloud technology, right? So they were looking for a trusted technology leader, one that was deep into financial services. And of course, that was Nasdaq. We were the trailblazer. And Brenda, we were focusing on outcomes, right? So we want to build a cloud platform low latency, reliability, but it had to be able to survive failure even to the region it was connected to.

And that gives us our Nasdaq cloud platform. It's built on Nasdaq operational excellence, which means it's national infrastructure grade. Every day, it delivers low latency matching and supports the billions of messages that are proprietary protocol. And now with the rise of AI, we're reaping the benefits of our early decisions to move our markets, our markets intelligence platforms to the cloud. So our early leadership in cloud is one of the reasons we're leaders in AI.

BP

Bradley Peterson executive

Brenda, I think we also have an update when we first were here, or 2 years ago when we were here, we just bought Calypso and AxiomSL, they were in the early stages of moving from on-prem to the cloud. So maybe give us an update on the progress you've made there, but let's broaden it to all the fintech products.

BH

Brenda Hoffmann executive

Absolutely. So when we think about our fintech products, we have been accelerating, accelerating and accelerating. No product in our fintech product suite has been left behind as it relates to us migrating to the cloud.

So let me start, 2 years ago when we were here we were talking about taking our AxiomSL and our Calypso engineering teams, and we were integrating them into our Nasdaq engineering teams. And we completed that. And Calypso now, in addition to its Oracle Cloud offering, we built an AWS cloud offering for Calypso, and we are starting to take our clients there.

For AxiomSL, we have advanced there and accelerated there. We have 80% of all of our new clients in the last 2 years are choosing and going to our cloud platform. Our NTS, which is our Nasdaq Trade Surveillance System has made significant progress in the last 2 years. We have 79% of 182 clients. So it's almost 80% of our 182 clients are running on the cloud platform. So that's huge, that's a huge progression in the last 2 years.

And then finally, for our market tech products, we call those our Eqlipse products. That's our trading, clearing and custody systems. All 3 of those products are cloud enabled, and we expect to have 11 clients running on those cloud platforms by the end of this year. So we've made some great progress. And it demonstrates, again, to everything Adena said, we have the expertise, we have the experience, we have the know-how. And we are our clients' trusted transformational partner. They are selecting us to take them to the cloud. So it's been really great.

BP

Bradley Peterson executive

We went there first. So they know we can do it. So Hazel, I'd like to invite you in. So how has the cloud set you up? And love to talk also about that -- we're moving to our second vector now, the strategic data consortium that you -- or consortia that you've built.

HD

Hazel Dalton executive

Nasdaq Verafin is really proud of the foundation that we've built in the cloud. We have been fighting financial crime for nearly 2 decades, and we pioneered our move to the cloud in 2011. That gives us 15 years of deep experience with cloud technologies and with that normalization specific to financial crime management, allowing us to build out our consortium data set.

Today, our highly scalable platform hosts just over 2,760 clients from community banks and credit unions to Tier1s, Tier 2s and G-SIBs. The sheer scale of our data consortium is impressive. Our clients collectively represent $11 trillion in assets, and our platform analyzes up to 1.8 billion transactions weekly to detect illicit activity and stop fraud in real time. These numbers really show how we've grown and evolved. Our cloud-first approach and the scale of our data has been key to differentiating Nasdaq Verafin as a leader in our space.

BP

Bradley Peterson executive

So how has that, the data consortium fit in?

HD

Hazel Dalton executive

We've built a unique, labeled financial crime data set, our consortium data set from across our client network. We believe that the quantity and the quality of this data set is what allows us to effectively train our AI and machine learning models. And this data set is key to unlocking advanced AI technology for our clients. By analyzing patterns in the data, we are able to detect risk insights, reduce false positives and improve our true fraud detection rates.

In practice, this means that our clients spend less time chasing false alerts and more time stopping real threats. We've created a true network effect. Every new data source. Every new client, every new integration makes our system smarter and more performant. And that provides a tangible ROI for our clients that Stephanie is going to tell you about later today.

BP

Bradley Peterson executive

Yes, as it grows, it gets better. I love that. So Angie, since you've been back, and we put the different groups together into cap. You saw the opportunity to build the data and intelligence layer as well there. So tell us about that.

AR

Angie Ruan executive

Yes. As Hazel talked about the Verafin's consortium data, I'm very proud to say that Capital Access Platform also operate with one of the richest data ecosystem in the industry. It starts with our own [ '19 ] exchange, and thank you, Brenda, for sharing the data with us. And index data, the alternative data and institutional investment data that asset allocators relies on each day. It's probably utilized by some of you, and thank you for coming.

We have 30,000 public market strategy and 80,000 private market funds. It represents more than 90 trillion in institution assets. It's a remarkable footprint. Well, let me tell you, the real power isn't just the data itself. It's how we integrate the data and our business together through the entire division and turn them into shared intelligence, which you call it the intelligent layer that Adena and Brad all kind of talked about. This is an enterprise strategy across and all of you guys building this all together.

So it is an engine that unify the data and sew it together and turn them into shared intelligence across the entire division. It's one thing is that it's a reflection of the high demand of actually our data by our clients who are embracing AI. Another thing, I'm proud to say it is a reflection of the engineering excellence for builders and architects like us here.

It starts with the data discovery and data governance, foundational capability for the data platform. And we also have other critical services. We standardize the entire data pipeline. We ingest normalized process and publish them into the trusted governed data sets, and we eliminated the multiple data pipeline and ensure a consistent data center across the entire division. We have AI service, data enrichment, classification service and turned around the data into product ready insights. All of this capability together drives efficiency, quality, and even growth, may not be obvious, but even growth.

BP

Bradley Peterson executive

Well, I like the growth side. So why don't you tell us more about the growth.

AR

Angie Ruan executive

There's a flywheel effect when we combine the data sharing and expertise together through this platform. And let me give you a recent example. We just launched the Nasdaq first private market index, and our platform securely shared with permission and governed and standardized the eVestment private market data to the index expertise. So index people can discover and know what kind of data have and put it into the index. Not only the buildup of this index is a lot faster, but also ensure the high quality of index.

So this type of sharing of data across different multiple business and [ created ] the new innovation, and we call it a growth story. I'm really proud to say this is just one of many stories.

BP

Bradley Peterson executive

Thank you, Angie. Thank you. So Brenda, you have differentiated data or, as we're saying, gold standard data. So it tells us about the data that comes off our systems.

BH

Brenda Hoffmann executive

Sure. So as you know, and as you're hearing from everybody, we have just a ton of data. And in our fintech products, the data used to be stand-alone and locked within those products. So we took a platform approach to unlocking that data. And we did that by extending our platform layer that we use for our market services to our -- to these fintech products. So now all of the data is unlocked. And of course, it's in that data layer in a secured protected permission encrypted way. And it is allowing us now to enhance our products while we evolve them with AI. So very powerful.

BP

Bradley Peterson executive

So we're going to move to our final vector, the AI section and start with AI. Don, you're going to lead us off with AI on the business.

DB

Donald Beery executive

All right. So with 12 years of sustained investment in cloud computing, machine learning and AI, this team has built an engineering organization that's truly ahead of the industry. And there's a saying, you take a picture yourself with your circle of friends because your friends are amongst the strongest influences of your future. If you take a picture of Nasdaq, you're going to find the 5 of us standing shoulder to shoulder with cloud and AI leaders, innovators, start-ups. And together, we're inventing and innovating this new agentic infrastructure. And these relationships give us access to cutting-edge technology and these great AI thinkers, but it's our shared vision that allows us to build future proof, best-in-class products.

And so what we're doing for our engineers because there's a lot of rapid engineering going on is we've built the Nasdaq Gen AI platform. It's a secure, foundational scalable platform that provides a consistent way of kind of framework to protect our data and then there's engineering to it. And I'll give some examples.

Agent registration, giving your agent an identity for authentication and authorization. That way you can manage and audit your agents. Observability, so you can see agent health, data health, AI behavior. Kill switch, so you can pause, kill or roll back a unique agent or a fleet of agents that are part of a common deployment. And this is just a sample of the governance that's important to deploying national infrastructure level of agents.

But I think when we talk about product development life cycle, the PDLC, within Nasdaq, we're reimagining all of these processes. We're not trying to do the same thing faster through automation. We're fundamentally looking at development, operations and all of our processes with an AI-driven mindset.

BP

Bradley Peterson executive

So in your old job, give us an example. I think you were working on that. That's part of why you were enlisted here.

DB

Donald Beery executive

Yes. So wherever there's a process, there is an opportunity for AI. And whenever there's a long or a complicated process, there's just more opportunity for AI.

So in my previous role, there are teams of engineers that are studying complex screens and running challenging technology platforms. But now with systems in the cloud, we're reimagining these processes with AI. We're tying together systems and data, and we're deploying this year hundreds of agents globally to thousands of agents by the end of 2027. And these agents will not look at screens. They're going to listen to signals from our systems and infrastructure. They're going to react real time. They're going to collaborate with one another. They're going to extend our availability and reliability. And ultimately, this is going to unlock an immense value for Nasdaq and our customers. And Sarah is going to hit on that later in her presentation. But there are a lot of projects. Brenda, you're working on a lot of projects across a lot of businesses, and I think you should share one of yours.

BH

Brenda Hoffmann executive

Yes, sure. Thanks, Don. So yes, I'll share one example. And as Don said, we're doing a lot of work across all of our products. All of our products use a product development life cycle approach to how we build them. So one of the products that I thought would be good to take you through is our Nasdaq Trade Surveillance product. It has 200 different alert types, and that platform is being fed by 239 global markets. So if you think about that, every time one of those global markets changes one little teeny element in their data that we receive into our platform, from an engineering perspective, we need to assess that change, we need to look at that change, understand the impact of that data element change on the 200 alerts that the platform is cranking on.

So to do that with the engineering team, we challenged that engineering team last year, and we said, can you look at your product development life cycle, you engineers, and reimagine it with AI in it. And so that was last year. They came back around the end of last year and they came back with 12 different agent types that they could put in their process. And we deployed 4 of them, and we've been running 4 of the 12 and they are around requirements. So every time something is changing somewhere, we have requirement agents looking at that, working in the process. And then the other 3 are around testing. So test creators, test validators, test analyzers. And those agents are in the process doing that work with the engineers.

So we have 4 of the 12 deployed. And with that, we are seeing approximately 20% reduction in cycle time, higher productivity and the engineers are now able to look at the next agents we want to look at, but also about doing higher value work in the product. So we are -- the engineers are really excited about this. And Angie and Hazel and I are sharing across our teams and working together on how we're going to move forward with all of these.

So Angie, I know you want to share some thoughts as well.

AR

Angie Ruan executive

Yes. Thanks, Brenda. Agentic engineering have been really a game changer for us. We have switched from more mundane tasks into the creative engineering or the system engineering, like Brenda talked about, looking the whole system altogether. I just want to double-click on what you were saying. We're sharing -- partnering shoulder by shoulder, like that, partnering shoulder by shoulder together with you all, sharing in this phase of the transformation, it's really a power of us to make that as enterprise grade. In autonomous world, engineering excellence becomes even more critical, yes.

BP

Bradley Peterson executive

And let's switch to the last section, which is in our products where it's even higher stakes because we're delivering out to our customers.

So Angie, why don't you start with your example?

AR

Angie Ruan executive

Earlier, you probably heard me talk about our differentiated set, incredible. And our power of the platform that drives the flywheel effect. We see AI as the accelerator of the flywheel. Let me give you one example of eVestment, and one of our products, we call it AI-ready data and for our client. And I'm not sure if any of you guys are using it, but let me explain.

For institution investor, for our clients, they have to make complex investment decision, and they rely on our eVestment data as their trusted source. And as everybody trying to embrace AI, guess what, they want to embrace AI, they want to use our data and their own first-party data to do the AI analysis and do take -- ask the machine to get help on this analysis.

However, they struggled in the past, right? They struggled because the data are unstructured, some of the data are unstructured, the charts, PDFs and management comment, it's easy for a human to interpret, but it's harder for machine. The reason behind this, even with the latest large language model, the default AI [indiscernible], we break the content or the unstructured content into odd places. And the AI will -- will not get the right answer.

So we took this problem head on. So first, we invented a new data transformation mechanism, and it is patent pending. And second, we leverage our platform to build an agent. And for each document, the unstructured document, we leverage the agent to automatically transform the unstructured, messy content into clean, context aware AI-ready data that is more reliable for AI reasoning, meaning they're more reliable for AI to read. The human can read, but now AI can read.

So the result has been remarkable. We have seen more than 50% relevant answer and 70% more token efficient. What's this token efficient is actually AI compute efficient cost, so 70%. So when our clients getting this data, integrating into their system, what they are getting, high accuracy, lower cost on their compute and far better experience when they're doing AI. Since the launch of this product late last year, we have seen really strong early adoption from the largest asset managers in the world. In fact, they were reaching out to us. "Hey, can you help on AI efficiencies?" And they believe embracing AI for them is an accelerator for their business, an accelerator for their business. And of course, it is a growth for our business. One client said, the bar has been raised for a meaningful impact on our productivity and data coverage. Again, this is just one of our examples.

BP

Bradley Peterson executive

And quality, again, is so important. Hazel, we're going to finish with you, and you've got some exciting things to talk about the agentic workforce. So I'll let you go and just tremendous progress there.

HD

Hazel Dalton executive

So as you know, Brad, Nasdaq Verafin has been an AI-driven business since day 1. And that means we have 20 years of experience, more than 20 years of experience taking a data-driven approach to applying AI to anti-financial crime. We have a deep understanding of the financial crime landscape. And just as importantly, we have a deep understanding of the unique needs and workflows of our clients.

In 2025, based on that foundation, we launched the Agentic AI Workforce, designed to target rising operational costs and manual repetitive tasks and compliance workflows. It's a truly transformative new technology and product offering for Nasdaq Verafin.

So what is the Agentic AI Workforce? It's a suite of workers designed to use the advanced reasoning capabilities available in the latest large language models to complete analysis, document results, even make decisions, just as a human analyst would. Instead of countless hours completing manual repetitive tasks, our clients are able to focus on deeper investigations, strategic analysis and proactive risk management. It's a fundamental shift from repetitive, reactive workflows to an intelligence-led approach to financial crime.

We're not just bringing our clients better tools. We are providing our clients with entire AI empowered teams that work alongside human analysts to dramatically improve outcomes in the anti-financial crime programs. We've seen strong adoption of our first 2 agentic workers, the agentic enhanced due diligence analysts and the agentic sanctions analysts. And we're excited to work with our clients in 2026 to work to prioritize our road map into the end of this year and beyond. I'm also excited to continue working with Brenda to bring these technologies to the Nasdaq trade surveillance product for the benefit of even more Nasdaq clients. Nasdaq, with our deep domain expertise and our background in working with AI is uniquely positioned to lead the AI evolution and bring this revolutionary technology to market.

BP

Bradley Peterson executive

Thank you, Hazel. So you can see that these 3 technology vectors are driving our strategy and our ambitions with the cloud, our leadership in the cloud, we've got an agility and the ability to scale the data, and the intelligence layer has allowed us to unlock data that was previously in our products and then the ability to create these incredible data consortiums. And finally, the preparedness for AI. And we mentioned our Gen AI platform, which is allowing us to embed agentic AI in both our products and our operations.

So as you think about the acceleration of investment that you've got the hyperscalers and the big AI labs continue to invest at unprecedented amounts, there's a forecast that says that AI inference and agentic AI is going to overtake training as the majority compute power for AI. So we see that as a great opportunity. We believe this is the next phase. And we're ready to innovate, to lead and to shape how you build agentic and the trust of that in our industry.

So you can see from the panel up here, you've heard all of this is done with great professional pride, engineering excellence and from a culture of operational excellence. So thank you.

We're going to queue up a client video from Franklin Templeton, and then you're going to hear from Nelson Griggs about capital access platforms.

[Presentation]

NG

Nelson Griggs executive

Well, good morning. It is certainly wonderful to have not 1 but 2 client testimonials for CAP before I even start. I'm thrilled today to talk to you about 3 areas that underpin our confidence for the CAP division to continue to deliver to our shareholders long-term durable growth. That's going to be how we power the innovation economy. I'll then move into how we are expanding, evolving and transforming our division. And lastly, I'll be discussing how that translates into our medium-term revenue outlook for the division.

So let's get started with our financials. In 2025, we delivered $2.1 billion in revenue, and that came from our 3 reporting segments of Data and Listings, Index, and Workflow and Insights. We had $1.3 billion in ARR, and that's growing at an annual rate of 5% -- or 7%, sorry, over the last 5 years. It's important to note that the vast majority of index revenue is not included in the ARR number.

Over the last 5 years, we've had 11% annual growth for the division. And this has been very consistent, and I think speaks to the durability of our revenue that we are delivering that has come during a pandemic, election cycle and extreme market volatility.

In 2025, we achieved a 60% operating margin, and that is 800 basis points higher than just 5 years ago. And so we have very strong expense discipline in the division. We also invest for the future. Primarily, I'll highlight today index, our global expansion and as well as that, our AI capabilities that we're investing in.

So now let's take a look at the solutions that power this innovation economy. It was truly wonderful to hear from Penny, from Edward Jones talking about the fact that they see us as having a history of trust and innovation, talk a lot about our domain expertise. The data division is truly firing in all cylinders, and I'll talk about that quite a bit today.

In listings, we saw some momentum pick up in 2025, and we're very encouraged about the pipeline we have for 2026. So we're optimistic about the work -- sorry, the Data and Listings segment.

When we look at Workflow and Insights, in corporate solutions, we are delivering governance solutions, IR as well as sustainability solutions to our clients. In analytics, it combines eVestment, Data Link, Nasdaq Fund Network and Nasdaq Fund Secondaries, and we're seeing particular momentum in eVestment as well as Data Link.

To round out the wheel here, our index business. The Nasdaq 100 is truly becoming a core growth asset for investors across the world. And that's driving significant AUM growth for our entire index portfolio, which in turn is generating more trading activity in the derivatives area as well as demand for our index data.

And the markets these solutions are operating in are large and they're growing. So today, we are penetrating 7% of our TAM, 22% of our $10 billion SAM, and that SAM is growing at a rate of 7% over the last 5 years. We're obviously focused every day about how we take greater SAM penetration, and we're seeing those opportunities, again, in index, in data, Data Link, eVestment. We're also looking at areas where we're going to bring more of the TAM into the SAM and long term, grow the TAM.

So you heard about this a lot on the last technology panel, but I'm going to go a little deeper. And [ Andy ] did a wonderful job of setting this up, but the CAP intelligence layer is truly our advantage in the AI world.

So the platform is a unified intelligence layer. It normalizes, it links and enriches all of our gold standard data. We have embedded institutional grade security, governance, entitlement and traceability of the data, so we make sure that data is properly used both internally and externally by our clients.

So the model takes the gold standard data, gold standard data you're seeing coming from not only our internal engines, but also our consortia data, and it brings that data in one time. And through permissions, we're able to use that data across our entire product portfolio.

One of the most important aspects of this, though, is the sophisticated areas that we bring this data to clients. This includes low latency feeds. We have a rich catalog of APIs and most recently, embedded MCP servers to deliver AI-ready data to our clients. This is truly, truly differentiated for our data business. So the important part of this, this is not a data lake, it is truly an intelligence layer we have embedded our domain expertise, the AI-ready data for our clients, but also AI workflows as we build products. So our entire team is so excited about this capability because what we're seeing is near 100% reusability of our data across our product portfolio.

We're bringing more product to market more quickly and the quality of that product continues to get better and better through AI technologies. And we believe that this is the foundation to us leading in an AI world.

Another real big enabler for the division is our communities. Adena highlighted that the mission of CAP is to connect capital to opportunity. And the clients that we do that across the world is very scaled. We have 5,000 asset owner and asset manager clients, 10,000 corporate clients, thousands of data clients, and that data is being used by billions of end users to make informed decisions on a daily basis. So having strong communities helps build our brand, it helps us build trust, it creates stickiness with our clients, and also gives us access to do more with our clients and engage with our pipeline.

So to put that in practice, with corporates every day, we are helping them gain visibility in the marketplace, engage with their investors through our corporate services and truly have world-class governance. We then think about the investment community that the corporates care so much about, we're helping that investment community through eVestment, making informed decisions every day. They're using our data on a daily basis to again make these informed decisions, and we are truly bringing world-class index products to the marketplace that also our corporates rely on.

So throughout any given week, and even a month, year, we're having -- continuing to have advanced thought leaderships who will bring the portfolio -- the personas together to learn from each other and really connect and convene these communities. And now we're seeing more opportunity than ever with the advancements in private markets, Always-On markets that Adena talked about and obviously, advanced technologies. So our communities are really powerful enabler for the division.

Now I want to turn to our flywheel. So at the top of the flywheel is how we're attracting the most innovative companies in the world to list on Nasdaq. We strengthen their performance in the public markets through our corporate services. We provide them the deepest liquidity pool in the world with the best trade execution, and this is a true partnership with our market services team, and Tal, you'll hear more about later today. And the deep liquidity pool provides us very rich trading that in turn gives us data to monetize throughout the world. That data gives us rich IP to create these indexes we're talking about. And now we're leading in enabled Nasdaq 100 options that Kevin Kennedy, who runs U.S. Transaction Services, will spend a lot of time talking about today. The growth of that business is truly fantastic.

So this flywheel is really driving the innovation economy. And for CAP, it provides these deep, deep corporate relationships. For the last 7 years, we've won the listing race, raising more capital on Nasdaq than any other U.S. market. This gold standard data that the engine produces is growing tremendously, and let's us monetize that throughout the world. And our index business is just a true juggernaut. So this unique IP, we get off this engine, this flywheel let us create more and more indices that are attracting more and more AUM to that business.

So our flywheel is truly special. At the top of the house, though, and I'll have a little extra enthusiasm here because I started in this business 25 years ago. But this chart here shows that U.S. domiciled market cap in the U.S. and our growth here in market share growth is truly phenomenal. 20 years ago, we were at 20%, roughly 20% market share. Today, we're at an astounding 50% -- 56% market share of U.S. domiciled market cap on Nasdaq. That growth is truly fantastic. And we are winning this race by having a world-leading brand, the deepest liquidity pool, these corporate services help our clients succeed, amazing index products, and it really is a true One Nasdaq effort to bring clients to marketplace.

And on the right-hand slide, we'll brag a bit more here. We have 8 of the top 10 companies by market cap in the world, 8 of the top 10. When we look at our switch business, we have brought over $4 trillion in market cap from the New York Stock Exchange, 25% of the Nasdaq 100 is comprised of switches. And over the last 7 years, we've led the market in the U.S. here with capital raised on our -- on the Nasdaq market. And over the last 3, we've had the largest IPO of the year. So this business is very well positioned. We are excited about the 2026 pipeline. We can't control market volatility, but the pipeline is probably as diverse as I have seen in many years. So again, we're optimistic.

But it's not just the U.S. where we lead. We have an amazing listing franchise in Europe. We are truly the envy of the European markets when it comes to listing activity. And you'll hear more about the trading quality from Tal when he speaks. The reason why this is the envy in Europe, it's actually growing. We've had an 87% growth rate in the number of listed clients in this marketplace over the last 20 years. Last year, more capital was raised in the Nordics in any other European market, 3 of the top 5 listings occurred on this market. And what's unique about it is not only the fact that it's a very deep liquidity pool, large, large expansion investor reach. But the economy in the Nordics is probably as close to the U.S., you can get in all of Europe with a very rich innovation culture, a very rich equity culture, and that's driving this liquidity and then driving these listings to our marketplace.

So the combination of our U.S. listing and European listing franchise, I think really speaks to where we sit at the heart of this innovation economy. And I could not leave this section without pounding this one a bit more about our flywheel and talk about the large exchange transfer in history.

Last December, Walmart switched to Nasdaq. That relationship started before the listing analysis. So they were a data client with their OnePay JV solution and their U.S. brokerage operations. They were using our corporate services to engage with investors. And then when they did the analysis, they really saw the power of the Nasdaq 100. They did an exhaustive review on trade quality and saw that we had the deepest liquidity pool and best trade execution, and came to the conclusion over time, this will lower their cost of capital. And I'd say the icing on the cake, but actually was super important was they wanted to partner with a technology forward exchange that was powering the innovation economy much like they are doing for their clientele. So this was a real big Nasdaq one effort we call it. But we bring that to our clients, our listed clients every single day across our entire opportunity set.

So now I'm going to move on to how we are driving growth with inside the division across the 3 pillars that you've heard about: expand, evolve and transform. In expand, we'll dive in a bit more to the data and index business. In evolve, I'll spend a bit more time on our AI capabilities and how we're driving results for our clients. And lastly, in transform, opportunities that we see in the private market space as well as Always-On markets and market modernization.

All right. So let's start with expand. In expand, I've talked about the data business, but as mentioned, it's truly, truly firing on all cylinders. When we look at the above return growth rates for the data listing business, this has been a big driver of that, and we see continued momentum. You saw in the video with Edward Jones, we take a real strategic approach to our clients, to us about how they use our data to grow their business, and we're seen as a wonderful partner in that. And I did talk about obviously, the intelligence layer. The key in that is the frictionless delivery of our data to our clients, this expertise we have in machine-to-machine intelligence delivery.

So in addition to that, we have 3 key drivers that we're excited about for the growth of this business. When we think about retail, and Kevin Kennedy will talk more about these trends. We believe the change in retail investment is a structural change. According to a recent JPMorgan study, in 2019, 10% of U.S. trading activity was retail-driven. Today, that's north of 25% on a daily basis. And we're very well positioned here with the proliferation of growth of retail investment portals, retail trading venues. We are going to continue to capture more and more activity through the growth in retail.

Last Investor Day, I talked about our plans around geographic expansion and also our enterprise licenses. So under geographic expansion, we have been very strong in the APAC region for years with our data growth. But now we've seen overall the data from international, the revenue from international expansion grew to 9% over the last 2 years. But last year, it actually accelerated to double digits. An area I had highlighted was the Middle East. We're going to focus on our sales and marketing there as well as other select geographies. And we've had success throughout the last 2 years in the Middle East. But this last Q4, and this will dovetail well into the enterprise licenses, we signed one of the largest financial institutions in Saudi Arabia to an enterprise license. When you start to do that in a region, you get this [ fomo ] effect, and it really enables us to find more and more clients like that. So we are very excited about our opportunities and data to grow our international revenue.

And under enterprise licenses, here's where I'm going to refer back to Penny at Edward Jones. She talked about how we are providing a more simplified infrastructure at a reduced cost. So the move to enterprise licenses for this business is truly a win-win. Our clients are getting benefit. But for Nasdaq, these are premium priced products, and they have more [indiscernible] revenue streams. So we're very focused on transferring more and more of our clients to enterprise licenses. So across the data businesses, ability to continue to drive this excellence across the very part of the clients, the combination of retail, geographic expansion and enterprise licenses gives us very, very strong confidence in this business to execute.

And now I'm going to turn to our index franchise, which has grown in revenue, 155% and over the last 5 years. I want to turn to the chart here and describe the revenue mix between AUM and non-AUM businesses. Last year, the part of the chart that shows our AUM growth, that is now over 70% of the AUM or the revenue growth of the business or the revenue mix. So we look at that revenue mix in a strong constructive market, we do see the asset piece having a larger portion of the revenue. But in a less constructive market, we would imagine that would move back to the more trading side of the business and the mix would shift a bit.

And this, again, speaks to really the durability of this business. And I want to highlight 2022 when the Nasdaq 100 was down 33%, but the index business still reported 6% revenue growth. So this mix is truly fantastic and again, it creates a very durable, durable business for us. And last year, we had $99 billion in flows to the business. We launched 122 new products. I'll talk more about that in a few sections coming up. And we ended the year with a record $882 billion in ETP AUM. So these are very strong alpha drivers to the business that we're getting more and more conviction in.

And why are we? Well, last Investor Day, we highlighted 3 accelerants. They're still intact today but have added new opportunities for us. So one is we're focused on how we're modernizing the platform. This platform calculates tens of millions of index calculations daily and is bringing an enormous amount of data. And the goal here is perfection. You need to get these calculations right. So having a modern scale platform is critical, but now we've embedded AI capabilities into the workflows. So this is a true enhancement for us to not only be more effective as we bring in this data more efficient, but also as we create new products.

So as I mentioned in the previous slide, we had 122 new products last year. And at our last earnings call, we highlighted that 36% of our flows in 2005 came from products that were just created in the last 5 years. So overall, that 122, if I take a 2-year look back, that number is 238 new products in market focused primarily on the institutional market as well as international, and that is double the amount of products we put in market the 2 years prior. So we're becoming very efficient on not only putting more product in market, but the right products in market.

And when we think about the institutional sector, we talked a lot about at last Investor Day, our focus on penetrating the insurance space that we estimate has about $700 billion in assets under management. And today, we are growing and taking market share there. We represent $66 billion, and the 20% growth rate over the last 5 years is accelerating. But as we have built out that sales team, our capabilities, more products, we realize there's other opportunities in the institutional space, particularly as the Nasdaq 100 continues to be seen as a core growth asset around the world. So we've been looking at expanding our distribution partners, expanding our product set to really penetrate institutional market more and more. And we're very excited about the results so far.

And lastly, what is critical to this business is our international expansion. The revenue coming from our international clients has grown 34% in the last 5 years. On the previous chart, I showed the business growing at 21%. So the international expansion is a true accelerant for us. And what separates how Nasdaq goes to market is we are not a supermarket. Clients cannot come to us or distributors can't say, "Hey, we want to use Nasdaq 100." We really analyze markets and find the 1, 2 or 3, depending on the size of the market, best partners we can scale and grow over time with a broad portfolio set.

So this is really the early stages of this as well, too. The team, I think, of our index group is absolutely world class, and they're focused on how we have the most modern platforms, leverages AI capabilities, how we continue to put more product, the right product to market. We have enormous opportunity to penetrate the insurance -- the institutional space as well as insurance, and then thinking about how we do this globally. So again, from the data business, the index business, we think we're well prepared to expand in CAP.

A great case study here for us is BlackRock because it really hits on all of these vectors, how we're innovating with the client, how we're focused on the institutional market and how we think about international expansion. So BlackRock is a part of Nasdaq across many different businesses, but an index, they're a long-standing partner with our -- and our largest European partner with the Nasdaq 100. They recently launched the Nasdaq Top 30, the Nasdaq Next 70, and options-based products, and these are all targeted at the institutional client set. And we just expanded with a new long-term partnership agreement with BlackRock to do more to invest in our current product set in market, but also expand with new products for the institutional space.

So now I'm going to turn to how we are evolving the business. And again, the market technology platform, the technology platform did a wonderful job setting this up. But we believe we are very well positioned to succeed in an AI world. I'm going to talk about this in terms of our product set. If we think about a combination of market data, Data Link and eVestment, our opportunity is the gold standard data we've been talking about that is truly mission-critical to our clients' decisions. So this is where we have the opportunity to incorporate value-based pricing.

So our teams are absolutely amazing at how they think about distributing, monetizing and protecting our data. So I think the Franklin Templeton video really said it all when they say, we want -- and Rich said, we want a clean, scrubbed data for AI use. And that's what we do. That's what our intelligence layer does. One thing I want to highlight in this business is that there's a lot of discussion about if you turn your data over these models, do you lose control of it. And we have had to control the use of our data, monitor the use of our data since the advent of the Internet. We're awesome at this.

So we actually have a tool in market called Patrol we developed 4 years ago that's AI-enabled. It's really understanding how our clients are using our data to make sure it conforms to contractual standards. It is so good that many exchanges actually licensed this technology from us. So we're very comfortable with the way we are distributing data, how our clients are using that data and how Nasdaq, in turn, will be able to monetize that and again, use value-based pricing.

Looking at our Corporate Solutions, there's 2 products I'll talk about, Boardvantage and IR. In the governance space, Boardvantage is a product that secures our clients' most viable data board material. It is the most conservative buyer in the marketplace. They are focused on security and control. So what they like to see out of us that we're delivering to market today, and I'll share some examples, is really helping them with critical workflow using AI tools, and we are a leader in how we're doing that with our clients today.

In the Investor Relations services, we're helping really clients do 2 things, understand our shareholder base today and target new shareholders. And we are the most scaled provider at doing this. We have 2 products. We have the advisory product as well as the desktop, and it's about a 60-40 revenue mix. In advisory, we actually have some very rich gold standard data. We have a 25-year database attracting shareholder movements in custodial banks. We can't do our job without that.

In addition, we have really the largest CRM tool, tracking hundreds of thousands of investor meetings throughout a given year that helps us with tracking flows. So the combination of those 2 have us to be really a world leader in how we're helping our clients with understanding their shareholder base, and that's where this domain expertise comes into play. And we have -- a lot of that data is incorporated into our desktop. And again, we're helping clients there with critical workflows. So how we tie that in a story together with them, it's really our scale, our domain expertise, coupled with gold standard data. And getting back to governance, it's all about this hyper resilient security. Obviously, all of our products are secured. There's nothing that is more secure than Board data.

Okay. Now moving on to index. This is talked a lot about how you can create an index using AI, and we are certainly doing that. We are going to make our index business better and better by ingesting more data more easily with AI tooling as well as create a new product, but you're never going to have an index business if you do not have brand, distribution and partnership. And that's what we have built over the last 30 years at Nasdaq. It's very easy to create an index, calculate an index, but you're not going to get to market without these capabilities. So we're world leading in that.

So we're very comfortable about our ability to not only be offensive, but also defensive in an AI world. And I'll give you a few examples here. And Angie covered this one amazingly well. When we think about the data assets, and they're really combined together. We have market data, Data Link and eVestment. This is the example we gave, and this is what Rich from Franklin Templeton talked about, we are well ahead of the game here in delivering high-quality data ready for AI use in their machines. And the kind of the utilization we're seeing here and the results we're seeing across the client base, we've been in the market now for the last 6, 9 months with this, is a 70% reduction in compute costs. That is real value.

And they're also seeing the data to be 50% more available to them, searchable. And when Rich talked about the need to have an information edge, this is what he's talking about. So not only are the opportunities within eVestment to grow this, but also our market data business is across the board. So we're very excited about the opportunity to expand our client usage and leveraging AI to do that.

In Corporate Solutions, the 2 products I talked about today, we've been in market with AI tools for our IR clients for the last 2 years, 74% of our clients are using that on a daily basis. And in governance, again, a little slower uptake, but it's growing pretty rapidly, 47% are using our AI services there. And this is where our focus on things like summarization, what's my next best move, completing these critical workflows and really helping the clients be more efficient and effective, and always comes with a lot of domain expertise.

And I did talk a lot about this index for us, AI is about the data ingestion and creating new products. We continue to see opportunities in the early results of using AI to create products more efficiently that 238 new products in the last 2 years is going to continue to grow for us in areas we're very focused on in institutional and international growth.

Okay. So now we're going to move on to how we're transforming the business, and these are 2 areas we're excited about in private market as well as the advent of Always-On markets and market modernization. When we think about transforming, the pie chart here is something that you're all fairly familiar with, but the growth of private market assets. Now the public markets are still massive and enormous at $127 trillion, and it has been growing over the last 20 years at a 6% annual growth rate.

Now when you look at private markets, they are about a $15 trillion market, but growing at roughly 13%. So we're seeing a lot of growth there. And as, again, Rich talked about at Franklin Templeton, it is a multi-asset, multi-strategy world. So our ability in this marketplace to capture growth is what we do best, trusted data, how we help our clients discover that data and do diligence on it, and we have a new opportunity in performance benchmarking.

So the asset that's key to us is really eVestment. eVestment is this incredible contributory data set where asset owners and asset managers come to meet electronically to make informed decisions and really drive their business, find that information edge. The database here was built over 20 years ago and has a rich history of data that's contributory from our clients.

So we started in the public market space. As Angie mentioned, we have 30,000 funds that we capture data on. In the last really year, 2 years, we have dramatically expanded the private market data set. We have 80,000 private market funds in the system. 30% of our new sales last year in eVestment came with a private market component. That's double what it was a year before. So our clients are looking for one provider that can help them in both the public and private markets. With eVestment, we are so well positioned to do that. And then you layer on our AI capabilities and leverage that data together, we think we have tremendous opportunity to be a real, real player in the private market space.

Now the data in eVestment sits in that intelligence layer, and our index team recently launched the private market indices for accurate benchmarking. So private market data is very dispersed. It's hard to trust, and we have a very strong opportunity to play a leadership role in the benchmarking world, and I think we're just starting in this area. We're super excited about what we're seeing in terms of the results. And last year, data business is distributing more and more private market [ edge ] to their clients, and the headline here is the Nasdaq private market is the leader in corporate liquidity, secondary liquidity, and we're leveraging that data set in our data business, what we call Tape D data.

So with a case study, when LSEG recently went through a fairly exhaustive review with their encumbered providers of private market data, they chose an enterprise license for the entire eVestment suite. So they're using our data for all their global workstations, the Nasdaq funds area, LP, benchmarking insights. It really is the full suite. And what I love about this slide here, it's really cool when you sign an enterprise client, and they want to do the press release. They love our brand here. It's true validation in the marketplace. That 30% sales coming with private market components last year is only going to grow for us. So you'll see us with the modern technology, the modern ability to capture private market data, having a real opportunity to talk more and more about this as the years to come with you.

Okay. So now moving to what Adena had talked about, Always-On. Always-On is the next -- is really the kind of the future of market modernization. And you'll hear a lot from Kevin Kennedy. You'll hear a lot about -- from him talking about the 23/5 access and how they're building that. You also hear from Roland Chai talking about our plans for tokenization. And although they are building that, we are a true partner in this because it's very impactful for our businesses. 23/5 opens up new TAM for us for our data, our data requirements around the world, particularly coming from Asia Pacific. And when we think about tokenization, we believe we're having a lot of conversations with our partners here, how this will drive new adoption for index products.

And when you think about our issuers, we believe Nasdaq has an amazing opportunity to be issuer, thoughtful, bringing along in the journey here and how they take advantage of a tokenized world to find new investor pools, particularly around retail on an international basis. We also think there's a great opportunity to reduce some friction in the marketplace that exists, primarily on the proxy process. So that's a very laborious, expensive process for all issuers, and tokenization has a real role over time to help them really kind of achieve better results here and be more efficient and have us help them do that.

Okay. So now I want to turn to our outlook. And we're excited to tell you today that we're raising our medium-term organic growth outlook to 6% to 10% for the division. There are some puts and takes in here. Within Workflow, we are monitoring the growth to reflect our recent performance, and clearly less of an opportunity in sustainability solutions. We are also seeing momentum in the analytics businesses. We are raising our outlook for Data and Listings on the strength and predictability of our data business that I had talked about. And lastly, we're raising our Index range. And that's really come from our confidence in these alpha drivers that I talked about today.

So in summary, CAP is so well positioned to continue to drive this innovation economy. We're very focused on capturing new opportunities as we think about expanding our business, particularly in data and index, how AI is playing a massive role to enable our clients to be more successful in our leadership in AI. And lastly, we're positioned to help our clients in transformative trend areas such as private market and Always-On and market modernization. And of course, we're excited to tell you that we're raising our medium-term outlook.

So thanks for your time. We really appreciate spending time with you this morning, and I also get to tell you, you have a break now. We have a 10-minute break before we come back for our next session. Thank you.

[Break]

AG

Ato Garrett executive

And we're going to continue our Investor Day presentation with a video from eToro before you hear from Market Services from Tal Cohen, Kevin Kennedy and Roland. Thank you.

[Presentation]

TC

Tal Cohen executive

Good morning, everyone. I'm excited to have Kevin Kennedy and Roland Chai join me to present our Market Services. Quick note on Roland, in addition to his responsibilities of running European markets, we've asked them to lead digital assets. And that's exciting for us, given his expertise and experience in post trade and his global expertise in terms of how this works. So you'll hear a little bit more about that.

All right. Let's get started by taking a look at the financial profile of the division. On the left, we highlight how we've capitalized on our scale to generate durable revenue growth and impressive operating margins. We hold leadership positions across U.S. multi-listed options and Nordic equities, along with running the single largest U.S. equities exchange. We've driven over 66% growth in compounded annual growth in our proprietary index options business over the past 5 years through investments in product and distribution. And our revenue capture for U.S. equities is 70% higher than our closest competitor. And that's because we've been better at capitalizing on structural trends such as the shift from active to passive investing to grow our closing costs, and we successfully monetized product innovations such as Dynamic M-ELO, which is the Midpoint Extended Life Order, first AI-enabled order type approved by the SEC, and we're really proud of that.

Now let's talk a little bit about how the flywheel with listings that Nelson mentioned really plays a key role in powering our performance. Going from left to right, you'll note that Nasdaq listed companies now account for over half of the average daily trading volume and represent 56% of market capitalization for U.S. domiciled companies. That's thanks in large part to our success in attracting high-quality IPOs and switches.

Now when we combine these 2 trends with superior market quality in the form of deeper liquidity and tighter spreads, it enables us to win market share. Here, we show how our superior market quality for companies that comprise the Nasdaq 100 directly drives our strong on-exchange market share. Now our Nordic markets have also outperformed their peers. And as Nelson mentioned, the secret is out. Our Nordic markets are truly the envy of Europe.

Our success is attributable to strong household participation, which is the highest in Europe and amongst the highest globally, a large and engaged pension system that supports the long-term growth in national industries and capital markets. A constructive tax regime that encourages investing and financial inclusion and a culture that supports innovation and entrepreneurs. As a result, we operate the most attractive capital raising and secondary trading environment across all of Europe.

As evidenced by the Verisure IPO in Sweden just last year, which at the time, was the largest IPO in Europe in over 3 years, a great proof point to share with larger issuers. And we're building on our success and our leadership position by investing in strengthening our over-the-counter capabilities and growing our addressable market.

Now I'm going to have Kevin and Roland join me in just a moment, and they're going to talk to you about how we're expanding and evolving our leading and differentiated options business, and how we're transforming by unlocking the potential of 23/5 markets and by leading the way on tokenization, both of which are foundational to an Always-On market.

But we're going to start with Kevin in sharing just why our option business is so special. Kevin?

KK

Kevin Kennedy executive

So listening to Tal, one thing should be clear. What powers and drives market services and enables us to expand, evolve and transform is the leadership, leadership that is deeply rooted here at Nasdaq in scalable growth, operational excellence and consistent execution.

When I say operational excellence and consistent execution, that doesn't happen by accident. You heard from Don Beery in his former role, who's head of Global Technology Infrastructure, and have a trusted partner that you heard from, Brenda Hoffmann, it's that leadership and their teams that enable our business and market services to have the scalable growth.

So when we now look at the results, because this isn't just hyperbole. Let's think about the results from 2025. In U.S. equity options, leadership market share of 500 basis point lead, 500 basis points over our nearest competitor. Nelson mentioned it, Tal mentioned it, U.S. equities, the largest pool of liquidity on the Nasdaq stock market. Highest share, highest volume traded and highest capture by 70%.

Now this business benefits from structural talents as well. But the differentiator for us and what enables us to continue to perform exceptionally and compoundedly is we have strong talent, strong talent paired with an operating and disciplined flywheel. And flywheel is so important to Nasdaq overall. And specifically, from my perspective, in the Market Services business, it is what allows us to have these incredible results year in and year out.

Today, we're going to focus on expand, evolve and transform. And I'll do it through 3 key parts of the businesses within Market Services. Equity Options and how that market is expanding; Index Options where our franchise is expanding dramatically and evolving; and then lastly, I'll discuss a little bit about 23/5, how it's leading to an Always-On market.

This really is about expand when I think about Equity Options and we highlight that. We've been the leader and participation is growing, who is trading options, when they're trading, what they're trading. And one clear example is at the end of January, our filing for what we call -- what we filed with short-term options, it's also called 0DTE. We -- on a very measured and deliberate and I think responsible way, we took the 8 largest companies plus the IBIT options, the Bitcoin options that are listed by BlackRock on our exchange, and added Mondays and Wednesdays.

And what we've seen, and it's just been about a month, but we've seen they're additive to volume. So even as volume is leading one [ exploration ] and coming maybe a little more short term, it's still additive to volume. And our market share in the short-term options is a little bit elevated. We're already elevated at the start of this year from where we've been, but we're also elevated in 0DTE or short-term options.

So let's talk about the growth in retail and institutional. There's been incredible growth in the last 5 or 6 years in options. And if you think back, just since COVID, it was prior to COVID that stock commissions went to 0. Options commissions didn't go to 0. They went lower, though. And then that's where we saw the big uptick. What used to be since COVID was 25 to 35, now it's pretty stable. It's in that 40 to 45 range, and we're also seeing stability in institutional growth. And the institutional growth is coming, one clear example is assets under management for embedded exchange traded products. So think of an exchange-traded product, they're using options to gain yield and then they spread that income out in dividends in their exchange traded product. We're seeing both of that growth.

So I'm really happy that it's a balanced growth story in options. But what does this mean for Nasdaq? Well, what it means is last year, we traded 16.3 million contracts a day. Just 6 or 7 years ago, the entire industry was only trading 16 million to 17 million contracts a day. And this year, we're already -- we, at Nasdaq, are already trading 19 million contracts a day. But this is not just about defending market share. We want to be the leaders in market share, but we want to expand the participation and by leading it, we will have great benefits for our shareholders and our clients.

Now we're going to talk a bit about expand and then we'll evolve into evolve. Great story here, very confident we can continue this. And this is not just a continuation. We believe we can accelerate our index options franchise. Five years ago, 12,000 contracts. We invested in it. We built out a sales team. Last year, 80,000 contracts. This year, already averaging 100,000 contracts. 45% growth from 12,000 to 80,000, 45%. But now look at revenue, 66% growth. The high notional value of the index as well as complex orders, electronic flex, we have a lot of levers to extract maximum value for our shareholders out of that index complex.

But now we need to invest behind the momentum. We need to amplify our commercial message, and we're doing that. And we are expanding our sales coverage. We built out the sales team 5 years ago, but now we're expanding it significantly. But this, this is not the destination. This is just the starting point. But when you have a starting point, you then have to have the next phase. So the next phase is an evolution for us. And what we want to do is we want to increase institutional adoption of the Nasdaq 100 Index. And we also want to expand the product set.

So on the institutional side, we're getting great feedback from clients, from our sales team, and they're using it more as a core risk management tool. So it's great to see that progress. And when I think of the progress we're making, so much of it happens because of what I have the luxury, my team has the luxury of working with our Capital Access Platform team in the index products. And we get to collaborate with that team within here at Nasdaq. We sit in a really good space with them. We collaborate daily on product design, institutional standards and index construction, all to make sure that we meet and align on standards from day 1 when we build out new products or we make changes to our products.

But with that, we're seeing more liquidity as we get more interest, spreads are getting tighter but you have to continue to invest in that. And we're doing that. We're investing in business analytics and business insights. Now as far as product expansion, we do have a filing with -- on Bitcoin index options. We're just -- we're working with the regulator to get to that, get that finished. And we're also working with the regulator on filing event options, some are called binaries, some are called prediction markets. But ours are going to be very focused on the Nasdaq 100 index to start and just broaden the participation and reach of the Nasdaq 100 index that we have.

We also have a micro index. So a micro index, we have NDX, and just as an example, we have XND, which is the same as Nasdaq 100, it's just a lower price point. It's 1/100th of the Nasdaq 100. But all in this platform, exceptionally strong, scalable. This momentum, it's real. The runway is expanding and the opportunity is significant for us, another significant opportunity. And I'm going to touch on this and then Roland will talk about it a little bit, too, is using 23/5, the expansion to 23/5 towards an Always-On.

And you may sit there and you may say, well, I think things are trading 24 hours a day now, why do you need Nasdaq? We need to bring industrial-grade infrastructure and industrial grade protections for investors. And if we do that, that's our opportunity. We can transform and reshape these markets in the way that the Nasdaq trusted fabric that we believe we are, we bring to investors and traders and clients. We sit at the center of this.

So you heard Nelson and Tal both say, well, the Nasdaq stock market is great. Well, half of the volume today is in Nasdaq listed companies, and it's growing. So it's our responsibility and our opportunity to do it in the right way with industrial-grade protections. And that will also open up and unlock opportunities for new investors in our own listed companies. So as we bring things like regulatory surveillance, transparency in the Securities Information Processor, which we call SIP, and as we bring trading curves and just industrial-grade infrastructure, we think we're going to unlock -- we don't think, we're going to unlock new revenue streams, not just trading, but connectivity, market data and eventually financial technology.

I do want to leave you with one observation before I hand it over to Roland. I've had the luxury of doing this for about 4 decades, and I've seen some remarkable cycles. With conviction, I sit here and I tell you, this is the most consequential time in the markets, maybe ever. And being positioned at Nasdaq, my team has never been more engaged, Nasdaq has never been more engaged and there's so much opportunity for here. We can control bringing safety and trust in this, and it's a tremendous opportunity.

So with that, I want to hand it over to Roland, who will go through our tokenization and digital assets expansion.

RC

Roland Chai executive

Thank you very much, Kevin. I'm excited to be here today to talk to you about how we take the industrial liquid market architecture of Always-On that Kevin has described and how extending that to digital assets is going to be transformational.

So why is tokenization and why are digital assets important? So I've had the great privilege of working across the globe from Sydney to London to Hong Kong and great Nordic markets and the U.S. markets, and working on market structure and post trade problems with our clients in terms of trade processing workflows, settlement workflows and asset life cycle workflows. There is an incredible potential for digital assets to transform the inefficiencies and the issues and the complexity of those workflows. So we see tokenization as being a vehicle for that.

In the last 2 years since the last Investor Day, we've seen accelerating growth of digital networks, accelerating growth of digital markets. However, there's been market structure issues with those. So fundamentally, we see inefficient price discovery. We see fragmented liquidity. And also, we see in the proliferation of tokens, a disconnect between the great -- the issuers and the great companies that we have in our public markets today and their investors. And also, these markets are running on parallel rails. They are not integrated into our deep liquid markets.

So tokenization, in our view, accelerates our vision of more intelligent markets. And we are uniquely positioned to lead that with our incredible platform and global liquidity platform. But let's talk about why that is. When we look at distributed ledger or blockchain technology, putting securities or digital assets onto a distributed ledger and ensuring that they're programmable means that those assets become able to take rules and automate workflows. They're able to be mobile and they're able to be transferable on near instantaneous transferability with verifiable audit trials.

So we see intelligent markets as an environment where going from 12 hours a day, 5 days a week to 24/7, Always-On markets of having digital networks and digital assets seamlessly interact with our traditional deep pools of liquidity and our capital, financial capital markets. What that means for financial institution is that capital that is locked up for collateral and margining requirements becomes mobile and is unlocked. For institutional investors, they have more transparency, more direct control over their assets. And when we look at post-trade processing, inefficiencies in trade processing and settlement workflows, tokenization and program assets can radically simplify these processes. So we see benefits from both investors, institutions and sell side and buy side.

Automation of core processes and data flows and security markets will unlock and maximize asset utility. That will, in turn, result in more liquidity in the system and that can be put back to work in the system. So we see Nasdaq as leading in a unique position and leading that transformation.

So how do we look at this practically? At the moment, we see -- and we've had a long history of working with these markets. We see potential market opportunity of $3 billion to $6 billion. And as Adena had mentioned before, we've been using blockchain technology a long time, and we're already capturing some of this, and it's rapidly expanding.

So we've had a long history of connecting pools of risk capital with entrepreneurs in an innovation economy. We've also had a long history of working with 135 marketplaces around the world in modernizing markets. And we do that at scale with trust, integrity and resilience. So you'll hear later on, Magnus will talk about how from 2024, which worked with the Chilean Central Bank to tokenize their sovereign government bonds in order to connect to a new distribution network on digital rails with new pools of investors. As Nelson mentioned, we have enormous data that comes through those digital markets and the demand for index-linked products is already increasing. And we have been supplying our ultra-low latency trading engines and market infrastructure to native digital market companies.

So going back to it, how are we going to capture that value in an expanding market opportunity. We're going to do it in 3 ways. So number one, delivering our Always-On global liquidity platform digital assets ecosystem will bring resilient industrial guardrails to digital networks. And that will increase demand for risk management, collateral and regtech solutions and market surveillance.

Secondly, we believe that raising the standard of tokenization, maturing it to the level of utility that securities in the market have right now means that asset owners can use those in their trading, asset workflows and collateral management workflows on digital rails, and that unlocks quite a lot of capital potential and expanding demand for high-quality assets around the globe.

Thirdly, we believe that we want to connect these markets, having siloed markets or digital networks on parallel tracks with our deep financial markets, it's not our vision of the future, and we believe embedding tokenization into institutional capital markets unlock significant benefits for all stakeholders in the market. But this scale adoption needs to happen at scale.

So when we bring it back to it, we see that Nasdaq has the opportunity to embed its One Nasdaq platform, and that leads to expanding horizons. By having tokenized solutions and our Always-On architecture, there's an incredible flywheel there that gives us opportunities to expand listings, data, trading and financial solutions technology.

So from left to right, as we discussed, exchange-grades, guardrails and surveillance in an Always-On environment will be needed by our clients to manage their critical workflows.

Secondly, global access, connecting investors and issuers to new pools of capital and also a new generation of investors on digital networks is extremely powerful. And as mentioned, 135 markets and regulators around the world are all partnering with us as transformation partners to see how they can leverage digital networks, how they overcome the challenges and how they can bridge and modernize their infrastructure and their platforms to do that.

Thirdly, the Nasdaq ecosystem. We see demand fueling for data, issuers being able to enrich their engagement with their investors in a way that they've never been able to do before. We see demand for technology solutions, the 3,800 financial institutions that we have will all need solutions across regulatory surveillance, anti-financial crime and also collateral optimization.

So in summary, we believe that intelligent markets and tokenization in digital assets isn't about changing what's good about our deep liquid markets. It's about making them more connected to global pools of capital, making them more efficient, unlocking capital and making them more intelligent.

So to summarize, I'll invite Tal back on so he can pull together how this all operates in the vision. Thank you very much.

TC

Tal Cohen executive

Thank you, Roland. It's easy to understand after listening to Kevin and Roland why we love running in the best markets in the world and why we're so bullish on our future prospects. And that's because we're leaning into structural trends that are growing asset classes we're leaders in. We're investing in exciting initiatives that are leveraging unique assets such as the Nasdaq 100 and the flywheel with listing that you've heard about. And by modernizing markets and leading that, we're going to consistently generate strong results in the future on a durable basis.

With that, thank you, and I'm now going to welcome in the next testimonial. You're going to hear from Darryl White, the CEO of Bank of Montreal, and he's going to talk about how their partnership with Nasdaq fuels their success. Thank you.

[Presentation]

TC

Tal Cohen executive

I truly can't think of a better testimonial [indiscernible] Financial Technology. Hello again. I'm going to present on Financial Technology, and I'm going to be joined by my colleague Stephanie Champion, Ed Probst and Magnus Haglind. So let's get started.

Again, let's get started with the financial profile of the division. As you can see on the right, we operate 3 highly scaled subdivisions under Financial Technology. On the left, you'll note the unique financial profile of the division. We generate strong recurring revenue growth and impressive operating margins. Our strong net retention underscores the scalable growth potential of the division and our solutions continue to earn and gain global recognition.

In the 2026 Chartis RiskTech100 rankings, Verafin, Axiom and Surveillance were all recognized as undisputed category leaders. These awards, amongst others, we've received showcase the strength and the quality of our portfolio.

Before looking ahead, I want to take a step back and share a few key accomplishments since our last Investor Day. We fully and successfully integrated Axiom and Calypso. We've established a unified operating model that enables us to scale and powers our cross-sell. We've applied our expertise to accelerate cloud adoption by 25% with particular progress for Axiom and Calypso. We've leveraged our brand and our partners to expand into 13 new markets. We've deepened our partnership with AWS and entered into new ones, as you've heard today, with BioCatch to catalyze future growth. And we've launched new capabilities that have grown our addressable market. As a result, we strengthened the competitive positioning of each and every single one of our Financial Technology products.

And that's exciting because in addition to tapping into these new growth vectors that are expanding our total addressable market, the structural trends that Adena mentioned earlier today are growing our total addressable market at 7%. And when you combine those structural trends with evolving client needs, they serve as a catalyst for our clients to convert operational spend into technology spend. And that is why our serviceable addressable market is growing faster than the TAM at 9%. And when you consider our relatively low SAM penetration across our broad client base, we have an attractive and capitally efficient land and expand opportunity in front of us.

Now while leaning into these structural trends is essential to growing our addressable market, we really bring it to life what it means to be the trusted fabric by serving over 3,800 of the most consequential financial institutions globally. That includes all of the global systemically important banks. We power more than 135 markets and regulators, including over half of the world's largest exchanges. We're a leader in helping over 2,700 small and medium banks and more recently, enterprise institutions fight financial crime. And we have a growing and impressive community of central banks who rely on our collateral management and treasury solutions.

And we're applying One Nasdaq to unlock the full potential of this community by establishing teams whose sole focus is on solving more of our customers' problems and making it easier to navigate our solutions, by cultivating deep and strong relationships with executives in the C-suite to be their strategic partner. And by bringing our clients together to share and compare emerging challenges and opportunities, we're positioning Nasdaq as a trusted partner of choice.

Now looking ahead, our growth is anchored in the 3 key themes we shared today, and you've heard a lot about that. We're expanding our platform by leveraging One Nasdaq to grow our client communities. We're evolving and strengthening our capabilities that empower our customers to solve their toughest operational challenges. And to be their trusted transformation partner, we're going to help them manage an Always-On financial system and derive better outcomes with AI.

Now let's dive into deep, and I'm going to start with expand. And over the next few slides, I'm going to share with you our growth algorithm, starting with our land and expand. We've enhanced our client acquisition capabilities by leveraging our trusted brand and strategic partners to open doors in attractive growth markets and with key customer segments. A few notable highlights from 2025 that really underscore our progress, Calypso signed 4 new central banks, Axiom signed its first mid-market client. That win validated our ability to streamline our offering to serve smaller banks, meeting them where they are, while providing them with the flexibility to grow as they scale.

And we're also fueling our upsell and product adoption, which accounts for a majority of our growth, given the size and the scale of our customer community by investing in initiatives that extend and deepen our capabilities where we have a strong right to win. A few notable highlights from 2025 include Axiom's expansion with an Indian Bank. We landed that bank with a single financial reporting requirement. That bank now takes a full reserve bank of India reporting package, a 3x increase in annual contract value, but just as importantly, a great proof point for us to share with other Indian banks in a key growth market for us.

And Verafin continues to move up market. Great example of that is we signed a [indiscernible] bank just this past year and expanded with them. We landed them with wire fraud. We expanded into ACH fraud, resulting in a 2x increase in ACV. But just as importantly, again, a proof point that we've been able to replicate consistently with enterprise clients, really exciting.

Now let's talk about another important element of our growth algorithm, which is cross-selling. Following the acquisition of Axiom and Calypso, we've been able to secure $45 million in run rate revenue from cross-sell deals won, while tripling the run rate revenue and doubling the number of cross-sell deals won year-over-year. That momentum puts us on track to meet and exceed our $100 million plus run rate revenue target by the end of 2027.

Importantly, our success spans the full breadth of our portfolio. We've been able to successfully cross-sell each and every one of financial technology products. And key metrics support continued success. Our cross-sell pipeline has grown by over 20% year-over-year and now represents over 15% of our total pipeline. And approximately half of our top 300 clients take one Financial Technology solution, providing us with ample headroom to deepen product adoption and penetration in this key client cohort. These metrics and the success to date reinforce our confidence in the scalability of our cross-sell strategy.

Now let's take a look at how we put this into motion. Here, we lay out how we've deepened and expanded our share of wallet with a global enterprise bank, and I'll walk you through it. Prior to the acquisition of Axiom and Calypso, they were a surveillance client. Through the acquisition, they became Calypso and Axiom clients, providing us with a strong foundation. Since then, we've secured a 7-year extension at Calypso and upsell of Axiom and importantly, a cross-sell of Verafin. They are now clients of all 3 subdivisions. Now looking ahead, we're already in conversations with them to migrate them on to Calypso Cloud and upsell them AI services across all of our solutions, really exciting. As a result, we expect to increase ACV by up to 50% in the near term and have the potential to grow it by over 2x over the long term.

But importantly, what I want to share with you is why we've been successful, and there's two main reasons. One is we've been able to establish deep and enduring relationships across the C-suite. They now see us as a strategic partner. And secondly, they trust in our products and the investments we're making in our products will help them stay one step ahead of the competition. Importantly, this -- the reason for our success is highly repeatable across our customer base. As you heard from Adena and others today, our customers are looking for strategic partners that understand what it means to serve highly regulated institutions.

Now let's take a look at how we're evolving by unifying the rich and high-fidelity data that we have across financial technology. As Brenda mentioned earlier today, we process and enrich and transform through our products, an enormous amount of data. To unlock the power of that data, we've built a native, a cloud-native and modern intelligence layer. And we're feeding it with all of the data that resides in all of our financial technology solutions, establishing a single source of truth. And we're doing it with the highest commitment to data privacy and security.

As you can see here, our intelligence layer unifies the rich data embedded in our system of record solutions. By unifying that data, we're elevating our collective intelligence and semantic understanding of our client community. And we're connecting the workflow and analytic capabilities that exist within each of our products and across our products, really powerful. We started by integrating market technology in Calypso, and early results and client feedback have been compelling. We've been able to demonstrate deeper cross product insights that have led to new cross-sells between market technology and Calypso, and it's become a launch pad for new reporting and analytics services we intend to offer our customers.

Ultimately, the intelligence layer delivers a richer platform experiences and takes our AI capabilities to the next level by enabling us to offer deeper personalization, smarter, more connected agentic solutions, all while preserving enterprise-grade security and safeguards.

We're really excited about how this new capability positions us as our clients' trusted transformation partner. And as our clients' trusted transformation partner, we're building next-generation AI capabilities that power our embedded workflow solutions. And we're leading the way on helping our clients manage the rise of an Always-On financial system.

On AI, we're confident in our ability to demonstrate durable value and drive better client outcomes across 3 dimensions. Our financial technology solutions are harnessing the proprietary mission-critical data that reside in our solutions to help clients proactively manage risk, optimize capital and strengthen resilience. Great example of that is with Calypso, and you'll hear a little bit about that in the subdivisions as well. We developed [ settle guard, ] an AI capability that predicts settlement failure, enabling our clients to proactively prevent counterparty failure, an issue that cost the industry billions per year. Our deep and diverse client community enables us to deliver collective intelligence at scale, a powerful differentiator for both Surveillance and Verafin as we use consortium data to conduct more effective and efficient detection of market abuse and financial crime that any single institution can do on its own.

Lastly, our domain expertise and deep understanding of our client community enables us to build context powered AI that simplifies and optimizes complex workflows. Two great examples. Axiom is demystifying complex workflows by providing near instantaneous and accurate interpretations of new and changing regulations, reducing the time to comply and minimizing the risk of noncompliance. Verafin is reducing resource-intensive work and accelerating decision-making capabilities through its agentic solutions. You heard a little bit about that on the tech panel. You'll hear more about that during the subdivision presentations.

Now I'd like to turn to why an Always-On financial system is such a unique opportunity for Nasdaq. And I'm going to build on some of the comments that Roland, Kevin, Nelson and Adena spoke about earlier. Always-On is a defining feature of the innovation economy. It spans 23/5 markets, accelerated settlement cycles, enhanced collateral mobility and the faster movement of money in securities. These advancements have the potential to improve capital efficiency, remove friction and reduce risk.

But in order to achieve that, our clients are going to demand infrastructure that is more scalable, secure and resilient. And in Nasdaq, we feel like we're really well positioned to capture this opportunity across all of Nasdaq. And that's because our market technology solutions are the most performant and resilient globally. We're already a leading provider of institutional-grade trading, post-trade and surveillance technology to the crypto industry. Calypso offers best-in-class collateral management and importantly, real-time risk management, which is essential for operating under this new environment.

We have market-leading solutions that protect the integrity of the financial system in Surveillance and Verafin because trust leads to adoption and adoption leads to growth, and that's the key. And finally, regulators are undoubtedly going to demand more granular and real-time reporting capabilities. Axiom's modern data management and analytic capabilities allow our clients to comply with confidence against these future obligations.

Finally, I just want to share and reiterate. We're really excited about taking our U.S. equity markets to 23/5 trading, which is subject to regulatory approval, along with Calypso's upcoming support for tokenized collateral because both of them will further strengthen our position as the trusted fabric of this next-generation ecosystem and market infrastructure. And it also advances our ambitions as a platform company. So with that, I'm going to invite Stephanie Champion onto the stage, who's going to talk more about financial crime management. Thank you.

SC

Stephanie Champion executive

Great. Thank you, Tal, and welcome, everybody. I'm Stephanie Champion, and I am the Head of Nasdaq Verafin. And today, I'm excited to share how our financial crime management technology platform is driving innovation, growth and client outcomes at scale.

Five years ago, we became Nasdaq Verafin, and we set our sights on advancing our reach into Tier 1, Tier 2 banks and international markets, all with the goal of advancing our vision of becoming the world's most effective crime fighting network. And the results are clear. We've grown our client community to over 2,760 financial institutions. which makes up over $11 trillion in collective assets. So we've grown our client community, our platform and our unique data consortium set to support clients at scale, now processing up to 1.8 transactions per week.

Now our success is really jumping off our ability to drive growth across all client segments as we enter new markets, but also continue to drive growth in our mature markets. Nasdaq Verafin now supports 22 enterprise clients. That means 22 enterprise clients are now leveraging a Nasdaq Verafin solution, fueling that flywheel as we land and expand and leverage a One Nasdaq cross-sell approach. Just last year, we signed our first proof of concept with a European Tier 1 bank, and we developed a deep pipeline of engagement across banks in Europe and new regions.

We did this all while maintaining our leadership position in the North American SMB market, and we also added 742 new SMB clients to our client community.

Now with innovators in this space, we continue to evolve our platform to ensure our clients can remain ahead of evolving financial crime threats in an ever-changing and complex operating environment. Now financially, we have delivered on results as we've grown our business and operated at scale. As of 2025, we've reached $329 million in annual recurring revenue with an ARR growth rate of 23% since the time of acquisition. And with a 25% revenue CAGR, Verafin has delivered an incredibly strong performance, and we are well positioned for our next phase of growth as a global organization.

Now the foundation of our success is our commitment to innovation in the fight against financial crime. And in the last year, we've executed well on our partnership and product strategies, developing new capabilities and new revenue streams like our BioCatch partnership solution and our agentic AI workforce. Now our financial crime platform is underpinned by our unique consortium data set. And as Hazel mentioned earlier, this data set is unmatched in the industry. Based on decades of pioneering innovation, cloud experience and deep, deep domain expertise, our platform and our consortium data set is purpose-built to fight financial crime.

It's that consortium data set that is our true competitive advantage, and it creates a network effect. Each client who joins the network in a give-to-get model, meaning all clients benefit from the growth of the consortium data set. That rich data delivers network-level insights into financial crime threats. And as it grows, it improves the performance of our models, driving deeper benefit and value across our client community. It's that strong return on investment that drives retention and referenceability across peers, fueling growth as we enter new markets and new geographies.

Let's talk about that benefit. For one of our clients, this is from a midsized bank, by leveraging our consortium-based wire fraud solution, we delivered a 17x return on investment over a 3-year period. And as the consortium data set grew, so did the performance of our models, and we were able to increase efficiency with lower false positives and increase effectiveness by increasing our ability to catch true fraud by value by 20 percentage points. Jumping off the success.

We are aligned around our 3 key strategies to drive our next phase of growth. First, we'll continue to expand into enterprise markets and new regions with new and differentiated solutions and leveraging a One Nasdaq cross-sell strategy. We will also continue to evolve our financial crime platform with new capabilities while we also build an ecosystem of strategic partners, all while we revolutionize crime fighting with AI and industry-leading solutions that are really transforming how our clients work.

We've had tremendous success landing with our enterprise customers with our consortium-based wire fraud solution. And in this space, we've delivered a 40% reduction in false positives for a 10x or greater return on investment for our largest clients like Bank of Montreal, we've heard from earlier. We see a tremendous opportunity here to continue to expand with our set of differentiated solutions. And with 360 opportunities available in the North American enterprise market, and 17% engaged or already in our pipeline, we are positioned well to increase our share of wallet and drive growth across Tier 1 and Tier 2 institutions in North America.

Now it's this proven consortium-based payment solution that is the tip of the spear as we look to expand into Europe. I mentioned earlier, we signed our first proof of concept with a European Tier 1 bank. We delivered 30% reduction in false positives over cross-border payments. Now this was very much in line with the bank's goals of reducing false positives, but also customer friction at the time of payments.

Now as we look to accelerate our growth into international markets, our One Nasdaq approach is going to be a key enabler. Leveraging our broader international reach and our international expansion, as Tal mentioned earlier, we are positioned for success for faster go-to-market as we expand across Europe and other regions. Now as we expand into new regions, we are also evolving our platform with an ecosystem of strategic partners.

Our BioCatch partnership is off to a tremendously successful start since we signed just late last year, and our clients truly see the benefit of integrating their behavioral intelligence risk scores into our financial crime platform. And we've got lots of opportunity here for more product integrations and more go-to-market activities. This month, we also signed our latest partnership with FIS, bringing Nasdaq Verafin's leading AML and fraud solutions to FIS banking and payment customers. This is not only a new growth opportunity, but an opportunity for Nasdaq Verafin to bring our real-time data integrations across wire, ACH and check to new and existing clients.

Now our clients trust Nasdaq Verafin to deliver the most innovative solutions in the fight against financial crime. And with 20 years of AI experience, we developed our Agentic AI workforce for a step change in efficiency. We've automated away the most resource-intensive workflows for our clients, and that's why adoption has been so incredibly strong. In just a few short months, we have over 350 clients leveraging our agentic workers in their daily workflows. One of our clients reported they are now 4x more productive, leveraging our sanctions agentic agents in their sanctions process.

As Hazel mentioned, we're not simply giving our clients new tools. We are giving them an entire AI-powered team for a step change in how they work. With 2 agents already in production and 6 more on our product road map, our Agentic AI workforce is a game changer in the fight against financial crime. As we look ahead, we have conviction we will deliver growth in the mid-20s in the medium term with our focus on innovation and acceleration across our 3 growth pillars.

We will continue to expand into enterprise banks and international markets with new and differentiated solutions and leveraging a One Nasdaq cross-sell approach. We will continue to evolve our financial crime platform. with new capabilities and develop our ecosystem of strategic partners, all while we transform crime fighting with AI and consortium-based solutions to help our customers stay ahead of financial crime.

Thank you for your time today. With that, I'm going to pass it over to Ed.

EP

Edward Probst executive

Okay. Good morning. My name is Ed Probst. And over the next 10 minutes, I'm going to take you through regulatory technology. I'm the Head of Regulatory Technology. and we're going to go through the metrics, the product and the strategy.

In 2025, we closed the year with $407 million in recurring revenue, 12% ARR growth on a global and diversified business. We've seen significant expansion across geographies, client segments and asset classes. And as you heard from Brenda earlier today, we've seen significant uptick in demand for our cloud, something we laid out as a key objective just 2 years ago at Investor Day. And more recently, we are seeing sincere interest in our AI-enabled services and managed services.

Our market-leading suite of regulatory solutions solve some of our customers' most complex challenges in an ever-increasing web of global and local regulations across regulatory reporting, risk and surveillance. By leveraging our modern and data-driven platforms, we enable our customers to comply with confidence while improving efficiencies. We do so by unlocking the power of our consortium insights and deep transparency into the data that resides on our platforms. And by providing a common architecture across customer workflows, we drive productivity up and cost down.

Here in RegTech, we harmonize the world of regulation into a globally consistent framework that is proprietary, unique in the market and battle-tested by the world's most sophisticated institutions. I'd like to share with you 2 recent wins that highlight these unique capabilities. In 2025, the CFTC selected Nasdaq Surveillance. That was a momentous win for us, not only because of the role the CFTC plays here domestically and internationally, but also because of the evolving agreement the CFTC has in digital assets.

Now they selected Nasdaq for 4 key reasons. First, they wanted a true cross-asset platform covering commodities, derivatives, crypto, binaries, et cetera. Secondly, they wanted proven experience and the tooling necessary for regulators to run their mission-critical obligations. Thirdly, they wanted expertise and delivered product in the most complex areas of surveillance like cross product and cross market. And lastly, and perhaps most importantly, a credible and robust road map in AI.

The second case study is a G-SIB bank that selected Nasdaq's AxiomSL in 2025 for global regulatory and risk reporting on Red Cloud. Now this client was able to replace multiple internal and vendor systems with one strategic end-to-end platform. This enables the customer to not only comply with the accuracy required for regulatory capital calculation reporting, but also unlock capital for growth by optimizing the results.

They as well selected Nasdaq for 4 key reasons. Firstly, they wanted one global platform, not a different solution in various regions they operate in the different countries. Secondly, an end-to-end set of capabilities, not just the reporting, not just data management, not just the series of engines in the middle, not just the workflow and gage, but a comprehensive platform all in one. They also wanted embedded regulatory intelligence and artificial intelligence in the platform. And finally, a scalable and robust platform that can perform with the intense volumes powered by an AWS backbone that we deliver. These 2 clients conducted a rigorous market scan and selected Nasdaq.

And as you heard today and consistent in RegTech, our growth strategy is driven in tangible demand across these 3 pillars. We are going to expand by increasing wallet share with our existing customers across geographies, asset classes, and we've taken our platform to new customer segments.

As you heard from Tal today, we're really excited about our expansion in 2025. We built and deployed our first mid-market solution for AxiomSL, proving we can solve challenges across customer segments. We're going to evolve our customer experience as well with differentiated analytics powered by consortium insights. As I mentioned, we are the aggregator of the collective intelligence of the regulatory community. We consume this information, we distill it, we find it and publish it back to our customers in the form of software solutions.

One great example of that is how we handle cross product and cross market. As mentioned, one of the most sophisticated areas in surveillance. We built and maintain a consortium database. that customers contribute to and is a function of an analysis that we do internally, and we publish that back to our customers, a true give-to-get model. Another good example of how we've evolved our customers is one of our largest customers was struggling to manage their end-to-end workflow. It was just taking too long.

By moving to RedCloud, we reduced their end-to-end run times by 75% while maintaining full granularity, transparency and accuracy, 100% reconciliation. And lastly, transform. We are the agents of change in our industry. Our data is unique. Our platforms are modern and scalable, and our clients have adopted our cloud. And that is the basis on which we've built a robust road map of agentic AI and agentic workers.

Now I'd like to take a step and look at this growth algorithm for Axiom. Since the acquisition of Axiom in 2023, as mentioned, we've greatly expanded our portfolio and our reach, covering 174 regulators. We've increased our portfolio of regulatory reports by over 20% and that has fueled growth. We've also invested in our cloud platform, made it more scalable and more resilient and 80% of customers selecting AxiomSL have chosen RedCloud. And with all these proven capabilities and with the credibility of Nasdaq around the world, we've done one of the hardest things to do in the regulatory compliance space. We've landed 8 beachhead wins in new countries, fueling growth for the future.

We know it's the hardest thing to achieve to win the hearts and minds of local regulated financial institutions. And what we've built is truly unique and differentiated in the market. One platform that consumes the regulatory content of 174 regulators around the world. We consolidate this into the gold standard data set that computes things like an IFRS compliant balance sheet, a GAAP compliant balance sheet, credit risk, market risk, operational risk, liquidity risk, shareholding disclosures and many, many more capabilities.

We automatically generate over 6,000 regulatory reports. We submit those to the regulators. We collect the feedback. We power the end-to-end workflow. This is not just a reporting tool. This is a strategic capability that enables our customers to do just so much, exactly like the G-SIB case study I highlighted earlier was illustrating. And this is the very foundation we need to unlock the real power of AI.

In 2025, we built and deployed 4 new AI capabilities on AxiomSL. The first is the Reg Investigator, an autonomous workflow that asks the questions our customers should be asking, collects the feedback, learns and gets smarter and smarter. We deployed the Reg Co-Pilot, which makes sense of the complex world of regulation across geographies, across languages and connects the regulation deeply to our platform so customers can connect the regulation to the data, to the rules.

The Reg Simplify capability brings enhanced lineage and controls, asks the questions and answers the questions that your regulators and auditors are asking. And finally, the Reg Navigator, which is we like to call the CFO's best friend. It's governance in the AI era, bringing together the end-to-end process. These capabilities are the foundation necessary to tap into a truly agentic workflow that can reimagine regulatory compliance.

And we've taken a very similar approach when it comes to surveillance. As Adena mentioned, we consume over 1 trillion messages a day across all of our venues. We consolidate this into our proprietary standard across asset classes. We generate over 250,000 alerts on a daily basis, and our customers interact with those alerts, making them smarter and building the signals that power the detection of the future.

Now let's talk about how this enables AI. We leverage this gold source data that we've created with all the customer feedback. We connect it with generative AI-driven insights, which rationalize the world of news and insights and analyst reports. We create this comprehensive data set. We allow our customers to calibrate leveraging AI, which adjusts their idiosyncratic trading strategies and their portfolios.

And then finally, we run our rules-based, rigorous regulatory compliant detection and AI-based anomaly detection to create a comprehensive surface to attack market abuse. We're confident these capabilities are what is critically necessary to truly unlock once again the agentic workflow that will ensure the integrity of the financial system for years to come. So we've never been more excited about the future of RegTech.

The future is very bright. There's incredible capabilities coming forward for our customers and to benefit for Nasdaq. We are confident in our ability to deliver high single to low double-digit growth.

Thank you. And on that note, I will pass it to my colleague, Magnus Haglind, to take you through capital markets.

MH

Magnus Haglind executive

Good morning, everyone. My name is Magnus Haglind, and I have the pleasure to lead our Capital Markets Technology business. And every day, our solutions underpin the functioning of the world's capital markets. It ensures that the markets open at the right time, ensures that they operate resilient and allow institutions and investors to engage with strength and with confidence.

Our platforms, they match billions of orders, they safe keep trillions of assets and they support the collateral movements that mobilize hundreds of billions of value every day. These platforms are not just supporting systems, they are the operating fabric of modern capital markets. Capital Market Technology is a global franchise that is built on 3 resilient product lines. In 2025, we generated $1.1 billion in total revenue, underpinned by a very robust and highly diversified ARR base.

We are super excited about the strong and solid ARR growth capacity of this business. That is further reinforced by the fact that we have very, very strong relationships with our clients that, in many cases, spans decades. And that reflects both our clients' trust and long-standing confidence in our solutions, but also our sustained ability to evolve alongside the industry as a transformation partner.

So what we deliver sits at the core of how global capital markets operate. They are mission-critical platforms deeply embedded into every client's architecture. It orchestrates multiparty workflows going across the institutions. And the design of these solutions are anchored in the regulated trust frameworks that has been evolving over decades. In market tech, we bring the solutions that help market operators to modernize core infrastructure and prepare for an always-on operating model.

And here, we draw on all the expertise and experience we have from Nasdaq as a scaled market operator. Our trade management services business, here, we provide low latency connectivity, high-performance APIs and data center services to all participants that want to co-locate close to our Nasdaq markets. Here, we serve the most demanding trading firms on the planet. And as velocity and data intensity continue to grow, also the demand for power and capacity do the same, and we have nearly doubled the capacity since the pandemic.

Calypso is our end-to-end trade management, risk, treasury and collateral management platform, and it's used by almost 250 institutions in 68 countries. It acts as the authoritative system of records that manage hundreds of billions of assets. And it allows institutions to maximize business outcomes and returns while staying within their trading, regulatory and risk mandates. And taken all together, our experiences and the solutions position us as a great long-term transformation partner to the industry.

So how do we then invest in the portfolio? At the highest level, it's structured across expand, evolve and transform. We expand by increasing the markets, the workflows and the asset classes that are supported by our platforms. And as clients consolidate their solutions into fewer, more trusted vendors and providers, we are well placed to expand the positions with them. We also evolved by embedding intelligence directly into these mission-critical system of records. And our intelligence layer works as a trusted AI-ready layer that unifies data sets without compromising security or sovereignty.

We transform by building the next generation of market infrastructure, including bringing pioneering liquid cooling capabilities into our colocation facility that helps the trading firms to bring even more compute and run AI inference close to our markets. We're also advancing the use of distributed ledger technology to solve real industry problems, and I'm going to talk more about that later.

These priorities are not just stand-alone initiatives. Together, these horizons, expand, evolve and transform helps us to strengthen today's market, but at the same time, building the foundation for tomorrow's. And so let me illustrate how that looks across the portfolio. We are 2 years into the Calypso acquisition and the product suite has become a core asset of our portfolio. We have introduced a comprehensive road map that supports both near-term enhancements and long-term expansion.

And since the acquisition, demand has remained very strong across all the segments and markets we serve, driven by the core capabilities of the platform, but also accelerated based on the industry modernization we have seen in, for example, Latin America and the Middle East. And as you can see here on the slide, our existing clients are also increasingly adopting more modules, which reinforce the strength of our platform strategy.

We're also very encouraged by the growing adoption of our managed services and cloud. Clients are increasingly using RegCloud to simplify operations and improve agility, which also helps them to focus their investment on differentiated value generation. We also see firsthand how modernization is expanding relationships with market operators across the globe as they are navigating complexity and accelerating change. Here, our operator experience from the Nasdaq market in the U.S. and in the Nordics is a real differentiator.

And in partnership with AWS, we have developed a transformation blueprint that enables clients to modernize with greater confidence and lower risk. And this blueprint combines the experience and the capabilities of our platforms, cloud architecture, operational excellence and change management. And the momentum here is truly real. We're working with several early adopters across the market tech community, and these engagements are truly helping us to expand the relationship with our clients and become strategic operating partners. A great example of this is Grupo BMV in Mexico. And we have had a long-standing relationship with them over many years around market surveillance.

And that has now evolved into a fully managed 5-product solution that across their full trade life cycle. And this is a very, very powerful proof point how modernization drives sustained revenue expansion, deeper client penetration and more importantly, also amplifies the client impact and the long-term value creation that we can provide.

Moving on then to the enhanced horizon. The capital market runs on data and the ability to convert data into insights is what drives trading performance and risk precision. But capital markets don't run on intelligence alone. It requires connectivity, multiparty workflow orchestration, created reference data, and that is where our platforms play a very, very critical role. And building on the role as system of records, our platforms, as I said, sit in the center of our clients' architectures, connecting tens of different market ecosystems and a multitude of upstream and downstream systems within each institutions, sometimes more than 50 in total.

And the web of interconnectivity also extends to a wide network of counterparties, each with distinct risk and credit profile that needs to be managed. A key strength of the platform here lies in the data fidelity, captured in our proprietary data models that we have developed over decades. One example from Calypso that illustrates that is when you have one trade progressing through their trade life cycle in the system, the transactional data is enriched and created with risk, treasury, collateral information to form a truly unique data set that consists of hundreds of millions of data points.

The intelligence layer amplifies the impact of this data and the transformation of high-fidelity operational data into trusted intelligence as the platform scales across a client's full and entire architecture. For our clients, the price of a bond is not just a number. It's a very complex decision tree across regulatory, accounting and risk at every branch in that tree. The comprehensive curated data sets embedded in our platforms capture this complexity and gives us a unique opportunity to bring AI directly into these mission-critical workflows. And our clients are ready for that. They want practical high-impact AI solutions deployed in a controlled and safe way that minimize operational risk.

And we develop these solutions side-by-side with our clients with a very clear focus on outcomes in 3 fields: risk reduction, improved decision-making and prevention of costly exception handling. A great example is Celgard that Tal earlier talked about within the Calypso suite that helps to reduce sediment failures. And this product, we developed in close collaboration with clients focused on solving a clear and very big problem for them. More of these practical examples of AI solutions are part of our product road map. And the client trust, the institutional expertise and the high fidelity data position us well to lead the next wave of AI-driven transformation.

Moving then on to the third horizon, transform. And as we heard from Roland and Tal and earlier, it's a big shift in industry now around digital assets. We're moving from experimentation to production-grade market infrastructure. And institutions, they are not asking if this matters, it's more about how do we scale and how do we scale this architecture and infrastructure in a safe way. And that is exactly where we play. Our platforms already support digital native issuance of new asset classes. And last year alone, we enabled $24 billion of digitized governance and corporate bond issuance in Chile.

Looking ahead, one of the most attractive near-term opportunities is around collateral tokenization. It's a very practical use case with clear economic value. mobilizing assets quicker and improve collateral efficiency. And we're moving now from innovation to production, and we focused on the outcomes and not experimentation. And as these markets expand, we expect a hybrid model where traditional and digital assets will coexist.

The winners will be those who can manage liquidity, risk and collateral seamlessly across both worlds. Here, Calypso, with our very advanced capabilities around treasury and collateral management will play a great role and support that transition. So we're at a pivotal moment for the industry and the investments we are doing in platforms, intelligence and infrastructure position capital markets technology well to play an even broader and central role in how markets transform and grow. We're not just keeping pace with change, we are shaping what comes next. So consistent what we have communicated earlier, this position us for high single to low double-digit growth over the medium term.

Thank you for the attention. And with that, I would like to hand back to Tal.

TC

Tal Cohen executive

Thank you, Magnus. All right. What you've heard from Stephanie, Ed and Magnus are a few things today. The passion we have for advancing our products, the passion we have for serving our clients and solving their toughest problems and that we're really well positioned to deliver strong and consistent growth. And the way we're going to do that is we're going to continue to leverage our deep and diverse client communities on One Nasdaq to deliver collective intelligence and scale.

The proprietary and consortium data that resides in and across our system of record solutions enable us to offer unique insights and help clients manage the ever-increasing risk and complexity that they're dealing with, which enables them to realize real meaningful productivity gains.

And then finally, we have decades I mean, really decades of embedded intelligence in our mission-critical solutions that allow us to deliver differentiated AI capabilities that then deliver better client outcomes. As a result, we're confident in our ability to deliver on our medium-term outlook of 10% to 14% revenue growth while moving up in that range over time.

With that, I'm going to thank you, and I'm going to take us into a 10-minute break because you guys deserve it. Thank you.

[Break]

AG

Ato Garrett executive

All right. Welcome back from that break, and thanks again for joining us here at the 2026 Investor Day. We're happy to welcome you back with another client testimonial this time featuring some comments about our partnership with Goldman Sachs ahead of going into our last presentation of the day with our CFO, Sarah Youngwood. Thanks again.

[Presentation]

SY

Sarah Youngwood executive

It's great to see everyone, and thanks for coming [indiscernible] You've head from Adena, from our clients, how we are positioned trial. We architect the world's most modern markets. We power the innovation economy, and we build trust in the financial system. And now I want to reinforce how we've built a financial foundation to support that vision and to deliver its benefits to shareholders.

We have undertaken a fundamental business transformation and have become a leading technology company that powers the world's economies. We have scale and relevance to be the trusted financial partner of our clients. That transformation has also created an engine of profitable and durable growth. And we have a track record through cycles and are positioned to capitalize on growth vectors. And that growth is combined with financial discipline. And by financial discipline, we're talking about expense, free cash flow and capital allocation and a capital allocation that combines growth investments and capital return to add value to shareholders. So we are very proud of the progress we have made since our last Investor Day and very excited about the opportunities ahead.

So I'm going to start with our fundamental business transformation. Before I recap the transformation, its results. We are delivering profitable growth at scale. We are a $5.2 billion revenue company with over 3/4 of our revenue in solutions. We partner with clients at the bottom in 130 countries, North America, Europe, but also Asia, Latin America and the rest of the world. We have an exceptional financial profile, and you see that in 5-year CAGRs of 11% for diluted EPS and 17% for free cash flow.

As you think about our transformation, the headline is that our strategy is working, and you can see it in the numbers. we have evolved our revenue mix by 10 percentage points that is growing solutions revenue from 66% to 76%. That strategy shift has had clear financial outcomes. You can look at the bottom at the CAGRs since 2020, 13% for net revenue, 16% for solutions revenue and 14% for ARR. What's remarkable is the acceleration. In 2020, our medium-term outlook was 5% to 7%. 2024 '25, 8% to 11%. We've achieved this acceleration through organic growth as well as thoughtful M&A, which has enhanced our product portfolio and our financial profile.

So we're going to look at that M&A execution, starting with Verafin. Verafin was 5 years ago in terms of the acquisition. And in those 5 years, we have tripled the revenue from $107 million to $330 million. That is a 25% CAGR. When we acquired Verafin, its entire client base was small and medium-sized businesses, banks. Unifying it with Nasdaq, we've been able to sign 22 enterprise deals. Goldman Sachs, Citi, BMO, to name a few.

Overall, we have added 760-plus new clients. That is a 38% increase in client counts. And we've done that while maintaining a very strong net revenue retention above 110% and this very special culture that you have felt when you heard from those leaders, that culture of innovation. We've also delevered 2.9x gross leverage within 5 quarters, and we were accretive to EPS within a year. Today, Verafin is a juggernaut in anti-financial crime with over 2,760 clients and $11 trillion in collective assets.

We are also expanding the capabilities of Verafin to drive incremental growth, whether it is product development like agentic AI and that workforce we're talking about as well as partnerships like FIS or BioCatch. In combination with Verafin, we have added AxiomSL and Calypso, as you know. And that gives us the scale and the relevance to be the trusted financial partner, trusted transformation partner across risk, compliance, treasury and trading ops.

By integrating AxiomSL and Calypso within Nasdaq, we are better together, whether it's cloud adoption with 53% of the new clients of AxiomSL and Calypso being in cloud or the Calypso Cloud that we just launched with AWS. Our domain expertise and our geographic footprint have enabled us to bring new capabilities like digital assets as well as new geographies, 15 new geographies. And we had strong sales execution with landmark deals.

So now if we look at this acquisition through the metrics, there is so much to be proud of. We are on track or exceeding on all the objectives that we had set at the time of the acquisition. So we'll start with cross-sell revenue, and we are on track for the $100 million plus run rate by year-end 2027.

And Tal has talked to you about 42 cross-sell, $45 million of the target and the acceleration we are seeing. On efficiencies, we targeted $80 million run rate expense synergies within 24 months. We actioned the full $80 million in less than 12 months. And then we upped it to $140 million, and we delivered $160 million plus in expense efficiencies action by year-end 2025. This was also accretive within 18 months, 6 months ahead. And on leverage, 2.9x for year-end 2025, while growing the dividend and doing $850 million in share repurchases.

I'd like to round out our discussion on M&A with an update on our strategic holders' ownership. Thoma Bravo has fully exited their position. As you may have seen, Investor AB has recently acquired additional shares of Nasdaq, confirming their long-term interest in Nasdaq and its continued success. We have also confirmed with Borse Dubai that they remain a long-term holder. We look forward to the continued partnership with both Investor AB and Borse Dubai, and we're thrilled to have on our Board Johan Pogby, representing Investor AB, Issa Kim, representing Borse Dubai and Holden Spate from Thoma Bravo, who remains on our Board.

I'll put a vote on this transformation and I'm going to actually repeat something that Adena already said because I think it bears repeating. In 2020, we had $2.9 billion in net revenue. That number is still relevant today, except that now it is our operating income. Our operating margin, 51%, growing by 500 basis points in the period to 56%.

And I'll finish the section where I started. EPS at a CAGR of 11% while executing 2 acquisitions and EPS growth was 24% in 2025. We are delivering for our clients and our shareholders, and that is reflected in our exceptional financial performance. Exceptional. I don't usually use that word lightly. But in the software sector, there is a benchmark. That's the Rule of 40, which is revenue growth plus EBITDA margin.

We are 1 of 18 companies in the S&P 500 that score above 60 on the Rule of 40 with revenue growth above 8% and at scale with revenue above $5 billion and free cash flow above $2 billion. So that performance stands on its own. I quite like the 70 on the right. But on a relative basis, we are also outperforming our peers in software, in full services and diversified financials.

So now let's move on to driving resilient growth. And I'm going to start with the opportunity. It's a significant growth opportunity. Today, we have a SAM of $38 billion and a TAM of $86 billion. Two years ago, you may remember me on the same podium talking to you about a SAM of $31 billion that was going to grow at 8%. You all really good at math. So you know that 2 years of 8% on $31 billion is less than $38 billion. And the difference is organic expansion, new partnership, digital assets, new products.

In the next 5 years, we project our TAM to grow at 6% CAGR and our SAM to grow at 9% CAGR. And as financial institutions adopt AI and Gen AI, we think that we're going to see an accelerated growth from the TAM into the SAM as some of their own internal costs are redirected towards blended spend. So we see a significant SAM growth and a very great right to win.

So now we've established a market opportunity, and I'm going to talk about our drivers of growth since our last Investor Day. In the last 2 years, we've had a CAGR of 10%. And you see in the middle, 7% for the alpha factors. Back to the acceleration I was talking about, in 2025, the Alpha contribution was 170 basis points higher than in 2024. that comes from existing client base at 5%. Our strong retention is driving lower churn of 2% and then new clients cross-sell and other innovation at 4%. Market Services had a market share and capture that were flat.

But if you think about it, maintaining those high levels in a strong volume environment, which you see in the 3% of beta is an accomplishment by the team. In this dynamic ecosystem, we balanced market share and capture across equities and options, and we had significant outperformance versus our peers. In U.S. equities, 74% higher capture than the #2. in 2025. In U.S. options, a 5 percentage point lead versus the #2 in market share since 2025. So you've already seen this from Adena. The growth results from staying ahead in innovation.

Gen AI is reshaping how we and our clients work. And we've all walked you through our differentiation on Gen AI. I will walk you through the financial implications for Nasdaq and how our clients benefit. Our contracts are mostly enterprise pricing based on scale and value. Only 4% of our software and data product revenue is seat-based that is IR Insight and Boardvantage, but they are relatively insulated from Gen AI disruption because Gen AI is unlikely to reduce the size of boards, senior management or IR teams. And we've put Gen AI into these solutions with a 74% AI engagement for IR Insight and 47% for Boardvantage.

Adding value to clients is extraordinarily important. And having that compelling ROIC to client is core to our revenue growth model. We measure it extensively, whether it's POCs or whether it's to drive net retention. And if you look at the value we add to our clients through the lens of our own investment framework, the one that I presented 2 years ago, still in appendix, it hasn't changed. The ROIC, which is the net benefits versus the investments meets or exceeds 2x over 3 years. In many cases, and you've heard some examples, materially higher. That makes all of our products and investment decisions H1 for our clients.

In addition, as you think about the renewal, we have a 2x in-year benefits versus in-year cost. So that is ongoing strong value for our clients. So we've looked at the market opportunity, the sources of revenue growth and how we engage with our clients. So I'm going to wrap up this growth section with our solutions medium-term outlook. We are again increasing our solutions revenue medium-term outlook from 8% to 11% to 9% to 12%.

In the last 5 years, we've operated within our respective medium-term outlooks. And in 4 of the last 5 years, we have operated within this revised medium-term outlook of 9% to 12%. We have the confidence in our ability to achieve the outlook. That confidence is anchored in everything you have heard today. The SAM growth of 9% with GenAI upside from Adena, our strategy and our vision, from our technology leaders, our innovation and culture of excellence and from our business leaders, the value we provide to clients, our engagement with clients and how we are going to grow across expand, evolve and transform.

Now let's get into the details of the 9% to 12%. We are increasing the CA medium-term revenue outlook from 5% to 8% to 6% to 10%. We are reaffirming the fintech medium-term revenue outlook at 10% to 14% with over time, the ability to grow higher within the range. That is because of the mission-critical nature of our solutions, the momentum of our One Nasdaq strategy, including the cross-sales, Gen AI and digital assets opportunities. For 2026, we expect our solutions revenue to be within the updated medium-term outlook range. We are reiterating the comments we made on the last earnings call, and we have strong momentum and engagement with our clients with sales time lines in line with our expectations.

So now let's go to financial execution. Let's start with expense. Our business transformation has also created tremendous operating leverage, and you're seeing 400 basis points since our last Investor Day. That was just 2 years ago. Our non-GAAP organic operating expense was at 6.5% CAGR in the last 2 years. If you look at the component, inflation and structural expense at 3.5%, acquisition expense at 0.6%, and that will persist in 2026 and '27 before tailing off in 2028.

Our efficiency initiatives, a 3% benefit to expense growth as most of the $160 million of actions are in the run rate. then revenue growth and investments drive the majority of our expense growth at 3% and 2.5%, respectively. For revenue-related growth, it's about unit economics, and we are investing on a sustainable basis. You've heard a lot about that. But that is why we are where we are today, and that is what will continue to preserve our leadership.

We are also importantly, reaffirming our operating expense medium-term outlook at 5% to 8%. That is great discipline in the context of the solutions medium-term outlook at 9% to 12%. Our expense medium-term outlook is rooted in discipline and amplified by the Gen AI productivity opportunity we see. We are launching a new AI productivity program. By year-end 2027, we target to have actioned $100 million in run rate efficiencies. This will continue to support our growth through reinvestments.

And over time, we have an expense and operating leverage benefit. In 2026, it will be a small benefit and more meaningful starting in 2027. We see compelling efficiency and effectiveness coming from Gen AI on the business. We talked about some of the examples, PDLC, client success, driving operational scale and automation -- it's a starting point, a disciplined way to capture value today while we continue to build the capabilities.

So now let's move to capital allocation, starting with its foundation in free cash flow. Free cash flow and free cash flow generation are the backbone of our capital allocation framework, $2.2 billion, one of my favorite numbers in the presentation. And that's a 2025 number. And it has been growing at a CAGR of 17% since 2020. And the free cash flow conversion on the other side of the slide, absolute basis, 109%. That is tremendous. And we've also outperformed our 4 major peer groups.

So what's great about that $2.2 billion and growing free cash flow is that it can support shareholder value in multiple ways. First, on growth investment. We are focused on organic growth, and we are prioritizing our investments through our Horizon framework, which I have described before and which is again in appendix. We have a 10% plus enterprise ROIC target. We also do, as you know, venture investments, and we may consider to augment our organic growth potential bolt-on M&A.

On leverage, we are establishing a target gross leverage of mid- to high 2s. That gives us the flexibility to optimize our capital structure efficiency and support our current ratings. Our corporate philosophy is to maintain an investment-grade rating. On share repurchases, the Board has approved an increase to our share repurchase authorization to $3 billion. We are committed to offset employee dilution. And in terms of opportunistic share repurchases, in 2026, we have already repurchased $500 million. That includes accelerating when we saw the dislocation in our stock. Just for context, last year, 2025 was $616 million total for share repurchases were just in February.

Finally, the dividend. We will expand our dividend progressively as we grow earnings and free cash flow. And our Board has approved an increase in our dividend by $0.04 to $0.31 per share that will be reflected in the June '26 payment. I am so fortunate to serve as the CFO of Nasdaq, working alongside this incredible leadership team and an incredible group of employees. We have reinforced our position as a leading technology platform and the trusted fabric of the financial system.

In a world of profound change, on the horizon, whether it is a structural shift in the financial markets or the rapid rise in AI, we are ready to continue to drive innovation and growth. We have intentionally positioned ourselves as our clients' trusted transformation partner while executing with consistent operational excellence to deliver sustainable growth, financial discipline and long-term value to shareholders. We have an incredible path in front of us, and we are just getting started.

So with that, I'd like to invite Adena and the leadership team back on stage. We're going to take questions from the audience, and Ato is going to moderate our session. Thank you.

AG

Ato Garrett executive

All right. Thank you again for joining us. We have eager bunch of questions in there already. So just a couple of format things for the question-and-answer section. We do have runners in the crowd. So please do hold your question until we do have a microphone over to you and then feel free to ask your question. And we're going to start up here with Alex Kramm from UBS. So wait for the mic and here we are.

AK

Alex Kramm analyst

That's what happens when you sit in the first row. Sorry that I -- there are so many questions, but I'm going to start, of course, with the Debbie Downer question because the one thing you didn't really touch upon today and the one area that you lowered your targets today was in the Workflow and Insights. So understand that you didn't spend a lot of time on it, but certainly would love to understand how we -- how you're looking at these businesses today.

I mean even in some of the slides, it certainly didn't compare as well in terms of the industry position of them. So a, is there any real initiatives that you can talk about how to maybe get some of the IR and governance solutions to maybe do better or any market backdrop that could help those businesses? Or if they're really dragging down the growth of the overall franchise, do you still think you're the right owners of these businesses? So just a little bit more update on those.

AF

Adena Friedman executive

Sure. Well, I'm going to start and hand that right over to Nelson. So just to remind everyone, the Workflow and Insights businesses include our analytics businesses, which are investment, Data Link, the Nasdaq Fund Network and Nasdaq Fund Secondaries and as well as the Corporate Solutions businesses with our IR and Government Solutions. So I just want to remind everyone.

I think the general view that you probably saw here, we have a lot of momentum across our analytics businesses. I think the challenge area has been more in the Corporate Solutions businesses. And I would say that it's definitely been a market backdrop issue. So I'm going to hand it over to Nelson to talk a little bit more about that, but also how well positioned they are for the clients and for what we provide to them.

NG

Nelson Griggs executive

Yes. It really has been a market backdrop situation. If you look at the IPO market from, let's say, 2022, '23 and '24 and really the softness there, we had a lot fewer public companies to work with. So that is the area we're focused on it. We are very scaled in both, and we think we've delivered the best products in the marketplace. So as we do see the IPO market pick up, we have more activity. We have more potential to work with our clients. We do believe the products are truly best in market. So it's really how do we ignite the growth there again.

But as Adena said, that whole segment, just really awesome opportunity across investment, and we're seeing some great growth out of the data and data link products. So I think the whole segment, I look at how we get that growth rate back up within corporates, we do need to see a more constructive IPO market.

AF

Adena Friedman executive

Yes. And I think one of the other areas that you also mentioned, Nelson earlier, is that part of the product suite is in the sustainability sector. And that's where we've seen also, I would say, a backdrop -- a demand backdrop that's changed. We're having good success in Europe and continuing to drive those solutions. We're investing in the solutions to make sure they're very fit for purpose for the markets that we're serving. But the demand orientation of this business has shifted in the last few years also.

I would also say when we show you the slides around kind of looking at each of our solutions, it's important to recognize that the Corporate Solutions businesses are really well positioned for what they do. But not all -- as you saw, there was like that limited versus not relevant. And it's because like, for instance, for our governance solutions, we are the keeper of board materials, but we're not creating gold standard data inside of Board Vantage.

We are creating a very secure and resilient solution to allow them to consume that content, their own content. And then we're putting AI capabilities on to create board summarizations and other capabilities within that content set. But it's just -- that's kind of an example where it's just not relevant to that particular product.

NG

Nelson Griggs executive

And one more quick comment is the Investor Relations business is super critical to the listing business. So the success in that win rate, it is a flywheel. It's imperative when you go in the pitches and have Investor Relations experts in the room, it really matters.

AF

Adena Friedman executive

Yes. So we have that analytics business and the software business. What's on that page is the software part of the business, but the overall business within IR is a very strategic asset to us.

AG

Ato Garrett executive

We can go to Mike Cyprys in the middle.

MC

Michael Cyprys analyst

Great. I appreciate all that. Just a question on tokenization. I think you had outlined a $4 billion to $6 billion market opportunity for tokenization. I was hoping you might be able to elaborate on what's comprised in that figure, how you see that ramping? And if Nasdaq is successful in penetrating that, I guess, what might that look like? What portion of that opportunity might you be able to penetrate relative to the penetration of your SAM today?

AF

Adena Friedman executive

Okay. I'm going to start with Sarah and then you can pass it on to Tal if that helps.

SY

Sarah Youngwood executive

Yes. So if you start with what is in the $38 billion of the SAM, it's about $1.5 billion. And so that's in today's numbers. So that is part of the $3 billion to $6 billion that you would see by 2030. So those are some of the things we are already doing, for example, serving the digital asset industry. Maybe I'll pass it to you for some color.

TC

Tal Cohen executive

Great question. So just on framing, again, that's a 2030 number, 3 to 6, and it incorporates all the opportunities across Nasdaq. So trading, financial technology, data index, just to frame the opportunity. And then let me just address it within the context of what we've been sharing today, which is always on. And in always on, we've talked about 4 opportunities. One is 235 markets. We see that as an enabler. Of course, we're going to grow on that. We think we're really well positioned.

Our tokenization filing really well positions us there. I talked about or Magnus talked about tokenized collateral for Calypso. Collateral management is incredibly important when it comes to tokenization to unlock the promise of tokenization, which is let's reduce risk, let's free up that capital. And by the way, when we free up that capital, we can put it back into work in the markets. And that's where you get that, if you will, knock-on effect and the flywheel effect. The third thing we talked about, and Magnus mentioned it in his presentation, is post-trade. We're selling post-trade solutions that enable tokenization.

And so it's not just happening here. It's happening across the globe. And if you think about the community of financial infrastructure that we serve, that we're providing post-trade solutions to, that could be really interesting in terms of the community we create and tokenized collateral capabilities that they have. Then finally, on what Nelson mentioned, it's not just about financial technology and trading.

Longer term, I think there is the opportunity to provide solutions that solve pain points and deepen our relationships with issuers. You talked a little bit about proxy, and we're thinking about that, and we're thinking about how to work with partners around that. So I think it's incredibly powerful. It's a long-term trend. These are some of the things that we're doing right now. And I think if we do these things well, we'll unlock greater opportunity going forward.

AG

Ato Garrett executive

We can go to Dan Fannon at Jefferies at the back.

DF

Daniel Fannon analyst

Just wanted to follow up on 2035. What's a reasonable time period for that to happen? And then outside of just velocity and more trading, what are the other revenue streams that we should think about kind of coming off of that incremental volume and user base?

AF

Adena Friedman executive

Sure. actually, I'll turn it back to you, Tal.

TC

Tal Cohen executive

Yes. So I'm going to take your 2-part question there. In terms of just timing for '25, we've said we're going to be operational and technically ready in the second half of this year. Brendan and team have done a great job of making sure, and this is really important that our operational excellence and the resiliency we bring to core trading hours today, we can replicate that for 235. So that's number one.

Number two, on that first part of your question is we need to work with the industry. We need to work with the SEC. We need to make sure all the utility in that infrastructure, whether it's DTCC, the SIP, the TRF are ready. In conversations with clients, retail very excited. Institutions apprehensive about what this means to them. So what we've said to them is we're going to preserve the sanctity of our open and our close in the way that they trade and think about how they look at benchmarks and their algorithms and how they look at the trading day.

So we've been working with the industry very closely. We actually have a working group with the industry to make sure that we're understanding their concerns, their needs on operational excellence, anything that has to do with corporate actions. And then also, there are rules like Reg NMS and SEI that do not apply right now to after hours, and we have to figure out if they should. So that's the first part of it. But we're -- from a Nasdaq perspective, we're excited. We're ready. And by the way, we provide technology to a lot of others that are running 24/5 markets.

NG

Nelson Griggs executive

I'll just chime in on that. Our data business is already deeply engaged with our clients on that. I think it's more reflective in a '27 opportunity, but that gave us also some confidence to raise the outlook for that reporting segment. Our international clients care deeply, and it's an opportunity for us.

TC

Tal Cohen executive

And I was just going to add to that, it is an opportunity for us to do 3 things. One, data, we're working very closely with Nelson's team on unlocking the power of our data, financial technology. we do it ourselves. We can power other exchanges. Others will think about that. And then over time, we're going to unlock latent demand in 2035 because right now, there isn't the transparency, the integrity and the trust in those markets. They fall down, they don't work. The price discovery mechanism is not what it should be. So I think over time, we're going to actually open up that opportunity. But there's an opportunity across the full flywheel as Nelson mentioned.

AG

Ato Garrett executive

All right. We have Bill Katz here in the front.

WK

William Katz analyst

Thank you very much. Great presentation. So one of the testimonials had Franklin Resources on there, and their CEO recently indicated that mission-critical applications are now under the next sort of level of assault. And then clients sort of arguing that complexity alone is not enough relative to pace of change in AI. You've done a tremendous job today sort of, I think, talking through the enterprise level and the complexity and the layers of the business. What are you hearing from your larger users here as the AI cycle times are accelerating, the cost is going down and then the durability of the business going forward? Because I think that's the real question for the stock.

AF

Adena Friedman executive

Yes, absolutely. So first, I'm going to start and then I'm going to actually allow Tal to give you an example on the same with Nielsen. And I think that -- I think Brad and the technology team did a great job of talking about what it really takes to build out enterprise-level AI capabilities. Our clients are incredibly highly regulated as are we. So we understand the fact that you have to do this at a scale and at a level of precision that really can carry us forward. And so that's, I think, really important to recognize.

And so our clients are going to be looking for partners who understand that and can be able to deliver that. I think we've invested years in our ability to be able to get to the point where we have the scale Gen AI platform that really is the -- think of that as kind of the operating layer within Nasdaq for both our on the business and in the product deployment of AI. So we really do partner across the business to be able to deploy it at that scale. And in terms of clients, they're actually turning to us as that transformation partner. We're actually leading them down the road.

So certainly, as you heard from the anti-fincrime business, we have this great team of clients that work with us to say, what are the highest pain points, what are the areas they want to work on the most. And we only launched our Gen AI agent, the agentic workforce in the fourth quarter of 2025, and we already have 350 clients using that, which means they've gone through their own internal committees. They've been able to -- we've been able to demonstrate industrial-grade capability to them, and they're using those solutions as a way, and that we're just getting started.

But Tal, you also have a good example of a client with AxiomSL that's probably worth mentioning.

TC

Tal Cohen executive

Yes, it's a great one, actually. And it's one that we're seeing that is, again, repeatable across our customer base. So in Axiom, we have what we would describe as a power user. That power user is on-prem. So you're using a great deal of Axiom's capabilities, but they're on-prem. Ed and team did a great job of showcasing and demonstrating the capabilities that we have with AI. You saw the full suite. So Navigator, Simplify, Investigator, we demoed that full suite. And the CEO said, well, I have to have that. That's going to give me productivity gains. It's super compelling, reduces complexity in a way that's meaningful for me.

And we said, well, you need to go to cloud to get it. And they said, done. And so now we actually have used AI to convert somebody from on-prem to cloud, and now we're also going to provide managed services on top of that. And they're going to take the full suite of AI capabilities, and we're going to explicitly charge for that full suite of capabilities. So it's a great example that we go in, we're not just solving a point-to-point problem across reg tech.

We're saying, here's a suite. here's a package of solutions that enable you to see real productivity gains, real ROI. This is how you can consume it, and this is how we can manage those service for you over time. And there's -- in this client, there's going to be a doubling of ACV as a result of that. So that's just a great use case, but it is not in isolation. This is something that we're consistently seeing with our clients. And remember, Axiom serves large complex clients. So this is an opportunity for us to go into that base of customers and present like I just said...

AF

Adena Friedman executive

I think a couple of other things to think about. I know Nelson, do you want to talk about the AI-ready data and other things that you guys are doing. And then I'll I have a feeling grad.

NG

Nelson Griggs executive

Well, I'll steal one of shinies behind. Our clients in data are coming to us to ask how we can help them. And it really was actually the Franklin Templeton video where the client said they want clean AI-ready data to drive alpha and make decisions. So that encompasses our entire data franchise, gold standard data that's mission-critical. So just I can go client by client, but that really is what they're asking us for.

And just really getting back to Corporate Solutions a bit when you think about the governance platform and what's the differentiated, how we have to look at product by product, that is the company's most sensitive data. They are not putting that in learning models ever. So you look at -- they are looking for critical workflows to be completed, and these are small ACV clients for us. So really have power to drive their efficiencies through AI. So I think the important world of AI to us is going product by product, what's offensive, what's defensive, what the client is asking for, what are they ready for. And I think we're just really well positioned across the entire portfolio to do that.

AF

Adena Friedman executive

Yes. Brad, any comments you have?

BP

Bradley Peterson executive

Yes. So maybe 3. So one thing is you heard we're very early on in these tech trends. And as an incumbent, you want to be ready. So we're in a very competitive environment. We don't mind competing. And so that's the one thing is are you tuned into what's coming? And complexity is one element that could be -- and the tools are getting much better, but complexity is only one element of that. So as you heard, we have been on our front foot with this.

The second thing is I have a dual role. I'm the other one. I'm the customer on the other end. So is my supplier giving me a reason to look and take on something -- something is complex and highly integrated. That's not a very attractive project to tackle with a new disruptor that has never done a major integration. So you look at it and you go, complexity is not enough to move. I also have to -- my partner is a vendor, not a partner and gives me a reason to even look.

So those are all the things you do every day in a competitive environment. And -- but I think the most important is just our position of we never sit on our laurels. We are always looking, and we're trying to make opportunities out of them, but aware of the defensive nature we have to take.

Yes. And I think as we've been looking at across everything that we do, the first thing is we were so happy that we have been investing as much as we have over the last decade because as soon as AI came on to the scene, we started playing offense. And I think that's really, really important. We didn't have to say and go, oh my gosh, we have to rewrite our solutions into cloud so that we can play offense. We had already done that. We'd already built an AI team. They were already partnering with our business.

We already had AI road maps for our products, but we've accelerated that. We have product road maps that cover multiple years so that we also understand at the architectural level, the platform level, at the application level, how are we bringing this technology across each of the products. And we do those product reviews on a regular basis. So it is very much a discipline within Nasdaq to make sure we're modernizing and staying ahead of what these technology trends are. And we do that with everyone here at Nasdaq.

The last thing I would say is we do have very special data. And I do want to point out, we have a lot of proprietary data that we create that is ours to deliver. We also have the ability to -- we've built out proprietary data within our platforms for years of operating those platforms that is truly unique, whether that's in Calypso, in AMSL, surveillance, in IR Insight. I mean these are like deeply embedded data capabilities that have built out over many, many years of experience, which really define the algorithmic capabilities that we're delivering to our clients.

And that then we can put AI on and make that even smarter. And then we have network effects across the data in our contributory data lakes and source data that is at scale. So I think all of that has been really foundational to being ready for this moment. As I mentioned earlier, I ran the data business for 9 years at Nasdaq. In fact, Nasdaq was the first exchange to create a data business, and that was in 2000. And so we -- I was the first leader of the data business. And it was like a whole new capability that we were building out, a way to monetize the outcomes of our trading engines in ways that no one else in the industry really considered -- and we have then carried that forward ever since then.

So I can tell you that data is at the center of every organic and inorganic decision we make here. It really has been and it will continue to be because we see it as such a powerful enabler of the industry. So that is a commitment that we've made as kind of foundational to our strategy, and it does create the foundation for all of our solutions. And that's why we're so ready for this moment.

AG

Ato Garrett executive

I know our analysts always have questions, but any investors that are out there as well. All right. We'll go on maybe Eli in the back.

UA

Unknown Attendee

Great. Adena, you talked about how you're embedding these agentic workers into almost every product, it seems like. I was hoping you could talk more about the economics of those agentic workers. I know the compute costs for generative AI can be quite significant. Are those extra costs contemplated by your existing licensing agreements? Do clients need to be upsold in additional models to get access to those workers? How do you ensure you're recouping that value?

AF

Adena Friedman executive

Yes. So we have, I think, that certain elements of what we're doing, we're embedding inside the capabilities that we're already offering under the pricing agreements we already have. Certain elements of those capabilities, we're pricing distinctly for those modules, and we're upselling our clients into those modules. Everything we think about is making sure that we're delivering a return and we're getting a return. So if we're having to invest in order to be able to drive that, then we're going to make sure that we get a return on our investment as our clients get a return on their investment.

But I also want to say there's one other capability that we haven't really focused on that I think it's one of the great capabilities we have inside of Nasdaq, which is data optimization. So in cloud, and we've been able to demonstrate that every acquisition we've made, we've made them vastly more efficient in leveraging cloud data and kind of putting their data in cloud and managing their cloud and data because data at rest is one thing, but data and motion in the cloud is variable. And we have done a superb job.

And we're talking 500 billion messages we're managing in our markets every single day, and we do that at scale with -- in AWS. And we actually -- all of that data flows into our AWS intelligence layer, and we have an incredibly efficient way of doing that. And so whenever we've acquired another business, we've taken them and made them vastly more efficient in how they manage data ingress, egress. That allows us then to think about that token efficiency, which is, again, we've applied that expertise as we've been bringing these models in.

And that's why the investment in AI-ready data is so much more token efficient because we have these great embedded experts. That expertise actually, it's interesting, sits both in the operations team and Brendan's team, but it's a core capability we bring across every team. So that's, again, like a one Nasdaq way of working.

BP

Bradley Peterson executive

Maybe I'll say something else. So there's a lot of things that are going to help us continue to drive that cost down. The good news is it has been coming down significantly. But when you think about domains as they narrow, there -- you don't need some of the heft you get from these models. So there's the opportunity to -- with domain specific, you can get way lower cost. So that's another opportunity. The overall trend is down.

And then I would say just what we've looked at, the automation itself has great ROI. So we've been putting this in for years. Most of our AI products have incredible ROI. So it is -- machines run 7x24 and they can do a lot of things. And as the capability keeps going and the cost goes down, there's a crossover point for way more automation. So we're pretty -- we're looking at going -- all those 3 things come together to look promising.

AF

Adena Friedman executive

I just want to say one more thing, which is our Gen AI platform allows us to be essentially model neutral. So we can evaluate every model, every sort of like new version of the model that comes in, we do test against it. We actually retest all of our solutions against new models that are coming in and new versions so that we know can we deploy this model, this new version of the model or something different to be able to solve the problem better.

So you should know that we are model agnostic in the way that we've built our Gen AI platform so that allows us to be as efficient and effective as possible and fit for purpose for each one because we actually are using different models for different solutions based on their capabilities and efficiency.

AG

Ato Garrett executive

I'm going to go to Ben.

BB

Benjamin Budish analyst

Ben Budish from Barclays. Maybe one for Sarah on the expense side. So it's a 2-parter. So in terms of the expected actions expense savings by the end of '27, how many of those are sort of like normal efficiencies versus like actual implementation of AI that's going to displace work that's done elsewhere? And then as we think about like your sort of cycle guidance, it's 3 to 5 years, I think the way you described this last time was there's like a range of revenues and OpEx growth targets, and they can kind of move with each other.

As you're using more AI internally, is it -- do you think about the possibility? Or how do you think about the possibility of revenue growth like continuing to outpace like -- could revenue growth be at the high end while OpEx stays at the low end or maybe you would reinvest that? But is that -- how do you think about those potential outcomes?

SY

Sarah Youngwood executive

Yes. So in terms of the first question, this is a Gen AI productivity program. There might be some AI. There might be some other automation because part of the solutions are not purely just Gen AI. You actually have lots of choices, but it's very much AI. This is not a location strategy or something else that we may have done in the past. That doesn't mean that we wouldn't do that, but that is not included in the $100 million that we have talked about.

To address your second point, this is definitely an accelerant over time. Remember that this is actually a program that doesn't have a restructuring cost. And that also speaks to the point that we've been investing since 12 years ago. And therefore, we don't need to do things like that. And even in the first year in 2026, I said there will be a small benefit. So that's actually quite powerful. And -- but I said there would be more '27 and after. And so that helps very much.

And we do have the ability to do what we've done in the past, which is either to yield that to benefit of expense or to reinvest that either for more expense benefits or for growth and really to support the growth of our products, which is why we are here today and how we are going to continue to maintain our leadership. So we are very excited because this is a really nice way to get us started with Gen AI productivity. And we do think that it's very tangible right now when you talk to Don and to the rest of the team.

AG

Ato Garrett executive

I think Owen, I think you're raising your hand, Owen Lau.

OL

Owen Lau analyst

It's a good presentation. I want to ask about capital return actually. Do you have a new target right now, mid- to high 2x gross leverage. You were at, I think, 2.9x at the end of last year. As you grow your adjusted EBITDA, I think your leverage will come down naturally. It doesn't look like you need to spend more capital to pay down debt. So is it fair to say that Nasdaq will be more aggressive on buyback? Do you have any aspirational goal of total payout ratio like 70% to 80%, which is consistent with other information services companies?

SY

Sarah Youngwood executive

I think I gave you a pretty good proof point of the fact that we love our stock price. We loved it, by the way, at the beginning of the year. And...

AF

Adena Friedman executive

We don't like the stock price now, but we definitely see a lot of value. We don't like the stock price.

SY

Sarah Youngwood executive

That is totally true. But in the meanwhile, as a buyer of the stock, we've been very aggressive. And so we have a lot of appetite for share repurchases, and we did also at the beginning of the year. You saw that actually in the 10-K when we published the variable ASR, which was the second time in a row that we did that programmatic repurchase to be sure that we were doing that. So we are not giving a specific target, but you're seeing us in action.

AF

Adena Friedman executive

Yes. I mean I would just say we obviously have great flexibility with the $2.2 billion plus growing cash flow. And what we want to continue to do, as Sarah mentioned, is that progressive dividend. You're right that our EBITDA growth will continue to support bringing the leverage down. We do have a bond that's coming due in June. We may choose to repay that. We may choose to decide that we'll roll that. It kind of depends on the environment. We definitely see a lot of opportunity with buybacks, and it's a great use of capital as we look at the return characteristics on that.

But I also want to say we want to -- we also -- we've always made sure that we have that like that real progressive dividend, the discipline for rebuying back any sort of employee shares the ability to do that opportunistic buyback and also to look at how do we optimize the return of our business over time. So we don't -- that's not a specific target like that is not something that we've actually even talked about internally because we're just starting to kind of bring in the buybacks kind of and really kind of amp up that.

So I just want you to know that's something that we want to continue to be able to have some flexibility around while we are doing a lot of share buybacks right now.

AG

Ato Garrett executive

We can go to Mike Cho.

YC

Y. Cho analyst

I just wanted to go back on the AI conversation. Clearly, Nasdaq is well positioned, has been positioning for 2 or 3 decades now in the data business. But just from a client perspective. I think, Adena, you mentioned some nuances in terms of the pace of client adoption different across the board. Clearly, Nasdaq has a whole suite of various solutions.

So I was just wondering, either from a client segment perspective or Nasdaq solution perspective, are there areas where clients or solutions are maybe a little bit more forward leaning in terms of AI adoption? And maybe are there some areas that are maybe a little less forward leaning when we think about the pace of AI adoption for clients?

AF

Adena Friedman executive

Yes. I think I'm going to hand that to Tal because I think he's got the most on-the-ground understanding of how we're engaging with clients. But I can add to it, but go for it.

TC

Tal Cohen executive

Yes. I take a step back and I'm going to call back for some of the things we said today. But we're giving our clients more reasons to do business with us because of the way we're investing in our products. That's first and foremost. When we go out to our clients and we have conversations with our clients, we're showing them how we're actively investing in our products and our AI road map. That's really important.

The second thing is our products are really good at what they do. I mean that's really true. And so we're solving, like we said, complex problems, but they're really good and our clients trust us. So that's the foundation. So now as I kind of go across our client base, what we see is this is for the most part, there's forward-leading clients that are, if you will, the new age banks that we deal with, they will absolutely be forward leaning. And we serve a lot of them, the new banks of the world, we serve the Revoluts of the world. Those clients love us. We love them. They're great clients. They're forward leaning. They take a number of our solutions. That would be an example of somebody that is also pushing with us when it comes to AI.

When it comes to some of our other client cohorts like the Tier 1s, I think what Nelson and others have said is very true, like the first question we get is like, how do you secure this data? Who's watching it? Who's touching it? I need to know that I trust you. That's why we use the word or the term strategic partner because the first thing they want to know is what we're doing with the data, what we're doing with everything that they're providing us. And then there's this whole discussion around the intelligence that's embedded in our platform that isn't in the public domain.

It's not in specs. It's in our products. So that's what we hear from Tier 1s. And then more globally, when we go to financially systemic important infrastructure, they're still pretty conservative. They're pretty conservative. They want -- they still want to talk to us about resilience, and they still want to talk to us about security and operational excellence. So those conversations are still outgoing and ongoing. sorry. But other than that, I would say we're pretty front-footed with our clients across all of our products.

Verafin is probably having the most advanced conversations with respect to their clients because they are cloud native, AI native. They have a digital worker suite out there. They have a couple of them out there. The ROIs and what we're seeing in the POCs are really compelling. And so that's been a great proof point, and they're pushing that. For other clients, we are really leading the journey for most of our clients, except for the kind of the cohort I shared with you earlier.

AF

Adena Friedman executive

Yes. I mean, as I mentioned, we have 3,800 financial institutions. And even within the institutional clients, too, first, you have to make sure that they really understand how we're leveraging the AI, and they do a lot of diligence, and that's great. We love it when they do diligence because I think that we shine in that kind of environment.

I think the second thing is different parts of the world are also more forward-leaning than other parts of the world. And what's really great about the way we can deliver our solutions is we, of course, want to give our clients the most advanced capabilities all the time. But there are clients who are on-prem, and they feel comfortable that way. And so with some of our solutions, we have -- certain of our solutions are cloud only. Some of our solutions, we are willing to continue to deliver that on-prem, but we're moving them towards cloud.

And then we're moving them into the AI era. And so it really kind of depends on, I would say, size, geography and how advanced they are in their internal operations. But we meet them where they are and then we carry them forward into the future. And we love that role for us. I mean we really do. It's -- I feel like it allows us to be that really deep partner that they're looking for.

TC

Tal Cohen executive

One other great point. One observation for you. Australia, very forward leaning. So sometimes what we see is literally a group of banks that are forward-leaning in a particular country, very different than what we might see in, say, Japan. versus Australia. So that's another way that we kind of look at our core.

AF

Adena Friedman executive

Yes. And yes, different conversations, but great relationships no matter where we are.

AG

Ato Garrett executive

One more question?

AF

Adena Friedman executive

Yes.

AG

Ato Garrett executive

Great. I'm going to go to Brian Bedell.

BB

Brian Bedell analyst

Brian Bedell Deutsche Bank. Yes, I have a 3-parter, but it's all related. Don't worry. And great presentation today, by the way, really super, super helpful. Thanks for doing this. The question is on retail. So you've outlined a structural growth in retail. Obviously, a lot of the initiatives during the day tend to be more institutionally focused. So can you talk about, first, do you see that structural growth in retail persisting? going forward. How you plan on leveraging that growth in retail? Is that more of an institutional sale relationship to those retail providers?

And then on Reg NMS 24/7, do you think -- right now, it does not apply to 24/7. Do you think it will apply to '24, if you could speculate on that? And then lastly, just any interest in getting involved in prediction markets or binary options or something?

AF

Adena Friedman executive

Okay. Great. I actually going to ask Nelson to start on the retail brokerage community and kind of what you're seeing in terms of the demand and also new brokers that are coming in new solutions. And then Tal, I'm going to transfer to you on the market side.

NG

Nelson Griggs executive

Yes. Well, I headlined that as one of the key growth drivers for the data business, and it certainly is something that we feel is secular. We see new clients coming online all the time. they're very progressive thing about how they want to use the data and how they want to leverage our brand to help them engage with their clients. So we do think that is structural. That's a partnership we have with Kevin, looking at that all the time and how we market to those clients. It also is a big obviously driver for the index business as we're seeing that attraction to the Nasdaq company.

So I think you have this headline of Nasdaq list the companies that want to be in, the activity is picking up. It's structural, and we're engaging across them, really data and index and really seeing some of the wealth channels grow for some of our other products and how that impacts the investment when we think about the family offices, et cetera. So it's all an enabler for us, and we're really excited about the growth.

AF

Adena Friedman executive

Yes. And so before I tell you go, just on retail brokerage community, I would just say the rise of what people are calling super apps is something that is obviously accruing to our benefit because it means that they're engaging with retail investors in new ways. And the first thing that they look for is what are the types of investments we want to make in Nasdaq-listed companies and just equities in general is a very, very high-value opportunity for them to get engaged in. So that's great.

The second thing is we are a B2B2C company. So we engage the institutional clients and the institutional clients gauge the ultimate retail investors, and that's kind of how we've designed our business. But now as we go into the market side and 24/7 and Reg NMS, go for it.

TC

Tal Cohen executive

Yes. I'm just trying to remember the 3 part of it.

AG

Ato Garrett executive

That was a good one.

TC

Tal Cohen executive

So I would say on prediction mortgage. Yes. I'm going to try to get it all. So on retail, 235 is an enabler for sure. A lot of foreign retail, so we didn't necessarily just speak about that, but there's a lot of foreign retail and it's unidirectional coming into the U.S. They want to invest in all the great companies that we have here. So we're trying to embrace that through 2035. That's important to note. In our options markets, we're trying to be very responsible with how we're handling it.

And I think a little bit of what Adena said with respect to the option markets with short-dated options, early innings there. We're just trying to make sure that the products we put in the market enable it to be a tool where people can hedge risk, manage risk, take express market sentiment in the right way. And that's what we've done so far. But that's allowed us to, if you will, in the B2BC example, really leverage that.

Okay. Then your second question was just 24/7 and Reg NMS. So we're excited about what this new administration at the SEC is thinking about because if they go down the direction of loosening parts of Reg NMS, we think that provides us with more flexibility, more flexibility to innovate, more flexibility to do different things and it frees us up to serve our customers in a better way and get paid for some of the premium products that we have in the marketplace. So I think we love the conversations that are going on with the SEC. We're embracing it. We're already putting plans in place around how we might be able to take advantage of that.

Prediction markets. Okay. So today, prediction markets, mostly retail or really all retail, a lot of sports gambling, a little bit of crypto, a little bit of politics, right? So the way we're looking at it, and you heard Kevin talk about this, is we're thinking about using our exchange assets. We're highly regulated, transparent. There's the integrity.

Most importantly, there's a great connectivity we have with the institutional community, and it's part of a larger complex. As you think about these types of products as part of a larger complex, we can use that to put in the market events contracts in our options marketplace with all the belts and braces that we have today, work with other partners to create that complex, bring in the institutional part of the ecosystem to make it much more robust and much more sustainable because what you see is a lot of trading, but not of open interest. in the prediction markets, right?

The lack of open interest tells you there's not a lot of real demand, like long-term demand. This is momentary, right? It's happening at the moment. And so what we're going to try to build is, if you will, curate that open interest through the products that we would put into our marketplace and have as a larger complex. That's the interesting opportunity, but we're going to need to have conversations with the SEC and others.

AF

Adena Friedman executive

Yes. Yes. So we're looking at kind of think of it as like financial event contracts, right, so that we -- and we start with what we know best in terms of the equities, I think that Kevin actually mentioned the Nasdaq 100 being one of those where we can kind of create options that are specific around that. That allows us to kind of play in the world we know really well, but deliver new capabilities to investors and be a door opener to investors with simplified prediction type options that allow them to kind of come in almost an entry-level way for them to get engaged in markets and financial contracts with kind of binary outcomes.

And so we're excited about engaging with the SEC to deliver that, but we do start to engage with the SEC on that. We're going over time. That's fine.

UA

Unknown Analyst

Thank you. Just to switch to your fastest-growing business, Verafin, just one quick one. I think you had that slide with the pie chart, the 360 enterprise potential clients. I think 22 you have and then you had that 11%, I guess it's 40%, right, in the pipeline. I don't know what pipeline means, but a, can you talk about this a little bit more? And then b, it's been 5 years. And maybe I'm just an Excel jockey, but it seems like you should be further along. I mean, I remember talking to you in 2021 about, hey, you have all these great relationships. Some of these banks are listed on Nasdaq. So why has this not gone faster in particular, given all the good results that you're showing in the marketplace?

AF

Adena Friedman executive

Yes. So I'll start with the second part of that question, and then I'm going to ask you to kind of qualify the pie chart. So in terms of our progress in the enterprise clients, which is banks with $50 billion of assets or more is how we're defining enterprise clients. I think when we actually -- when we acquired Verafin, we said it was going to take 3 years to land our first client. We landed our first client, I think, after 2. But it does take a while.

I mean a lot of you work for these large institutions. It's not an instant decision for them to come in. And frankly, trust -- they have to trust you with their data. They have to understand the value of the franchise. We have to prove out the value, which we do through these proof of concepts. And then they start to go through the contracting process. And the contracting process in some of these banks is rather long. But what's really great is, first, we've created a master services agreement now that spans across all of our fintech solutions. So therefore, as they're taking more products, it's a faster time to contract.

The second thing is that we now have 22 clients. And that obviously allows us to go faster. We had tripled the number of signings last year as we had the year before. So we are definitely showing acceleration in our ability to land these clients. And then we're starting to get those expansion contracts. I think we mentioned a couple of them where we actually are expanding our relationships now because once we can prove value, we can get to the next contract. That contract takes about half the time and then it is also -- at least that it's proving out so far, and it's allowing us to demonstrate more and more value to our clients.

So I would say that I always think that every single client to take our product is so much better than everyone else's. But it's just that process of engagement of going through it, especially with a very risk-averse clientele, just means that you have to go through that process. And I think that the team is doing a great job. We're also using all of Nasdaq now to get them through that contracting process as quickly as possible. So do you want to go through the pie target?

SY

Sarah Youngwood executive

So when you go through the pie, I actually really love that pie because I love that we haven't even touched the great majority of the opportunities because that gives you a really good basis for continuing to put on this medium-term outlook for a long term. And so in some ways, we have delivered 25% CAGR for the last 5 years, and we have barely touched the pie. We have a really nice pipeline that is much larger than what we have already delivered.

It does take a time to deliver from the time it enters the pipeline to the time it signed and then the time to value, but that hasn't changed. That was always the case when we bought this asset given the type of data that it is touching. But once you have it, it's incredibly sticky, has extraordinarily good ROIC, and we're progressing nicely, and we have this immense pie of opportunity.

AF

Adena Friedman executive

Yes. And in terms of the pipeline, it's a high-quality pipeline. I mean we're not just going to say we have one conversation. So they're moving themselves through the pipeline and think about that as a high level of engagement, but in different stages of that engagement.

AG

Ato Garrett executive

Christian, do you have a question? Great. Just last question, [ Nikila ]?

UA

Unknown Analyst

I was hoping you could talk a little bit more about the strategy for NDX options. It feels like that's a product we're hearing a lot more about lately. Specifically, how many retail brokers have lit up those products? And then I also think you gave us a revenue number for NDX options for the first time today. I was surprised to see that the fee rate appears to be at about the same price point as Cboe's SPX. How do you think about striking the right balance between capturing value and building a critical mass of liquidity?

And I know it's a lot, but just one more. There's -- I know there's a rival kind of between S&P and your indexing business. But is it out of the question for Nasdaq to maybe make a run for the S&P index options license when that comes up for renewal, given this new product.

AF

Adena Friedman executive

Well, I'm going to take that last question first and then hand it over to Tal. The first thing I would say is we don't actually have a rival with S&P. We do address different things. We have clients who take obviously multiple indexes. The license multiple indexes, they invest in multiple indexes. Honestly, we have a great relationship with S&P. So it's not at all a rival REIT. It's just a matter of us growing and expanding with our return characteristics and our thematic indices and our special sauce, and they do the same with theirs. So I just want to say the index is a little different. In terms of the trading, though, I think that it's really great to talk about the index options business and how it's growing.

TC

Tal Cohen executive

Yes. And there's like another 3-parter on that one. so let me try to make sure I got all of them, but let me know if I missed anything. So number one, we love the proprietary index option business, and we've been investing in it for the last 4 or 5 years actively. And the way we've been investing in it, just to give you a little color is we've been investing in the product and in the distribution. So working with retail brokers, working with the ecosystem to expand distribution.

And you saw a little of that in what Kevin presented today when we talked about ETP AUM, and now they're incorporating options into ETPs. And a lot of that is Nasdaq-based products. Some of the most successful launches on the ETP side have been with Nasdaq index options behind that product. So that's been something that's been ongoing. Now in terms of where we are, we are averaging in terms of just like the number of contracts a day, we're probably 115 to 120 contracts -- 120,000 contracts a day. That's just the starting point. We are literally early innings on that.

And we think we can further accelerate that by some of the partnerships that we're talking to retail brokers about. So that could be a big part of our growth. The other part of it, and there's a 2-parter there, is international. We need to do more globally to introduce the Nasdaq 100 because all the names in the Nasdaq 100 are the most popular relevant names in the world. So we need to work with Nelson's team and others to do that. And then finally, on the index side, we're working with Nelson's team to unlock institutional demand. just because his team has great relationships with institutions. So we're going to try to unlock some of that institutional demand that we know are there, give them tools, give them more exposure, help them understand how to invest in our products.

The other part of your question, I just want to make sure I got this right. You said it was more expensive. Well, so that's interesting because Kevin and I talk about this all the time. We're actually, I think, cheaper and maybe slightly cheaper on a notional value because you got to remember the notional value of NDX. It's a pretty expensive contract, right? And that's why Kevin talked about XMD. So I think on a basis point, so basis points is the best way to look at it. I think we're slightly cheaper actually. So it could even be more attractive, if you will, against other similar products in S&P.

So we've always actually thought we've actually had pricing room in NDX, to be honest. So we feel really good about retail distribution, working with the index team. The pricing of the product has not been a problem for us at all. In fact, we've raised it over the last couple of years, and we've seen demand just grow. And so all of those factors are why we're just really excited and continue to invest in that business.

AG

Ato Garrett executive

All right. Well, thank you very much for joining us for the Q&A session. And we'll turn it back over to Adena for closing remarks.

AF

Adena Friedman executive

Great. Well, I think you all are going to stay here for 1 second. So thank you all so much for joining us. Thank you for honestly braving the weather because some of you did come in during snow. It's not beautiful outside. But thank you so much for spending the morning with us. Hopefully, you really did get a sense of the power of our platform, the deep relationships we have with our clients, the power of our data and the fit-for-purpose solutions we offer our clientele to carry them into the future. And I want to thank you.

Now we get to have lunch together. So for those who can stay for lunch, our team will also stay for lunch, and we look forward to continuing our engagement. Thank you.

Sep '26		+/- %
Revenue	9,186 9,186	12% 12% 100%
- Direct Costs	3,406 3,406	10% 10% 37%
Gross Profit	5,780 5,780	14% 14% 63%
- Selling and Administrative Expenses	2,332 2,332	9% 9% 25%
- Research and Development Expense	- -	- -
EBITDA	3,448 3,448	17% 17% 38%
- Depreciation and Amortization	656 656	5% 5% 7%
EBIT (Operating Income) EBIT	2,792 2,792	20% 20% 30%
Net Profit	2,084 2,084	28% 28% 23%

Head office	United States
CEO	Ms. Friedman
Employees	9,613
Founded	1971
Website	www.nasdaq.com

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