Nasdaq Aktie

Good morning, everyone. I'm Elias Abboud. Craig Siegenthaler and I cover U.S. exchanges here at BofA, and I'm pleased to be joined on stage by Nasdaq's CFO, Sarah Youngwood.

With 4,500 companies on its exchange, Nasdaq is the largest listing venue in the U.S. It is, of course, a leader in both stock and options exchange -- options trading. But since 2017, it has been in the midst of a strategic pivot to being a scaled technology and information services provider as well. Today, nearly 80% of Nasdaq's revenue is from nontrading businesses. This includes indexing data, corporate services, marketplace technology, regulatory reporting and financial crime management technology.

Sarah was appointed as CFO in 2023. Before coming to NASDAQ, she was the CFO for UBS, where she played a key role in modernizing the bank's infrastructure and facilitating the acquisition of Credit Suisse. She also has 25 years of experience at JPMorgan, where she held senior roles in investment banking and Investor Relations and as the CFO of Chase and JPMorgan's technology unit. Sarah, thank you for spending some time with us.

Thanks for having me.

So Sarah, to get started, my sense is that a fair number of our European clients still think of Nasdaq as an exchange. So to start, why don't you talk to us about the strategic pivot that the company has undergone over the past decade and lay out the motivation and vision behind your entry into these adjacent business lines?

Yes. Thank you. So we are the trusted fabric of the financial system. So by that, we mean that we architect the world's most modern markets. We power innovation, and we build trust in the financial system. And so you're right. When you think about all of the exchanges that we run, including, of course, Nasdaq, that is 30% of what we do. 30%, and that includes the market services piece and the listing piece. All of that is 30% of what we do. 15% or over 15% at this point is actually an index business including the NASDAQ 100, but $1 trillion in ETP AUM constitute that index business and has grown tremendously over the last 7 years. And then the balance of it, about 50% is core infrastructure and for the financial system. And by core infrastructure, you've named many of those, those are really important rails and gold data that enables the financial system to run and to transform.

And our vision was about, call it, a decade ago. we saw trends, technology trends that we were going to transform the financial system. And to be honest, it's all happening today, but it was visible 10 years ago. The first one is the cloud. The second one is the distributed ledger. And the third one, of course, is AI. Originally algorithmic AI and now Gen AI. And by catching those trends, cloud 12 years ago, distributed ledger 9 years ago and AI 10 years ago, we were able to put ourselves in a position where today, naturally, we're at the right place at the right moment. But that all started a decade ago.

And what's very important is that we have modernized continuously during those 10, 12 years. And as we've done so, we've prepared ourselves to be ready to modernize the financial system. And that our clients, the financial system operators need solutions that are going to be Gen AI-ready, that are going to be digital ledger-ready that are going to have data that they can't buy somewhere else, that help them have the liquidity, the trust, the integrity in the financial system as the financial system changes. But I think what is even more powerful is that as we did that, we did it with the shareholders in mind. And so we did it trying to get, okay, a higher SAM addressable market share, like serviceable addressable market, and more alpha, more solutions revenue. You mentioned the 80%.

And today, we are a rule of 70 business. So if you think of the rule of 40, we score at 70. There are only 18 companies that are at scale in growing mode, 8% or more and that are at rule of 60. So it's a very good company in which we are, and it's a very rare occurrence to have rule of 70. And so a rule of 70, 80% solutions, double-digit alpha growth in the last 2 quarters and also mid-teens revenue growth over the last 2 quarters. So we feel very good about where we are. And we feel that, that transformation has been not only very timely starting 10 years ago, but also really giving us an opportunity to deliver for the shareholders.

I see. Let's dig in on tokenization for a moment. So you announced that you'd be launching Nasdaq equity tokens in the second quarter of 2027. Can you help us understand how these are going to work?

Yes. So our big principles, and you're going to hear those words all the time, hopefully, they stick, are liquidity, integrity and transparency. And so this transformation of the financial system is happening. You've got the convergence of AI and the digital assets with continuous transformation. And those trends reinforce each other. So when we're looking at what we need to do, we need to maintain liquidity in this particular case. As we introduce the digital ledger because the digital ledger is going to provide benefits for both the issuer and for the investor. But the problem is to make sure you do that without breaking what we have today, which is a very deep liquidity pool. So we provide Nasdaq equity token is maintaining one unified liquidity pool.

You have all of the rights of the security itself. It trades in the same way the current fiat security actually trades. And in addition, you have the benefits of the token, which issuer benefit from having some of the actions that are written into your token or other that enable you as an issuer to have a closer relationship with your shareholders by embedding in some ways, messaging or actions, dividend could be an action, for example, into your token. And so you've got no harm done on the liquidity because of the unified liquidity.

You've got more potential for the issuer to have capabilities on its token. And then from the investors' point of view, you have the ability if you are in token mode to use it more swiftly in terms of moving it as collateral, for example, to reduce your collateral needs.

I think there's probably about a dozen other competing stock tokenization initiatives at this point, including some other issuer-centric models, like Superstate, Securitize. Can you maybe speak a little bit more about how what you guys are doing with stock tokenization differs from those other initiatives already in the market?

Yes. So I'm going to go back to that word liquidity. To the extent that you do a wrapper, for example, and I'm not saying that every solution is a wrapper. A wrapper is breaking the liquidity pool. And so what you really want to make sure is that you are enabling the trading to happen in the way it does because whereas you can have the ability to trade a few shares here or there in a small liquidity pool. The beauty of the financial system here is the speed at which it operates, as well as the depth with which it operates. And so we go back to, for us, making sure that we have something that has the transparency on the integrity, but very importantly, that does not break the liquidity pool. And we believe that markets will decide in some ways. Markets are valuing connectivity or valuing nanoseconds, or valuing depth.

There is a reason why half of the capital markets happen to be in the U.S. in the deepest liquid market. There is a reason -- money goes where liquidity is. So whether it's the corporates that are going there or whether it is investors that want to trade there.

Got it. Let's switch gears to the other hot topic -- hot topic in our space, AI. So can you speak to how your conversations with bank executives around AI have evolved over the past 6 months?

Yes, it's really an interesting trend because we talked about the cloud adoption and it really took 10 years. The Gen AI adoption is on a very different pace. And the dialogue is becoming very, very deep over the last 6 months. There are Gen AI applications, I would say, everywhere. And so from how you use your data, are you going to deliver my data in token efficient way? And we do. And we have even patented -- patent pending ways to provide our data in token efficient way, for example, for investment, whether it is what are the features that are upcoming that are Gen AI that enable the issuer to either have a copilot or to also have, if you are a large financial institution, a lot of the work done independently. So I'll give an example.

In Financial Crime Management, which is a $4.4 trillion issue, there are a lot of things that need to be done. The first thing is we use Gen AI to actually catch up fraud itself by putting that consortium data of 2,800 banks, $13 trillion of assets into one on cloud, well segregated that enables us to give better alerts to our customers. So the quality of the alerts is the first Gen AI output. But then you can go further and you can have agents. We have 800 out of our 2,800 banks that operate with our agents, which means that they have gone through AI governance committees, and they are using on a daily basis, agents. Sanctions is one that we introduced in December. We have 6 of them at this point, 2 in beta. But the sanction, one, for example, is going to enable you to file the sanctions with 80% of the sanctions not being touched by a human. And so 80% not being touched by a human can translate into real efficiencies for our clients. And that's what we're seeing with now a pretty good level of experience with 800 of our clients using that. And that's just an example.

If you go into our regtech, we have different solutions that are also serving both the quality as well as the efficiency, all of the regulatory reports are generated benefiting from Gen AI. Reg to code, for example, but also delivering capabilities to the clients to make sure that we help them detect the data that they are giving us in terms of like is it going to comply with the 1,000 ways that it needs to comply.

And what I think becomes more and more interesting is when you actually converge the 2 trends and you say Calypso, you're going to have in the cloud, Gen AI capabilities, but you're also going to be able to move collateral. And so now you are using digital assets and Gen AI and those solutions are enabling us to be viewed by our clients as their trusted transformation partner. They need to go on their journey. They need to meet that transformation of the financial system. The needs are very strong, and there are very few counterparties that are as trusted as we are and as innovative as we are.

You launched an MCP server for Nasdaq Data Link earlier this year. Can you talk about the extent to which that data demand has been additive and incremental versus cannibalizing other data delivery channels?

So I'll start to say that when we deliver the data in a better way, we charge more, not less. And that's a good thing to do. And so when we deliver the data in a way that is easier to consume, we benefit from it as Nasdaq and you benefit from it as our shareholders. What we have is the ability to deliver the data to you in the way you want. MCP is a very, very useful way to deliver the data. We -- but we can do it also by API, by whatever it is, that works for different financial institutions or brokerage houses. What has been very powerful is that we can really embed ourselves in your trading systems. So if you need to trade, again, it's not like you're going to check a screen and then trade.

We have the ability for you to embed that data at the point where you want to consume it. If you're a hedge fund and if you want to embed it in strategies, it's there. It's basically available in real time where you need it. If you're a retail brokerage house somewhere in Asia or in Europe and you want to enable your clients to trade in the U.S. financial system, especially December 6, as we go always on, you have the ability to have that data at the fingertips of your clients in whichever app they may be consuming on your behalf as a brokerage house.

Over at Verafin, a pillar of your growth strategy has been the movement up market into the Tier 1 banks. Can you update us on where Verafin stands today amongst the Tier 1s? And is it a meaningful portion of ARR yet?

Yes. So I will answer that we have 3 pillars really of growth in financial crime management. Financial crime management is underlying all of the -- a majority of the $350 million that we have is small and medium-sized banks. We come in, and we are the financial crime management platform for those banks. And that has been how Verafin constituted its brand in the financial system. But once you have 2,800 banks, majority of which are smaller banks, you become extremely attractive to the larger banks because where fraud will go is not just between one large bank and a second large bank. It's actually wherever fraud goes.

And if you're a large bank, you can maybe have an agreement with 2 or 3 large banks or 5 or 10, but what you're not going to be able to do is 1 by 1 under being an agency of the government because you cannot mix in personal information without the right rules and frameworks, assemble 2,800 banks of data. And with that, we've been able to add approximately 20 large banks. And those large banks that would be Tier 1 and Tier 2 banks, example, Citi, example, Goldman Sachs, those are names that we can name, but there are many others that we can't name.

In Canada also, we've been very successful with some of the large banks. And so we have that second leg of growth which is today, to answer your question, still small in terms of its base, but growing in a fast way. And we had 11 signings this year, year-to-date, which is more than what we had the year before. So we are accelerating. We are -- we talked about the year before being back-ended in terms of like those large signings, but the second half of the year is upcoming. And so we have a lot of potential tailwinds coming from the fact that those large banks represent half of the SAM, the serviceable addressable market share in the financial crime management.

We're talking about approximately a $9 billion SAM. And so when you're taking half of that, it's $8 billion. We are able to have a very, very large potential share that is today untapped.

Your Calypso business is very well known globally for its capabilities in rates. But we've seen a lot of product innovation across derivatives over the past couple of years. We've got perpetuals. We have compute features coming. Can you talk about the opportunity to expand Calypso's capabilities across more asset classes?

Yes. So Calypso is a pretrade, trade, post-trade and treasury management system. And when you think about that, if anybody thought that it was simple to do all of that, before the proliferation of products, before the digital assets, before you could even think about moving a collateral in token form, that's what -- I mean it was probably reckless to imagine that you could do that on your Excel form, but some people did. When you add the complexity that we are seeing today, there is no doubt, even at fairly small institutions that you need help. And you're going to want to have that help from somebody who is cloud-ready, Gen AI-ready, digital assets ready and ready for all of those products that we are talking about. And that's basically us.

We're also very modular, which means that we're not going to sell you like a very large package if you're looking for something that's pretty precise. We're able to give you exactly what you need and to enable you to grow with us as you go to new geographies, as you expand into other products. It's a very easy decision to make. And this has been a product that has been very much modernized under all watch since we bought it, and that is very modern at this point and ready for all of those technologies to help to benefit the financial system.

And in Axiom, you already count every single G-SIB bank as a client. Can you talk to us about the moving pieces to let that business continue to grow high single digits, low double digits, in line with your guide?

Yes. So there is a very difference -- big difference between having landed in AxiomSL and having fully penetrated your opportunities. So we are very fortunate that every G-SIB except one actually uses AxiomSL. And beyond that, we have very large opportunities with the rest of the banks as some of the regulation is now affecting smaller banks than the G-SIBs, including some of the parts of Basel that came through. And so when we think about that, we talked at Investor Day about a penetration that is close to approximately 10%. And overall in the space of regulatory tax. So when you're thinking about having most of them, but having a penetration that is approximately 10%, that is really the root of our land and expand strategy.

And we're doing extremely well. Again, we have a cloud solution. We're selling greatly majority in the cloud for AxiomSL. And that also enables us to help our clients with the Gen AI features, which are available on the cloud and which enable them to participate in the modernization of their regulatory framework in a very simple way. Think of the regulatory as thousands of updates. We have 64 countries, 150 regulators, thousands of reports. I believe it's 6,000 reports that we update every year, you have thousands of updates that have to come through. And so if you're a financial institution, you definitely want the help, which is why everybody but one that we're working on is working with us and is working with us more and more, which enables us to support the medium-term outlook.

Within your index business, what new products are you excited about? Do you have anything in the lab that could be the next Nasdaq 100?

And so we don't think of we need the next Nasdaq 100 necessarily. What we try to have is, first of all, a very good ecosystem against the Nasdaq 100 because having the Nasdaq 100 is great. We all refer to it. We all watch it as we do 1 of the top 3 indexes that tells you how the market is doing. But more importantly, it's becoming part of portfolio composition, which means that an ecosystem needs to be built around it, whether it's the futures, which we do through a partner, whether it's the index option, which we have built from scratch and create some good alpha opportunities at a good capture within our Market Services business, whether it's the Nasdaq 100 binary option, which we have filed for. And we have a whole lot that can be done on that.

The next piece is we do have a lot of new products. Last quarter, for example, 34 new products, half of which were international, 11 of which were institutional. And so we try to fit into lots of different pockets so that we can grow our ETP AUM, and we certainly do grow them. We added $11 billion in the last 12 months, and that's on a base of $1 trillion. So a growth rate that is extremely good.

And then to answer your question, like is there a thematic that is the thematic? Obviously, AI infrastructure is an important thematic today. So we have indexes that are around data centers, for example, semiconductors, for example. But it could be that somebody in Australia comes to us with a need, and we will have something that is specific to that particular market. And so we're very flexible to capture the opportunity and the alpha on behalf of our clients wherever it is.

Let's circle back on your oldest business, the stock exchange.

Yes.

Based on your conversations with issuers, what does the IPO pipeline look like for the rest of the year?

Yes. The IPO pipeline is robust. So if you look at the first half, first of all, we have had the best first half we have had ever. That's $110 billion that were raised. And that is including, of course, the SpaceX IPO, but that is only -- I won't say only, but that's $86 billion. So to get from $86 billion to $110 billion. you've got a lot of breadth of other sectors. On the sectors that we're seeing as active today are, of course, the AI infrastructure and all of it are creating opportunities broadly. But second of all, there is still some fintech activity, more in insurance and real estate, actually.

The biotech sector, which had been not very active is coming back, and we're very happy to see that happening. Defense is also a sector that has some tailwinds nowadays. And so you are seeing a pretty broad spectrum of consumer tech also coming. And we're very fortunate as Nasdaq to be extremely well positioned and to have a very strong pipeline.

On the trading side, I know there's been something of a drift downward of not just Nasdaq on-exchange trading broadly relative to off-exchange trading over the past 10 years. More recently, the regulatory wins have shifted around reg ATS. I wonder as you look out over the next 10 years, do you think you can return to growth in cash equities market share.

Yes. So when you think about the 50% of the market that are off-market. So it's about 50-50 of what is on market versus off-market. And we have a real opportunity to participate, and we were thrilled to acquire the LeveL ATS, which is the third largest ATS. That ATS is not only interesting in its own right. But it has a gateway that connects it to 2,500 buy side and sell side. So now you can start to think about liquidity pool that are off markets that can be connected through a gateway. And we didn't have to have a cold start issues since we were able to acquire the LeveL ATS. And so that enables us to have participation in what we believe ends up being an important pocket of opportunity off market, which, of course, we continue to be focused on markets, but it's great to have optionality to wherever investors would like to be.

We're going to open it up here for audience questions in a moment. But to wrap Sarah, is there anything that we didn't hit on today that you're spending a lot of your time thinking about?

Yes. We hit on it, but I do want to come back to -- at the end of the day, when you try to think about what's happening today, it's the moment of convergence of 3 technology trends which are transforming the financial system. I've been in the financial system for the last 29 years, and I have never seen a time of further transformation of the financial system. When you think about that, it's the cloud Gen AI distributed ledger that are meeting towards continuous markets. And if somebody is very well positioned because we operate our own markets and because we're helping as a trusted transformation partner to transform the financial system in the right way, preserving the trust, the integrity and the liquidity of the financial system. It's absolutely Nasdaq. And being that well positioned is also transparent in the strength of the results that we are posting.

Great. So is there any questions in the audience? One in the front.

Question on Verafin. There's a few businesses out there that are growing as fast as Verafin. It looks like you're growing faster in Europe. The competitive landscape might be softer in Europe. So I wanted an update on how the outlook looks in Europe relative to the broader business. And also, you've been announcing several partnerships in Verafin. What's driving that? And should we expect more partnership announcements in the future?

Yes. So in Europe, that's really our third leg of potential growth. We have the ability to work with European financial institutions, first on their cross-border payments where all of the -- the depth that we have in the U.S. is very helpful, but also eventually on their local payments, too. And we have several POCs that are successful, and we have not yet announced that we have signed a European. So we are looking forward to a moment where we will be able to announce that, but we are highly confident that, that moment will come. So good momentum, good things that are in the work, but not yet ready to announce something for Europe.

When we are trying to think about the regulatory construct in Europe, it's very much evolving in a way that is productive and the regulator is well aware of financial fraud being actually proportionately even higher in Europe than it is in the U.S. and therefore, different regulators are at different stages of readiness in enabling the banks in the right way to an intermediary like Nasdaq to pull the information. But that needs to be done, I would say, in very close cooperation with the rules being changed.

The partnership question is a great one because when you think about us being the platform for banks, we can benefit from that situation where we are embedded in 70 core infrastructure systems. So it's whichever core infrastructure they use, we embed ourselves in it, and we are in 70 of them. And so therefore, if a partner who doesn't have the distribution that we have and the integration points that we have has great data or has great capabilities, we can actually be a way into those banks without having to put those banks through the difficult fit of having to reintegrate with somebody else. It's always very complicated for banks to do that. So we're in that position of strength, which enables us to have partnerships, and we certainly like that strategy.

Was there another question in the audience? I thought I saw one more back there. Okay. In that case, thank you, Sarah, for spending some time with us.

Thank you very much. Thank you.

Great conversation.

We can get started here. So welcome, everyone, to the next session. I'm delighted to have Tal Cohen, who is the President of Nasdaq, and Tal leads Nasdaq's Market Services business as well as the Financial Technology division. Tal, welcome very much to the Future of Commerce Conference at Autonomous. I appreciate you making the time.

Thank you for having me. Good stuff.

We'll get right into it. There's a lot going on Nasdaq with regard to market structure, 23/5 equity trading coming on in December. You're launching a bunch of event contracts around your key indices, tokenization of equities is coming in early '27. You've done an acquisition of LeveL. So kind of a lot going on in there. I'd be curious, what are you building to in your equities business? And what does that business look like over the next sort of couple of years?

Thanks for having me, by the way. And hopefully, lunch was not heavy and people got caffeinated, so we can have some excitement here. But everything you described is us building towards an Always-On world where we are trying to increase access for investors. We're trying to provide investors with choice, and we're doing it under a well-regulated umbrella. So all of those activities you just mentioned, and there are just 4 activities, but there are many more that we're undertaking, allows us to really embrace all the possibilities and all the opportunities that come with Always-On.

Good. Well, let's stick with Always-On. I think even you've noted that 23/5, for example, like only about 10%-ish of volume is outside of the core sessions. And only 2 of that is overnight. So it doesn't seem like a particularly big market. I'll be curious as some of these initiatives come through, how do you see that evolving over the next couple of years?

Yes. So it's really interesting. The U.S. equity markets, as you noted, just about 10% of it happens after 4:00 and before 9:30 in the morning. And the majority of that happens between 4:00 a.m. and 9:00 a.m. So -- and Nasdaq today is open 16 hours a day. So we open up at 4, we close at 8. So we're not a 9:30 to 4:00 operation today. So it's 16 hours. What's interesting is in the hours that we're closed, as you said, there's not a lot of volume, let's call it 1% or 2%. But our -- what we envision, I should say, is when you provide an exchange that has the resilience, the operational excellence, the transparency that gets investors and regulators comfortable with trading, we expect that to be a larger percentage of overall ADV. Number one, more of that ADV will be executed on exchange. It's executed today off exchange. There's a lot of OTC facilities that are available to you or OTC channels that are available to you today.

So I think we will unlock latent demand and it will be gradual. It will happen over time. But there's also a flywheel that comes with being 23/5, which I hope we have an opportunity to talk about because there's the data side of it, the financial technology side of it, the asset servicing side of it, the collateral side of it. So most people see just the trading side of it. And what we see is a much, much bigger picture and a grow-the-pie opportunity.

Perfect. Let's hit the topic of the moment, equity tokenization. You have your offering and various offerings out there. Best as I can tell, under your offering, a tokenized Nasdaq shares on the same security, trading on the same order book, certainly, I think, the same way. So what exactly does an investor get once you move to a token structure? What is the benefit?

The one you are referring to is the Nasdaq equity token. And it's really important, if you put it in the context of the innovation exemption that came out. So the innovation exemption that just came out from the SEC talks about a few very important things. One, is it's got to be issuer sponsored. Two, is it's got to be a one-to-one backing, conveying the full economic and governance interest of that security, right? And three is, anybody can really become a TSV. It is not just DeFi versus CeFi or something like that.

Okay. So we have the Nasdaq equity token. We were the first ones to go out there and said, it should be an issuer sponsored, issuer-centric. So the programmability and the composability of what we built into our token have the attributes that issuers care about, which is proxy, corporate actions, dividends. So it's really, really important for us that your rights and your protections travel with you. And that is the one thing that we're providing, which is there's many forms of tokenization.

There is many forms of tokenization that don't require issuer sponsorship. We have not taken that route. So one is we're trying to make sure there's more connectivity between issuers and investors, which has not been part of the tokenization story today. We need to create more engagement between issuers and investors on that. And two, is we want to make sure that while we pursue innovation, we're not sacrificing, compromising market quality, market integrity or investor protections. And that is what really differentiates the Nasdaq equity token.

Okay. Perfect. Another version of a token is as Kraken has its own versions out there. Nasdaq Ventures has a partnership and has invested in Payward, which is Kraken's parent. So maybe talk through that partnership, what you're doing there and how you envision that working going forward?

Yes. We're really excited about that. Thanks for noting that. It started with a conversation with regards to can we be technology partners? Is there a commercial relationship that we can structure here? And it very quickly got to the point where we understood that there was a strategic partnership that we can develop with Kraken. And what's really interesting is there's this discussion going on between like permissioned and permission-less. And by the way, that debate is like a false choice. It should be what is the best of a permissioned world, what is the best of a permission-less world? How do we create or combine the 2 and then how do we create better investor outcomes through that? And that's what we're doing with Kraken. We are growing the pie, creating interoperability, fungibility, and we're saying -- so let me give you an example. On the permission-less side, there's real benefits to a layer 1 or the network layer being permission-less.

Anybody can build on top of it. Innovation can grow. You have a great idea for an app. You should be able to do that. But the assets and the applications that sit on top of it should be permissioned. Why? Because you care about governance, you care about compliance. Institutions care about that. And so you can have the rails be permission-less, but the assets and the applications that sit on top of it be permissioned. And that is what we're working through with Kraken, which is they're going to diffuse and distribute the Nasdaq equity token.

So growing the pie of what we're trying to do and creating a standard with us. And when they do that, like I said before, the rights and the protections carry through but they're then bridging the permission to permission-less world, in a way that's really constructive because what we do not want all of us who don't want to wake up in 5 years and have dual tracks. Coexistence between on chain world, and off-chain world, and all of you have to figure out how to connect it back and stitch it back together. Technology can do that, but you shouldn't have to do that. So that's what this partnership is trying to do.

Okay. Perfect. So maybe just following up on that, I guess, around DeFi, your onshore design keeps tokens moving between wallets that have been registered and screened. So they cannot be posted into permission-less protocol. Kraken is very different. So how are you thinking about that gap, particularly in terms of expanding internationally?

So Kraken provides us with a great distribution. And it's a great, if you will, template and road map for us to have other partnerships. So we can go out now and talk to others who are like-minded, share our ethos around how tokenization and security should happen. And now we have a model that we can go out and say, this is a model that we put in place with Kraken, can we put the same model in place with you? And what we didn't talk about is Kraken has taken our surveillance solution. So that's a big deal for them to have the surveillance solution that monitors. So not only are they taking Nasdaq equity token, they're taking surveillance, and we're working with them on a gateway between permissioned, permission-less.

So that's the model we can diffuse across the globe with like-minded partners because, again, if we can drive that level of standardization and the interoperability between these chains and these networks, what we will have done is created, if you will, a connection between regulated markets and blockchain networks. And you put that together, then you can start to deliver on the full promise of tokenization that we talk about, which is 24/7, rails that are frictionless, all of that is built on the promise that all of this infrastructure and plumbing somehow connects seamlessly for you.

Okay. Perfect. Let's talk money and how you monetize all this. I think you guys have done a good job of actually giving us some guardrails around potential here. You talked about Always-On, an opportunity being about $3 billion to $6 billion by 2030. Curious how much of that is tokenization specifically? And then even more interested in how you think about that between execution trading versus software, services, et cetera.

So the $3 billion to $6 billion number is what we think about as a SAM. And within that SAM, there are 5 components to it -- discrete components to it. There's the trading component to it, both in equities and derivatives. So across all asset classes, and that's material. The other one is tokenization, and we can license the Nasdaq equity token. So that's a revenue stream for us and an opportunity for us there.

We can provide asset servicing capabilities off the back of tokenization, which is pretty cool and something that is, if you will, a new opportunity for us. There's a data opportunity for us, a real big data opportunity because as you grow the pie and you stitch it back together with data, very few people do better than we do. And then from a financial technology perspective, our financial technology solutions are natural, if you will, add-ons to this opportunity and so I talked about surveillance, our trading, our post-trade solution, all fit within this Always-On narrative and allow us to really use all of our capabilities.

We like to talk about it like from a One Nasdaq perspective, we can bring all of Nasdaq to Always-On which is really, really unique. I don't think any other exchange can bring as many capabilities and assets and then the customer community behind us to this.

Okay. Just a follow-up on asset services. I hadn't heard that before. I envision Nasdaq as the new Bank of New York for digital assets. So maybe flesh that out for us.

Yes. So I think in the digital world, when we think about asset servicing, there are different components to it. I think BONY does a great job. State Street does a great job. But in the digital world, where you're the tokenization agent, and you're working with a Computershare and you can have a partnership with a Computershare or Equiniti or Proxymity or even Securitize, there's asset servicing that you can do from a digital perspective that is kind of unique to the one that has a tokenization engine and those capabilities. So I think we'll work with our partners.

We're very -- I should say, we're very open in working with partners. We actually have a really good relationship with BONY. We do not want to custody these assets, just to separate that for a second, and that's where a lot of the asset servicing happens. So we don't -- we're not looking to be a custodian to be super clear, but there are certain things as a tokenization agent or engine that you can provide.

Perfect. Okay. Let's switch to what are the hottest parts of Nasdaq's business now, your financial technology business. And particularly, Trade Management Services has been growing pretty well. That's your connectivity and colocation business. Just curious, like kind of what's driving that growth? How you think about sort of on-demand markets, Always-On markets and how that can sustain growth in that business?

So Capital Markets Technology, the division you're referring to in Q2 grew by 14%, revenue-wise and 17% from an ARR perspective, and that's wonderful and it includes Calypso, Trade Management and Market Technology. So we love all 3 businesses and they're performing well. On the Trade Management Services piece, which is really the infrastructure connectivity access part of that business, two things we've done really well, and one is fortuitous. In 2021, coming off the back of COVID, we were probably one of the few exchanges that said, volatility and elevated volumes are here to stay. So back in 2021, we went to our data center provider and our hyperscalers that we're working with and said, we need to build out. We need more capacity. We need more power, more compute, more space, and we were right. And by the way, we didn't know how right we would be, but it ends up we were right.

And that was, again, a really smart capacity planning move that started to pay dividends. By the way, so this is from 2021 and started to pay dividends in '24, '25, '26. So it just shows you the lead time that you have to think about infrastructure, that's one. Two is we have new services that we can offer because of Always-On to your point, we have new and existing services, so existing services that have become more popular and we're selling more of them. And then we've been able to integrate new services into our ecosystem that really help us power the Always-On movement. And I think we're just at the beginning of that. I mean, it is really -- we're in the first or second innings of seeing what that can be over time.

That's very helpful. But how long do you think it will take? I didn't realize the lead time was that much. So how long do you think it would take for your competitors to catch up? Because when we look at some of the data around your cabinet capacity, it's a lot higher than peers.

I don't know if it's so much a catch-up because once you have them in your ecosystem, they're not leaving your ecosystem. You've developed this ecosystem, this center of gravity around all the markets, so we run 6 options markets to the equity markets, the SIP, the TRF. There's so much in there -- and then we -- and then there's dark pools and others that are in there that you have to think about this as like a network play, an ecosystem and a center of gravity. And once you've established it, it is really, really powerful. So I actually think all of them should do it, but it's not a -- I trade one for the other.

Okay. The other opportunity seems to be around collateral and collateral management. I think you've talked about Calypso potentially being a pretty big opportunity for them. So just talk through what you mean by that, how collateral management could potentially be a growth driver.

So Calypso, which is our Trade Management platform has a particular strength and capability, core competency around collateral management. It is -- our clients love the collateral management module of Calypso. What we're doing now, and we've just done a test trade with Vanguard and Wellington that we published in July is we're connecting Calypso to digital rails, like Canton and other layer 1s. And by doing that, we're giving our clients or providing our clients with a 360-degree real-time IM/VM view, allowing them to do scenario analysis and allowing them now on 24/7 rails to increase the velocity and the mobility of the collateral. So that's step #1.

But the real unlock is this, once you have unleashed that collateral, your clients need more sophisticated financing, margining and optimization tools to figure out where to take that collateral and what to do with it. So then you need to build a collateral network below that, an orchestration layer that allows them to say, "Hey, I freed up my collateral, there's more velocity and mobility with my collateral, what do I do with it? Where do I send it? How do I know that I'm optimizing it?" That's a lot of work. So now what we're trying to create below that is this collateral network, this orchestration capability, which is incredibly powerful once you freed up that collateral. Does that make sense?

Yes.

So -- and that's the difference really. And that's taking a core competency and a strength and really building upon it and extending that on digital rails and it's a use case that is obvious to everybody.

Yes. I don't mean to put you on the spot, but that sounds like a pretty big opportunity when I just think about the size and dollars of collateral that goes through your system. Is it something that could be a meaningful driver of business over the next few years for Nasdaq?

Yes, I don't think we've published anything around that because it's still early days, and this is a Reg FD event. So I don't think we said anything about that, but we're really excited about it.

Okay. Good political answer there. All right. Let's move to rather dense regulatory topics. Well -- so I mean, for years, there's been a battle between on-exchange, off-exchange volumes and some of the advantages that you've pointed out or Nasdaq has pointed out that off-exchange platforms have. So I was kind of surprised that you guys went out and bought an ATS, LeveL. So curious kind of what you're thinking now, the strategic rationale for that and how you're thinking about dynamic between off and on-exchange?

Good question. So off-exchange is roughly 50-plus percent every day volume and once you take out the cross, the close and the open, it's even higher than that. And this has been a trend for many, many years for those that have been in the business, we've seen it coming for the better part of a decade. And what we've done against that is we've innovated on-exchange. We've done a lot of really great things, innovative things that we've introduced into the market, purpose-built innovation. Now we're taking it to the next level, no pun intended, and we bought an ATS that we looked at and said, has great connectivity into the sell side, has great connectivity into the buy side, has an orchestration layer below it.

We can see ourselves doing a couple of things with it. We can see ourselves powering Always-On and tokenization through it. We see it giving us more execution channels and more protocols and different ways of executing that we can offer investors. It allows us to play offense in different ways. We can take it global and we can put that out there across all markets. But not only that, we're unique in that we serve 130 markets globally, so now having LeveL, I can think about that in the context of my market technology offering, too.

So there's a, if you will, a flywheel there with my market tech business. So I'm really excited about LeveL. We haven't closed the transaction yet. We're still under HSR. So there's not much I can say other than I think it's a great platform. We would be privileged to be an owner of it. I think there's lots of great things we'll be able to do with it. And again, I think we can innovate on-exchange. It just extends and complements our capabilities.

Okay. The other topic around market structure is the SEC's proposal to rescind the Rule 611. If that goes through, how should we think about opportunities or risks to Nasdaq?

611, so that's the order protection rule and the thing that we think about is what else comes with it. And what we mean by that is how do we think about best execution, access fees, the SIP or the Securities Information Processor revenue formula because it kind of lives off the back of the gold standard, which is the order protection rule and the National Best Bid and Offer. And so we've asked the SEC what do you think of all these other elements of Reg NMS and what will change or what won't change? And the reason for that is Nasdaq is always going to adapt. I think we're really well positioned to win in either scenario if OPR stays, wonderful. If OPR goes away, we're not concerned at all. We have the single largest market in the U.S. in the Nasdaq flagship market. So we feel really, really good about our positioning in terms of liquidity, market quality and what we do there.

We've asked the SEC this question because we do not want to see a world where market quality suffers, that we see less depth, less liquidity in our markets as a result of that. We have great markets, robust markets. That is the moral high ground for the U.S. right now is our capital markets, and we want to keep that. So we are asking questions to the SEC to make sure that investor outcomes are better and market quality is better as a consequence of all the changes they're thinking of. But for us, if OPR stays or goes, we feel like we have a lot of runway without OPR because we've just bought LeveL, like you said. And we have a strategy there that we love and we can execute on.

If OPR continues to exist, we know how to compete in that regulatory world where order protection is the rule of the day. So we feel good either way.

Perfect. Okay. I have a bunch of questions around event contracts, but let me open it up to the audience first in case there's any questions people wanted to ask, scan a little bit here. Okay. We'll keep going. So you guys are going to launch your first event contracts around the Nasdaq indices shortly. Clearly, Kalshi, Polymarket, or you have a bunch of these sort of markets out there, you have a pretty good distribution have a good running start. Just talk to us how you think about the opportunity for Nasdaq in the context of, I wouldn't say late comer, but certainly, others have started this already.

Yes. So in some ways, we're an early comer because not many of them are regulated in the way we're regulated. And we get through the cold start problem because I have an exchange. So I have an options exchange, I have 6 options exchanges. We can essentially create these binary outcome contracts on an options exchange that is well-regulated, goes through post-trade channels that people and our customers understood and understand, has great risk management over it. And I don't have a cold-start problem because all the broker-dealers are connected to me. And in fact, you could argue because Kalshi and Poly and others are CFTC-regulated. From a broker-dealer perspective, we might actually have deeper distribution into the retail side.

So I think it's really interesting, right? We use a regulated exchange that is under the SEC to launch a product that is, I think, core to what we do. And the kinds of products we'll launch, to be clear, going to be financial and economic. We're not going to get into the sports arena. That is under litigation between the states and the federal government. So we'll see what happens there. But we have the opportunity also to have proprietary contracts. That's the other thing that's really important to note.

So we'll do the Nasdaq-100 Up/Down contract, that is a proprietary contract to Nasdaq. And by the way, we have the options contract on it. So we have a full complex and the full flywheel around it. So not only do we not have a cold-start problem, we're doing it with everybody connected, again, well-regulated in a product that is well understood by us and our members and is potentially something that we think we have a great advantage in.

Just curious like what -- do you know what the demand for the sort of products are? I think about event contracts, they look a lot like short-dated options. So I'm curious like who's asking for these products?

Yes. Well, perpetuals are more like levered ETFs in terms of the cash and return profile, right? It's more of a linear product. There's -- what we say is like convexity, right? There's a lot of -- there's a convexity return in cash flows in options. So it's -- you're not -- it's not the same use case. I don't think. We'll see. I guess we'll see. There may be a sliver of the 0DTE world that thinks about it in terms of risk profile and other things in the same way they do perps. But for the most part, I think institutions will not see it as the same. And to answer your question, we're going to find out. We're going to find out what retail demand is. And what's interesting is that you could have asked me is like, how much does leverage play into that. And again, we see that with levered ETFs. And that's where that crowd tends to be. So I think we'll learn a little bit. I think some of these products will have a gradual roll. And of course, we're not going to offer products that are going to be 50 to 1 and 100 to 1.

Right, right. Hopefully, not in the way. All right. On perps, you've said something like along the lines of Nasdaq has an opportunity to do more. on perps. So what does that look like in practice? Is that trading or you mean more around surveillance and I don't know, technology? Just curious perps strategy for Nasdaq.

It's like any other super cycle around like a new asset or a new product. We have an unbelievable opportunity with surveillance and our fintech solutions. So Kalshi, Kraken are customers of ours on the surveillance side. And we sell a lot of institutional-grade trading and post-trade technology all across the world. To the extent we're going to continue to see asset proliferation, product proliferation like perps, we have an incredible opportunity as Nasdaq to provide institutional-grade, full Trade Management life cycle technology into that ecosystem. And the reason we can do that is because we've hopefully engendered trust. We'll bring operational excellence, resiliency and great technology, great performance. So to the extent that these asset classes take off, mature and evolve, we have a great opportunity to be part of it.

Fantastic. Okay. I have one closing question. But before that, again, I'll just quickly open up to the audience. In case there are any burning questions people had. You made a point earlier?

[indiscernible] tokenization, is that something they're asking for [indiscernible]?

Can you repeat that? I'm sorry. It's not you, it's me. I just couldn't hear it.

So he asked about like issuer engagement. Like where are we in that cycle -- the issuer is asking for it or...

On tokenization?

On tokenization, yes.

Great question. Sorry, it's me, not you, ears are clogged. But it's interesting. It's a great question because I think issuers are earlier in their understanding and appreciation of tokenization, there's no doubt about that. And let's separate issuers. There's ETF issuers that I think are much more advanced and understand what they would like to achieve with tokenization, distribution, access. The composability, the visibility of tokens, I think, resonates with ETF issuers and the crowd that they can serve.

Okay. On the corporate side, I think they're approaching it and saying, okay, what problems are you actually -- what pain points are you actually solving with tokenization and if you're a large corporate issuer in the Nasdaq 100 with a great brand and great liquidity in your stock. So buybacks aren't a problem, there's tight spread deep markets.

We're not going to them, and I don't think anybody else should in saying, hey, we can solve a liquidity problem for you. And by the way, they don't want fragmentation of their liquidity as a result of this. So the approach we've taken with issuers is to say, okay, let us tell you what the Nasdaq equity token is meant to achieve. And we show them what we've composed within the token to say, proxy, corporate actions. Things that cost you money that are generally manual today that are a pain point for you to administer. We can help with that. And what we want to do is have -- open up a conversation and say how much of a pain point is that, how do we help you solve that? And of course, we know it's part of a broader set of like solutions that issuers require along the lines of corporate actions and everything else.

So we're approaching them and saying, we can help you solve pain points, how meaningful is it for you? And then what we can also do if we get this right, is put it on 24/7 rails that are interoperable and there are standards around it. And that's very important for institutions and issuers to understand because they do not get the whole -- I don't understand my stock is trading and where and what platform and what country under what rules and by the way, do I know any of them? Are they on my cap table? No, it's an SPV. You've never met any of them. And so they are uncomfortable if it takes them away -- one step away from the issuer-investor engagement, too, which is what we're also trying to talk to them about and saying, how does tokenization allow for more intimate issuer-investor engagement. They care a lot about that.

So early days, this is some of the conversations, corporate issuers are not where investors are. They're not where retail is and they don't see the same benefits that like broker-dealers would -- and from a collateral management or cash flow management perspective. So it's a different narrative that we're establishing with them. Is that helpful?

Okay. Any other questions?

Early days, by the way.

Okay. Fantastic. All right. So putting you on the spot here. When you come back 2 years from now because I got to assume you're going to be back. What is the 1 number you would put in front of us, this room to say the Always-On market strategy worked?

I don't know if I have a number. Could I give you a qualitative way I would describe that?

Yes.

If I'm sitting here in 2 years, and we have done the following that I think Nasdaq has been successful, which is if we've engendered trust in the Always-On system because you can hear even from the questions of like what problems are you solving? Then we've done a good job. If we have -- if our solutions have led to better outcomes for issuers and investors by solving real problems like capital efficiencies, risk management, liquidity, greater transparency. And again, it's under the banner of trust.

And we've created what -- the picture I have depicted to you, which is standards and interoperability through the Nasdaq equity token, then we will have created an ecosystem in a market that is very, very successful and can build upon itself. So if we do all those things, and there's a lot to do, then we feel really good about it, and we'll have different conversations about issuers and investors and like bringing blockchain networks and markets together.

Fantastic. We look forward to that time in 2 years' time.

Yes, 2 years.

Thank you very much, Tal. That was great. Thank you.

Thank you.

All right. Good afternoon, everyone. Thanks so much for joining us for this next session. Any of you don't know me, I'm Ben Budish. I cover the U.S. brokers, asset managers and exchanges. And for this fireside chat, really pleased to have Sarah Youngwood, CFO of Nasdaq. Sarah, thank you so much for being here.

Thanks for having me.

Maybe just to start, can you talk a bit about how you see the current macro backdrop coming out of a period of heightened volatility early in the year? How does the environment look across capital markets, IPOs, the broader FinTech business? I think investors are particularly interested in your expectations for IPO activity over the next 6 to 12 months.

Yes. So I'll start with macro. So macro, we would say that the environment is constructive. You still have very good investments, especially in AI and digital. You also have a consumer that remains very resilient and earnings that are really supporting the valuations that we are seeing. So when you take those together, we would say constructive.

And you translate that into IPO, to your question. And we've seen a very robust IPO environment. So the first thing is pipeline is absolutely there. We have had the best half year we have ever had with $111 billion raised. Of course, that includes $86 billion with SpaceX. But that really tells you that the market is looking for scaled, mature opportunities, but there is also a broad array of what is in the pipeline. So we're seeing a pipeline, of course, in the whole AI infrastructure, whether you're talking about semi or data centers or AI models themselves. And then you've got defense, which remains here. We've got a little bit in insurance and real estate. And even biotech, which had been a little bit too calm for a while, is starting to come back. So we are quite excited to see the breadth of what we are seeing in the IPO market.

And then if I then take that to our FinTech space, we had an excellent performance in the second quarter, 15% revenue growth, 16% ARR growth. And what that tells you about the environment is really a tremendous engagement with our clients. We are viewed as a core infrastructure for them. We're viewed as an AI forward transformation partner, which enables us to be really in the dialogue. And so whether you're looking at pipelines, whether you're looking at the tenure of our deals, the booking mix, we are seeing just really good stats with our clients and with how they're behaving with us.

Great. Maybe just quickly staying on the topic of IPOs. Can you talk a little bit about Nasdaq's win rate? I think last quarter, you were home to the 7 of the 10 largest operating company IPOs. What's driving that track record? How do you continue to win today?

Yes. So we love to win, and we have a wonderful 73% win rate, as you said, 7 out of 10. What that's really representing is the fact that whether you're talking about switches like Walmart or people coming to market like SpaceX, but also like many, many others, people are looking for the association with Nasdaq, the quality of trading, of course, but also the innovation and trust that is represented in our brand as well as at this point, we have the top 10 companies that are all listed on Nasdaq and so the association with us.

And that creates the flywheel because that creates relevance and the index is a beneficiary from it and also, of course, benefits our listed companies and the data that we get out of those great companies as well as the trading is all a wonderful ecosystem that we have been able to derive. And so we feel great about our position in the markets.

Fantastic. Let's talk about your Market Services business. I feel like usually, this is the one we stick at the end, but there's so many interesting things going on. So a number of initiatives you've got underway on the trading side. Maybe tell us a little bit more about Nasdaq Digital Liquidity Networks, the level -- the LeveL Markets acquisition. Any updates on the tokenization pilot, token design, the progress we made with the Canton Network. I know there's a lot in there, but...

Yes. And actually, there is a lot. And so if you go back to 50 years ago, we were created to actually connect capital to innovation in a totally different way using technology. And that has resonated. And over the last 50 years and never more so than right now, we are continuing to evolve what markets are doing, to grow markets, to make sure that we do that respecting the principles that we have put forward, integrity, transparency, liquidity and also the intelligence that comes with all of that.

And so our role today is to continue to do that as the markets evolve. So at the intersection of digital ledger and AI, we are seeing those trends converging into a great transformation, and we're particularly well positioned. So we've organized ourselves around Digital Liquidity Network, to address the first one, and that is really our effort to drive all of the trends that reflect the investor demand for always-on and to make sure that this is done in a way that is, again, respecting this liquidity, transparency, integrity principle and putting both the investors and the issuers at the core of that.

So then you go to the next piece, LeveL ATS. We just acquired the third-largest ATS. And that's very important because this is a foray into off markets -- off exchange. And that gives us the ability to continue to give different pools of liquidity to our investors so that they can operate whether in the fiat world or outside of the fiat world in the way they want to operate and with us at the center of that. And this LeveL ATS come also -- a connectivity gateway in some ways, that gives you access to 2,500 buy side and sell side. So quite important as we think about continuing to remain in the middle of the flow of capital.

Then if we actually go backwards to last year, we had announced that with the DTCC, we wanted to make sure that we had the settlement either fiat or token. That got approved, and this is on its way for a launch. And so again, continuing to make progress.

But then with now Payward or Kraken, we did two things, both an investment of $100 million in Payward, the parent company of Kraken, but also a strategic investment. And the idea here is that together, we can help to bridge between fiat and token and making sure that we maintain the depth of the liquidity pools and also putting the Nasdaq issuer in the center. So we have this Nasdaq Equity Token.

They're also taking our surveillance, and that's an interesting theme because we're talking about Market Services, but that transformation of market is also incredibly productive for us in terms of core infrastructure provider to markets and market participants as they transform. So that gives you a lot. And then just to round it up with the last one, collateral management, and we have also put forward for Calypso, the topic of using Calypso as a central point in the collateral management, but also moving collateral between tokens and fiat.

Very interesting. So you're the CFO, so I'm going to ask you the P&L question. When you put all these initiatives together, how do you think about the ultimate opportunity for Nasdaq, whether it's market share gains, increased trading volumes as liquidity improves across global trading hours or any other potential benefits to share volumes, P&L? How do we think about all that?

So I would say yes to all, but it goes broader than that. So the way you think about it is not only when you have always-on, when you create potentially additional demand for the U.S. markets, and we're very well positioned for that, you will create by being able to navigate between on-market and off-market additional liquidity pools that we're able to participate into. But you will also create with all of those new products, and I should have mentioned one more thing, which is the ability to have new products that are getting approved right now, you create the ability for us to do the hedging, again, additional volumes, additional market shares, but also for us to be the infrastructure provider. And that now with market tech and Calypso side of the equation.

And so we think we're particularly well positioned for this moment because we are AI forward. We have a very strong digital effort that is now extremely robust, well organized and that enables us to be both on the market services front as well as on the foundational front.

Great. Maybe one last question on the topic of trading and innovation. What are Nasdaq's latest thoughts on prediction markets/event contracts and perpetual futures? So can you talk about where opportunities may exist for Nasdaq if these products continue to gain traction? Like how do you think about all of that?

Yes. So we really believe in the evolution of markets and in the role that we have had and we'll continue to have in the middle of all of that. So if you take event contracts, for example, first of all, we were able to get our first event contract approved with the SEC, and that's part of those new products that I mentioned. So that should launch shortly probably at the end of this year.

And so if you're looking at that, that is basically Nasdaq-100 and doing binary contracts, binary events on that. So continuing to add to that, we could certainly be interested in KPI-related events. But again, all within the construct of being approved by our regulator. And probably not focused right now or in general beyond right now on sports or politics, but we stay within the financial realms where we think that all of those, if they are done well and if they are satisfying investor demand, if they are well structured, if they're bringing investor trust to the markets can be incredibly additive.

And so we think we have an important role to form here because we have been able to support the formation of markets, which today, the U.S. is more than half of the markets in the world and Nasdaq is the largest market. And so bringing all of that demand from the rest of the world into the U.S. and continuing to evolve the U.S. markets with the principles that we stand for.

Okay. Maybe to...

Perpetual, if you want?

Yes. I'm sorry, please, please.

So what we've talked about at earnings last quarter is that perpetual itself is probably representing less than 1% of revenue overlap for us, which is probably what you were moving on. And that's probably the right thing to do. But to the extent that there is a version of perpetual that is interesting and resilient with appropriate leverage, we're certainly open-minded to it. And again, in the meanwhile, we can provide additional capabilities to those who participate in those markets in terms of providing to them core infrastructure, again, whether you're talking about trading, whether you're talking about surveillance, we have a lot of tools which the new players in this world are interested in turning ourselves -- towards us for because we can help to do things in a very good way.

Great. All right. Moving to your index business. This one has been extremely successful for you. I think ETP AUM is now over $1 trillion. Index options revenues are growing very rapidly. You've noted that a meaningful portion of inflows recently have come from products launched over the past 3 to 5 years. So maybe can you talk a bit about what's working particularly well outside of the core Nasdaq-100 franchise?

I will say we're thrilled with that franchise. It now represents 15% of what we do, $1 trillion of ETP AUM. We had $109 billion of inflows over the last 12 months. We had 35% growth last quarter. Where do I start? And so it has been just like incredible. And what's great is really the alpha generation, and that's what you're talking about, which is that we've got the Nasdaq-100, which has been then complemented with -- in addition to the distribution from Invesco, which is a fantastic partner. We also have now State Street and BlackRock that are behind it. So that continues to give us lots of legs of growth for Nasdaq-100 and continuing to create the ecosystem around it, whether you're talking about options or futures, this is an index that continues to have a lot of opportunities.

Then if you look at the $109 billion I talked about, 38% comes from products that were actually launched in the last 5 years. And so that's the point you were making, which is the innovation of the last 5 years is not just core. It's actually creating 38% of more than $100 billion of inflows. And then those create the next legs of growth as they grow with market performance in addition to additional inflows that come into those indexes because those ETP AUMs accumulate really over time. And at 5-year mark, you're just getting started.

So the themes that we're seeing, you have everything from option strategies to, for example, data center has been a big theme. So whatever is investable as a trend, and right now, there has been a lot around AI infrastructure can create opportunities. Then the last thing that I would add is that 50% of our inflows were coming from outside of the U.S. And so the Nasdaq-100 is really a way for the rest of the world to participate in innovation in general because a lot of it sits in Nasdaq-100. But beyond Nasdaq-100, we also are spending a lot of time on other products with asset managers around the world.

Great. Let's talk about your FinTech business a little bit. So maybe starting with Verafin. One of the key narratives here has been the push into Tier 1 and Tier 2 banks. Maybe talk about what demand looks like across that client segment. And to what extent are you seeing adoption of point solutions versus the broader Verafin platform? That's been another one you've talked about quite a bit.

Yes. So this year, we had 11 enterprise deals that we have signed, which -- and this is so far as of the second quarter, which is more than what we had done in all of last year. So clearly accelerating. In general, when we get started with an enterprise client, they're really interested in our consortium, which represents 2,800 banks, $13 trillion of assets. And so they usually will take [ fraud ] protection through that.

So that would be the way they enter. But what's really interesting is that we're starting to see them do additional products once they have landed. And what we're also seeing is that whereas we have a 6 to 12 months, usually closer to 12 in the time to close an enterprise. We actually are towards 50% of that time line when we're doing an add-on. So we are seeing momentum, and we're also seeing the enterprise clients interested in our agentic platform that we have in Verafin. And so it's a very broad demand for what we're doing.

And the great work that we've done now since we've owned Verafin over the last 5 years is not just establishing a brand, but establishing that data that you can't purchase. And we are now presenting ourselves with a lot more capabilities. We also have nice partnerships that we add so that we can continue to catch the fraud earlier in a way that is incredibly additive to all of our clients. But now all of the enterprise clients are recognizing this.

I think Verafin is also one of the businesses where you've been particularly proactive in deploying agentic AI and other AI-powered technologies. You alluded to that a little bit. But can you maybe unpack that a little bit more? What are you seeing in terms of AI-powered solutions, specifically client adoption, improvements in fraud detection, workflow efficiencies and things like that?

Yes. So what's really exciting about Verafin is that they have really moved towards agentic. And so we don't use that word lightly. Agentic is really those agents which are able to not just be a good coworker, but be a good worker. And those workers are able to generate efficiencies, both in terms of like when you time the catching of the fraud, but also the efficiencies that they can represent for the financial institutions.

So we are seeing about 4x our productivity when you use those agents. We have 2 that have been in place since December. They are used by 800 of our clients. So this is not something that's in beta. This is something that's used by 800 clients out of our 2,800 clients, mostly, I would say, in our small and medium tier clients, but also interest from the larger enterprise clients, as I just mentioned. So we're seeing that as continuing to add to productivity and to time lines and in fraud, time line is very important.

And so if you think about what's happening where everything is going faster and potentially, you are introducing in payments additional risks related to that, having the Verafin solutions becomes even more important than it has ever been to small institutions and to large institutions. And if the majority of people start having Verafin, then you can't afford not to have access to that additional protection and everybody is realizing that.

Interesting. Maybe just one follow-up there. And I know you've kind of been asked this on some of the earnings calls over the past year or 2. But maybe could you just remind us what does this mean for the financial impact? Does it mean you have more pricing power? Does it mean the product becomes stickier? You kind of suggested that the depth of moat, especially from the size of like the data that's being pulled in from the consortium is itself sort of a source of that moat. So how do we think about that translating into, I don't know, faster revenue growth, sticky revenue growth, anything like that?

Yes. So we were at 22% last quarter for that business, and we have a medium-term outlook of the mid-20s. So we definitely have good revenue growth. We have a net retention that is above 110%. So we have, I would say, benefited and will continue to benefit from an ability to price for the very strong service that we deliver.

In addition, we are pricing this agentic workforce as a separate add-on. And right now, we're still, I would say, mostly in what we call the free period. So we give a certain amount of volumes to our clients. We need to go -- to let them adopt. If you're a financial institution and you want to adopt something, the first thing you want to do is go through compliance and get through your AI governance committees. And so if in addition, you need to pay, that's probably too many things.

So -- but now that there is adoption, and we've been very clear with the clients that, that would be a paying product, we are starting to convert, and we're starting to convert. We haven't disclosed the numbers, but it's a contributor to our future expected growth. It's still a very small number for today, but the pipeline is very robust.

Got it. That's very helpful. Maybe shifting to some other parts of the FinTech portfolio. Earlier, we talked about the opportunities created by developments like always-on markets, tokenization. So beyond the trading ecosystem, what else do these changes create opportunities for Nasdaq? And how are you thinking about the implications for Calypso, your post-trade solutions, surveillance?

Yes. So we were talking about that a little bit earlier. What's exciting about our positioning is you think about us as markets, you think about us as index. But with the credibility of those, we've been able to develop a core infrastructure solutions that we test ourselves, and we use ourselves and therefore, can sell to the very best. And I would say that we participate in bringing integrity as well as efficiency to the financial system.

So we don't say it lightly when we say that we are the fabric of the financial system, the trusted fabric of the financial system. But equipping this transformation of Market Services with the right surveillance, with the right data, with the right collateral management is exactly where we sit. And so Calypso is participating in the collateral management and pre-trade, trade, post-trade. We're seeing AxiomSL continuing to play the role in regulation. And if others become regulated, that can open opportunities. We're seeing the importance of connectivity as being higher now than ever with very strong demand, as you know, in trade management services. And our market tech -- technology, which serves 120 marketplaces, including the 20 we serve ourselves, but 100 others is also serving new tech, I would say, and new markets so that we can be there.

And then I wouldn't forget data because as the world moves towards always-on, we also power the world. And if you're going to trade in the U.S., you need to have the data to trade in the U.S. And as the index becomes a broader index, you need -- you are creating, again, that flywheel that I was referring to before.

Okay. Great. Moving through the segments, and I think you alluded to Axiom a little bit. We talked about Verafin moving upmarket to Tier 1 and 2s. I know with Axiom, that's sort of been the historical bread and butter and you are working to move further down market. So can you give an update on that effort? And maybe in particular, talk about how existing Calypso and Verafin customer bases have contributed to the Axiom opportunity?

Yes. So one of the key things we've done with AxiomSL is we've taken it to the cloud. And when you have a cloud solution, you have the solution that's a bit simpler to implement and that's more suited towards smaller clients. And so we went from being this really amazing partner to all of the G-SIBs minus 1 and to all of the largest banks beyond the G-SIBs to actually now having the credibility that comes from being able to say that we have all of the G-SIBs and having served them and understood them and serving, I want to say, 114 regulators across the world in 64 countries, and my team will correct me with the exact numbers, but it's a tremendous credibility that we have and that we can then bring to the smaller banks, but also buy side are starting to look at that. And again, we're prepared to serve anybody who needs regulation and to bring the rigor and the techniques that we have had to do that.

Maybe sticking with Axiom, you talked about the cloud journey. So maybe sticking on that sort of theme. You talked about increased use of AI, again, the cloud. How do these developments affect the addressable market, monetization opportunities, client demand? I think there's always been a perception that like since there's an accessing of a lot of bank data that banks may be hesitant to allow AI that kind of access. But I'm sure there are a lot of efficiencies that can be gained and whatever else. So curious if you could talk about -- a little bit more about that tech journey.

Yes. So what's really interesting is that we're already touching their data. So the magic of Nasdaq really is that we are already the partner to the largest financial institutions. And so it took us, and you see it with Verafin, years to be in the position of having the banks review or cyber review or infrastructure review how we do things to the point where they are already letting us touch data.

And then we have enterprise contracts, which means that we don't mind if our services get integrated through their agents or through their people. And in fact, we are helping them become more efficient. And when I'm looking at some of the migrations to the cloud or additional sales in AI because usually, we need to be in the cloud, although we have some solutions to do it differently, but that's the simplest way to do it. The clients have a very easy business case to do more with us, give us more value as they generate a great business case for their own shareholders. And that has really worked.

And so the hard work has been done. We are already, I would say, a safe partner, a trusted transformation partner. Our solutions are really excellent. They are forward and they are -- they enable us both to sell, to maintain the credibility, to move towards the higher ACV that comes with the cloud and then in some cases, to sell separately on AI. But I would say, in general, it's in the first 3 buckets that we have been for AxiomSL, for example.

All right. Maybe stepping back, thinking about the broader cross-sell and relationship deepening opportunities across the FinTech portfolio. I'm curious if you could talk about any examples, any metrics you can share around product adoption, client penetration. It's funny like from a sell-side analyst perspective, it feels like there's all these different revenue lines, but there's obviously this like top-down logic around exchange, data, information and everything else. So curious if you could give us examples, anecdotes about how things are coming together, again, cross-sell penetration, things like that.

Yes. So the cross-sell metric that we have been sharing is that over 15% of our FinTech pipeline is in the cross-sell. And we are very much seeing that our One Nasdaq efforts are bearing fruits. We are elevating within the financial institutions where we are, where we have C-suite relationships, which are covered by our management committee in general. And so whereas those remain separate solutions, we have a real cross-sell motion that is driven, I would say, with the machinery that you would expect from a very strong revenue organization. But you also have in complement to that and for some of the largest clients, the C-suite to C-suite relationships.

Great. And maybe a few questions now on the cost side and capital allocation. So we talked about AI as a revenue driver. Curious how you think about that opportunity internally? How much runway is there for incremental efficiency gains through deployment of AI across the organization?

So I'll start by saying to all that we think that it's a massive capture-the-SAM opportunity. So there's a revenue opportunity that is really important, helping us to move in adjacent SAM in an organic basis is incredibly important. And so I want to start with that, even though you asked me the question in the context of efficiencies.

There are efficiencies too and we will capture them. You know that we have put forth at Investor Day, $100 million of AI efficiencies, which we are executing upon. And we are incredibly organized, I will say, as a leadership team, we spend tons of time on both the revenue opportunity and the efficiencies. And the efficiencies, by the way, give you the powder to generate additional investments, additional revenue growth.

And so we are providing our team with a lot of support, training, engagement as well as just great tooling, great opportunity to have the best tools available. And then we are measuring, and you know me enough by now, I can't have a fireside chat without talking about return on invested capital. We're looking at the returns on what we are doing, both in terms of the revenue and in terms of the efficiencies, and we're seeing a great equation associated with both with AI.

Great. Maybe on the capital side, a little bit of an update on your capital allocation priorities, the current M&A pipeline, types of assets that are most attractive to Nasdaq today. And then, of course, I have to ask thoughts on the potential for larger or more transformative acquisitions over time. I know the messaging there has been pretty consistent in the last year or 2, but worth asking all the same.

Of course. So let's start with over $2 billion of free cash flow. And that's a great place to start because it enables you to do more than one thing. We have always had a progressive dividend, and when I say always, for the recent times, we have a progressive dividend, and that will continue and no surprise expected there. But that has been a very nice contributor to our -- some of our investors.

The second part is share repurchase. You have seen us very engaged in share repurchases recently. That's in the context of we have a great organic strategy. We fully fund our investments. We are, I would say, pretty thorough in actually dedicating dollars towards organic growth, and that is the priority. But after that, we still -- after that, after the dividend, we still have a lot that is available. And we believe that our price is undervalued. And to be honest, we have been very consistent at buying that stock. And we've done as of the second quarter, about $900 million, which is a lot more than what we had done last year altogether. And we launched at the entering of the third quarter, an additional $200 million to $250 million variable ASR program. So the sign that we are continuing to buy despite being already way over what we had done last year. So that's share repurchase.

The deleveraging that we have done a fair bit since the Adenza transaction, I would say we don't need to do proactive deleveraging. We are -- we have a leverage target range of 2.5x to 3x. And we are as of the second quarter at 2.6x gross leverage. So at this point, you should not expect, I would say, anything particularly in terms of deleveraging other than potential natural deleveraging since we have a very nice growth of EBITDA, which contributes to that.

And so when you go towards M&A, we have a focus on organic growth, and that's really leveraging us a lot. There could still be M&A that could become interesting, but I wouldn't expect anything in what you described as a transformative category. But could there be tuck-ins? We've done a few, Dasseti and LeveL were two of them. And could there be even bolt-ons? Absolutely, if they made sense in the context of the other opportunities that we have.

Great. We'll go back and revisit 1 or 2 topics, I think, that are also of interest. So we didn't talk -- spend much time talking about your data and data sales business. And I'm curious if there's sort of a tie-in to like the retail trading angle, which has been obviously like a huge growth driver for equities, particularly options, now maybe a big driver of prediction markets.

So your data sales have also been quite strong. I'm curious if you could give a breakdown of where those are coming from. Is there a read to sort of like the broader retail trading environment? Any color there would be helpful.

Yes. So we don't sell directly to retail, but we sell to people who sell to retail. And so we have very strong relationship with brokerage houses around the world. And I will say with the advent of [ 2035 ] at the end of this year in December, people are equipping themselves to have data. And it's not like a December 6 and on. This is a trend that started some time ago and that we would expect is going to continue for years thereafter because this is really equipping the world and trading in the U.S. is a continued journey.

And so we are very much at the center of that. We have solutions which are not only very thorough, but very easy to implement, very real time. And so we've had very great success, as you mentioned, in growing that business. We think that this continues to have lots of legs of growth. And this is something also where there is an advantage to real-time data, which is that by definition, it's protected because it is real time.

And so we're very good at monitoring the use of our data and making sure that we generate the revenue associated with the value of what we provide. So we've got very strong interest coming from Asia and the rest of the world. We don't give breakdowns as to exactly where it's coming from. But the U.S. is, of course, a contributor, but the rest of the world is also a contributor to the additional growth that we have.

Okay. Well, with that, we're nearly out of time, Sarah. So I think we'll leave it there. But what a pleasure to have you. Thank you so much for being here.

Thank you very much.

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to Nasdaq's Second Quarter 2026 Results Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your first speaker, Ato Garrett, Senior Vice President and Investor Relations Officer. Please go ahead.

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today to discuss Nasdaq's Second Quarter 2026 Financial Results. On the line are Adena Friedman, our Chair and Chief Executive Officer; Sarah Youngwood, our Chief Financial Officer; and other members of the management team. After our prepared remarks, we will open the line for Q&A. The press release and earnings presentation accompanying this call can be found on our Investor Relations website.

I would like to remind you that we will be making forward-looking statements on this call that involve risks. A summary of these risks is contained in our press release and in more complete description on our annual report on Form 10-K.

We will discuss our financial performance on a non-GAAP basis excluding the impact of acquisitions and divestitures, the impact of changes in FX and a $6 million onetime benefit to Index revenue related to a contract modification. Definition and reconciliations of U.S. GAAP to non-GAAP plus adjustments can be found in our earnings presentation as well as in a file located in the financial sections of our Investor Relations website at ir.nasdaq.com.

And with that, I'll now turn the call over to Adena.

Thank you, Ato, and good morning, everyone. Today, I will start with a review of our second quarter financial results, and we'll then review the operating performance across our divisions. I will then hand the call over to Sarah to walk through the financial results in more detail. In the second quarter, Nasdaq delivered outstanding growth across each of our divisions, underpinned by our leadership in driving the transformation of the financial system and fueled by the continued demand for leading market infrastructure and mission-critical technology.

Our leadership translated into a series of historic milestones this quarter. In our Index business, assets under management surpassed $1 trillion for the first time in our history, and we had our largest quarterly net inflows ever. Nasdaq Verafin crossed $13 trillion in combined assets across more than 2,800 financial institutions that rely on our platform to fight financial crime. We set new records in notional value traded during both the June Triple Witch exploration and the Russell reconstitution. We welcome SpaceX, the largest IPO in history and are proud to have become the largest exchange in the world by market capitalization of our listed companies.

We continue to operate in a constructive U.S. economic environment, supported by resilient corporate earnings, ongoing investment in AI and digital infrastructure, and healthy consumer spending. Within the capital markets industry, we're working constructively with regulators who are seeking to encourage innovation, including always-on markets and tokenization of assets. These emerging innovations have the potential to become durable market advancements that meaningfully expand investor access across the globe when paired with appropriate investor protections as well as with structures that drive institutional investor demand alongside that of retail investors. We look forward to continuing our efforts to engage regulators and legislators to define the future of markets.

Now I'd like to turn to our results. In the second quarter, we delivered $1.5 billion in net revenue, up 15% and solutions revenue of $1.2 billion, up 17%. Our overall annualized recurring revenue, or ARR, grew 12% year-over-year to $3.3 billion. Expenses were $641 million, up 10%, and we delivered 25% diluted EPS growth, driven by 19% growth in operating income and strong capital returns. Within our divisions, Capital Access Platforms generated 18% revenue and 8% ARR growth. Financial Technology delivered 15% revenue growth and 16% ARR growth. And Market Services delivered 11% net revenue growth.

These results reflect our expand, evolve and transform framework in action. Throughout the quarter, we deepened our client relationships through our One Nasdaq strategy, launched innovative products while enhancing existing solutions, and invested in strategic opportunities that will drive our next phase of growth.

Now turning to the divisional results. I will start with Capital Access Platforms where I will first discuss Data and Listings. Our U.S. listings franchise delivered the strongest first half in U.S. exchange history with $111 billion in operating company proceeds raised. Our performance was underpinned by the historic IPO of SpaceX back on June 12, raising $86 billion, marking the largest IPO in history. We were also proud to dual list SpaceX on Nasdaq Texas, the region's premier listing venue. Other landmark listings in the second quarter included Cerebras, the largest semiconductor IPO of all time; Quantinuum, the largest pure-play quantum IPO of all time; and Parabilis Medicines, the largest biotech IPO of all time.

In total, for the quarter, we welcomed 26 new operating companies raising $106 billion in proceeds, including 7 of the top 10 IPOs. Earlier this month, we also welcomed SK hynix, which raised $27 billion, the largest ADR listing in U.S. capital markets history. The IPO environment is robust, and we are in a strong position to capitalize as new companies look to join the public markets in the second half of the year.

Nasdaq powers the innovation economy, connecting leaders from around the world with capital that turns their ambitions into reality. The breadth and significance of the companies that list with us this quarter is a meaningful testament to that pillar of our strategy.

Turning to our data business. We delivered strong growth driven by new bookings and increased usage. This includes a 34% year-over-year increase in the number of enterprise licenses across multiple geographies. The growing adoption of AI and rising demand from digital asset platforms continues to accelerate interest in our data solutions. Looking ahead, we're excited to support the transition to always-on trading with the launch of unique integrated data sets that will expand usage of Nasdaq's proprietary data among investors worldwide.

Our Index franchise set new inflow records with $51 billion in net inflows for the quarter and $109 billion in net inflows over the last 12 months. Our quarter end and average ETP AUM reached new milestones and exceeded $1 trillion for the first time ever. Product innovation remains a key driver of growth in our Index business with 38% of the trailing 12-month net inflows driven by products launched over the last 5 years and 22% driven by products launched over the last 3 years. We launched 34 new products in the quarter, including 11 insurance products, demonstrating the breadth of our innovation pipeline. We also continued to expand our global reach. 50% of all new products introduced this quarter were launched outside the United States.

We're pleased to introduce expanded access to the Nasdaq-100 with the recent launches of BlackRock's IQQ and State Street's QNDX ETFs in the United States. We also continued to grow our long-standing relationship with Invesco, expanding global investor access to QQQ ETFs, which we cross-listed in Japan in the second quarter.

Turning to Workflow and Insights. Revenue grew 5% with continued momentum in Analytics. In Corporate Solutions, we continue to operate in a challenging environment. However, clients remain highly engaged with our AI-enabled capabilities with 65% of Boardvantage users and 79% of IR Insight clients leveraging our AI tools.

Within Analytics, we delivered double-digit revenue growth from bookings and a higher retention rate in both eVestment and Data Link. Growth in eVestment has been driven in part by AI adoption. More than 1/4 of new bookings to date are associated with AI use cases. We also continue to expand the reach of eVestment's data assets, which now include almost 91,000 private funds.

Within Data Link, we see sustained demand for our unique data assets. This quarter, we are pleased to introduce the Data Link Model Context Protocol, or MCP, which will deliver frictionless client connectivity to power agentic workflows. This capability makes it easier for clients to integrate Nasdaq's trusted data, including our market data directly into AI-driven applications, enhancing the value and reach of our data assets across the AI ecosystem.

Turning to Financial Technology, we achieved an outstanding quarter, delivering revenue growth of 15%. The performance was underpinned by strong engagement across our clients for solutions that address market modernization, the transition to always-on trading and the evolving regulatory landscape. Our sales cycles, our contract term lengths and our bookings mix between existing and new clients have remained consistent, reflecting the durable nature of our mission-critical solutions. In the quarter, we signed 58 new clients, 7 cross-sells and 107 upsells, driving 16% ARR growth.

In Financial Crime Management Technology, Nasdaq Verafin delivered 22% revenue growth driven by significant expansions across key client segments. Our product suite now serves more than 2,800 clients, representing over $13 trillion in collective assets. During the quarter, we signed 47 new SMB clients and continue to see strong momentum in the enterprise clientele with 2 expansions, 2 renewals and 2 cross-sells. Early in the third quarter, we signed an additional enterprise expansion and a cross-sell totaling 11 enterprise signings so far in 2026, which already exceeds the total number of signings we had in all of 2025.

Nasdaq Verafin continues to accelerate AI innovation in its business and across its platform. Our agentic AI workforce is now used by 750 clients. In the second quarter, we announced an expansion of the workforce, including 2 new agentic workers, which we've moved into beta, 1 for AML structuring alerts and the second for ACH fraud alert triage. The new role-based workers enable end-to-end automation of financial crime workloads from fraud and AML alert reviews to investigations and reporting.

We also plan to introduce new auto dispositioning capabilities in Q3 and flexible deployment options that extend our AI solutions across third-party systems by the end of the year. Verafin's Agentic AI Workforce expansion reflects our broader AI-first development approach, which is transforming every stage of the product development life cycle, from design and development to testing and deployment. This enables us to increase innovation velocity, expand our product road map and bring new capabilities to clients faster than ever before.

Regulatory Technology delivered sustained growth, driven by significant expansions to always-on markets and infrastructure modernization. Overall, we signed 9 new clients, including 2 cross-sells and 63 upsells. In AxiomSL, we deepened relationships with existing clients while expanding our global footprint with continued strength in our cloud bookings. During the quarter, a U.S. bank expanded its footprint with AxiomSL as the client grew through acquisition and faced more significant regulatory requirements. Additionally, a top 4 Australian bank expanded their relationship with us to leverage our cloud-enabled regulatory reporting solution, reinforcing the global demand for our platform.

In Surveillance, we delivered strong growth while experiencing significant demand from clients expanding into new markets, including energy and digital assets. This demand included a significant renewal and expansion with a global broker-dealer as well as a renewal with a key global financial institution. We signed 3 upsells for our cross-product surveillance capability, which we launched earlier this year. The new solution enables our clients to detect complex market abuse tactics across multiple markets and asset classes, highlighting the power of our new signals-based detection. We also secured a Tier 1 client for our newest AI solutions, Calibration Copilot and GenAI news copilot in July, reflecting growing demand for AI-powered workflows and positioning us for broader adoption over time.

Capital Markets Technology continued to deliver strong performance, highlighted by significant new clients and excellent revenue growth in Trade Management Services. In the quarter, we signed 7 new clients, including 3 cross-sells and 42 upsells. In Market Technology, we maintained momentum while advancing key infrastructure modernization initiatives. We made further progress in the rollout of our Eqlipse product suite with 2 existing clients committing to the migration of their market platforms to Eqlipse. We also completed 3 modernization programs, including going live with clearing for BYMA, Argentina stock exchange; and with trading for nuam, a regional market operator that integrates the Peru, Chile and Colombia stock exchanges.

In Calypso, we signed several new clients that expand the reach of our products to new countries, institutions and asset classes including our first U.S. treasury clearing deals with 2 large financial institutions. Additionally, earlier this week, we announced a deal with the Georgian Financial Markets Treasury Association to modernize the country's treasury and financial markets infrastructure. As part of this deal, 5 leading commercial banks in the country of Georgia will adopt the Calypso platform with opportunities to onboard more banks over time. With this deal, Calypso now operates in more than 70 countries.

Additionally, we piloted tokenized collateral trades on the Canton Network in July alongside 2 of the world's leading asset managers. Specifically, tokenized money market funds were successfully transmitted as collateral through Calypso, leveraging the Canton Network.

Now turning to Market Services. The division delivered 11% organic net revenue growth against the backdrop of record industry volumes in U.S. options and U.S. cash equities. We also achieved record volumes for Index options, doubling year-over-year revenue for the fourth consecutive quarter. In European cash equities, we experienced higher industry volumes and delivered a 3 percentage point increase in lit market share, bringing us to 74%.

On June 18, we achieved a record Triple Witch event recording $296 billion, the largest ever in notional value traded. That date also marked a record date for U.S. equity industry volumes with 34.6 billion shares traded on the day. The Russell reconstitution on June 26 set new records across the board, achieving our highest ever revenue, our highest ever share volume in the cross at 4.6 billion shares and a record notional value traded of $334 billion, more than triple the prior Russell rebalance record set last year.

Looking ahead to near-term milestones. We remain on track for a projected launch of 23/5 trading on December 6, 2026. Additionally, we received SEC approval to list event options and remain on track for launch in the fourth quarter.

Overall, our results demonstrate the strength of a business increasingly driven by recurring revenue from deeply integrated platforms and long-term growth trends that are still in the early innings, such as AI adoption and market modernization, including tokenization and always-on markets.

Markets are evolving rapidly as new technologies, asset classes, market structures and resiliency requirements reshape their financial system. Nasdaq continues to be a leader in this transformation by building the trusted, resilient infrastructure that enables institutions and market operators to modernize responsibly to serve both institutional and retail investors.

Our role is to help design a durable investor experience with the goal to increase investor access while also protecting investors and the broader financial system through the markets we operate and the technology we provide to other markets, our Index and Analytics products and our risk management solutions.

Our competitive position reflects decades of investment in a deep client community, gold standard data, mission-critical technology platforms and exceptional technical talent. Together, these advantages have created powerful network effects across our ecosystem. AI is enabling us to strengthen these advantages by enhancing the pace and scope of product capabilities that we can deliver to our clientele. Looking ahead, we're energized not only by the strength of our performance but the breadth and depth of the dialogues we have with clients and the scale of the opportunity in front of us.

With that, I'll turn the call over to Sarah to walk through the financial results in more detail.

Thank you, Adena, and good morning, everyone. In the second quarter of 2026, Nasdaq delivered exceptional results, headlined by Solutions revenue growth of 17%, including the second straight quarter of double-digit revenue growth in all 3 Financial Technology subdivisions. We had diluted EPS growth of 25%, exceeding $1 in quarterly EPS for the first time in the company's history.

Let's start with quarterly results on Slide 11. We reported net revenue of $1.5 billion, up 15%, with Solutions revenue of $1.2 billion, up 17%. Operating expense was $641 million, up 10%, leading to an operating margin of 57% and an EBITDA margin of 60%, both up 2 percentage points over the prior year period. This resulted in net income of $605 million and diluted EPS of $1.07, up 25%.

Slide 12 shows the drivers of our 15% net revenue growth for the quarter. We generated 11 percentage points of alpha, the second consecutive quarter of double-digit alpha growth, driven by new and existing clients and product innovation. Meanwhile, data factories contributed 4 percentage points of growth this quarter, driven by higher valuations in Nasdaq indices and higher derivatives volumes in Index and higher overall volumes in Market Services.

Let's review divisional results, starting on Slide 14. In Capital Access Platforms, we delivered revenue of $621 million, up 18% with ARR growth of 8%. Data and Listings was up 9% for both revenue and ARR. Data revenue growth was strong and driven primarily by upsells, new sales and usage. Listings revenue benefiting from the improving IPO environment and pricing increases, partially offset by delistings and lower amortization of prior period initial listing fees, which were marginally better than our expectations.

Index revenue was up 35%, and ARR, which covers a very small portion of revenue, increased 8%. Revenue growth was primarily driven by record average ETP AUM surpassing $1 trillion in the second quarter, bolstered by record net inflows of $109 billion over the last 12 months, including a record $51 billion in the second quarter.

Volume-based revenue also contributed to growth with record derivatives contract volumes up 33% in the quarter. Notably, volume growth outside of the U.S. was very similar to growth in the U.S., reflecting the strength of the product ecosystem in regions around the world, where perpetual-style derivatives are already available. The volume growth was partially offset by the continued mix shift in derivates volumes from higher-priced E-mini contracts to lower-priced micro E-mini contracts.

In Workflow and Insights, revenue was up 5% in the quarter, with ARR growth up 6%. The revenue increase was driven primarily by Analytics, mainly from eVestment and Data Link. Corporate Solutions revenue was essentially flat.

Excluding the onetime revenue item related to a contract modification in our Index business, quarterly operating margin for the CAP division was 63%, up 4 percentage points for the prior year period.

Before we wrap on Capital Access Platforms, we are continuing to optimize our portfolio with 2 transactions. Earlier this week, we announced an agreement to sell Nasdaq Fund Secondaries to Nasdaq Private Market, where we remain an investor and strategic partner. This transaction brings together 2 highly complementary businesses and strongly positions Nasdaq Private Market to capitalize on the significant opportunity to provide secondary liquidity infrastructure for both private company shares and private fund interests.

And today, we are announcing that we have entered into an agreement to acquire Dasseti, an AI-powered due diligence platform used by institutional asset allocators and managers across public and private markets. Dasseti will be integrated into Nasdaq eVestment to provide a seamless experience across eVestment's institutional network.

On a pro forma basis for the last 12 months, these 2 transactions would have combined to result in a net increase in revenue of approximately $4 million to Nasdaq, and both companies are still early stage. We did not provide purchase or disposition prices for the transactions as neither of them is material.

Moving to Financial Technology on Slide 15. Revenue was $539 million, up 15%, driven by double-digit growth across all 3 subdivisions. ARR growth was 16%. Our business continues to see strong demand across all FinTech subdivisions and high levels of client engagement. The division signed 58 new clients, 107 upsells and 7 cross-sells in the quarter, while sales continue to represent over 15% of the FinTech pipeline.

Financial Crime Management Technology revenue grew 22% in the quarter with ARR growth of 17% and net revenue retention of 110%. We signed 47 new SMB clients in the second quarter, reflecting continued momentum in the SMB client cohort. In enterprise, we signed 2 cross-sells, 2 expansions and 2 renewals in the quarter as well as 1 additional cross-sell and an expansion early in the third quarter. Regulatory Technology delivered revenue growth of 13% and ARR growth of 14%, reflecting strong performance across both surveillance and AxiomSL. The subdivision delivered 9 new clients, including 3 cross-sells and 63 upsells in the quarter.

Capital Markets Technology revenue grew 14% with an ARR growth of 17%. The subdivision delivered 7 new clients, including 3 cross-sells and 42 upsells. The quarter's strong performance reflects demand for data-centric services as well as a pricing increase in Trade Management Services and continued execution at Calypso, including a strategic long-term renewal with a large global bank. Performance in the quarter was partially offset by lower professional services revenue. As a note, Capital Markets Technology revenue growth in the third and fourth quarter of 2025 benefited from the contribution from Calypso upfront revenue, which will create a tougher comp for Capital Markets Technology in the upcoming 2 quarters. Financial Technology quarterly operating margin was 46%, in line with the prior year period.

Turning to Market Services on Slide 16. We had record quarterly net revenue of $340 million, up 11%. Growth in the quarter was driven by record industry volumes across U.S. equities and U.S. options and strong volumes across European equities and fixed income.

We also continued to deliver alpha as reflected in higher market share and higher capture in U.S. equities, Index options revenue more than doubling versus the prior year period for the fourth straight quarter, strong adoption of newly launched short-dated options products, and higher market share in European equities. This performance was partially offset by lower capture in U.S. options driven by a continued mix shift in the composition of order flow as new consolidators have entered our markets and lower U.S. tape plan revenue, primarily driven by lower audit revenue, following an industry-wide adjustment in the prior year period, which we had called out last year. Quarterly operating margin for this division was 64%, up 1 percentage point versus the prior year period.

The financial system is undergoing one of its most significant periods of modernization in decades. The shift is visible across multiple dimensions in the move towards 23/5 trading, the adoption of tokenized assets, the use of AI across financial infrastructure and the development of new instruments, such as perpetual-style derivatives and prediction markets. This market evolution enables Nasdaq to expand its role across the financial ecosystem.

Perpetual-style derivatives are the latest example of a potential product innovation being considered by U.S. regulators. Today, U.S. regulatory approval has been limited to instruments outside the scope of Nasdaq's U.S. markets. Should there be a consideration by the SEC and the CFTC to expand U.S. approval across equity products, including options and equity-linked Index products, even in an extreme case, we would still expect minimal crossover, representing less than 1% of our total revenue. Over time, However, such innovation to the extent they are durable can create opportunities for us as they expand market access and increase demand for trusted and resilient market infrastructure. Nasdaq thrives in an environment that enables responsible innovation while remaining focused on protecting investors.

Moving to expense on Slide 17. We had operating expense of $641 million in the second quarter, an increase of 10%, driven by employee compensation reflecting the timing of our annual compensation cycle as well as incentive compensation driven by our strong revenue execution, increased marketing expense due to a strengthening IPO environment, investment in technology to support revenue and drive innovation and growth and severance costs. The second quarter operating margin was 57% and the EBITDA margin was 60%, both up 2 percentage points versus the prior year period.

We are updating our non-GAAP expense guidance for the year to a range of $2.530 billion to $2.570 billion from $2.485 billion to $2.545 billion, with 2 primary drivers of the increase, higher employee compensation given the strong revenue performance we have experienced year-to-date and increased marketing expense due to a strengthening IPO environment with marketing expense having a larger effect within the quarter of the planned IPO.

To note, in the third quarter of 2025, we collected a $5 million regulatory fine, which was recorded as a contra expense. As a result, we expect a tougher expense comparison in the upcoming quarter. We maintain our 2026 non-GAAP tax rate guidance of 22.5% to 24.5%.

Turning to capital allocation on Slide 18. Nasdaq generated free cash flow of $477 million in the second quarter. Over the last 12 months, Nasdaq generated $2.2 billion in free cash flow at a conversion ratio of 97%. We paid a dividend of $0.31 per share or $174 million in the quarter, representing a 31% annualized payout ratio. During the quarter, we repurchased a total of 4.1 million shares of our common stock for $356 million.

In combination with the dividend, Nasdaq returned over $530 million to shareholders in the second quarter. In the first half, we have repurchased $903 million compared to $616 million of repurchases in all of 2025. In July, we launched a $200 million to $250 million variable accelerated share repurchase plan, which will be completed in the third quarter. We finished the quarter with a gross leverage ratio of 2.6x driven by EBITDA growth and a net repayment of approximately $162 million of gross debt.

In closing, Nasdaq delivered another quarter of excellent execution. Our results reflect the strength of our business model highlighted by broad-based revenue growth across all 3 divisions, expanding margins, rigorous capital allocation and mid-20s EPS growth. As we enter the second half of the year, we are extremely confident in our opportunity, and we are focused on executing on our ambitious strategic objectives to deliver long-term value for shareholders.

With that, I will turn the call over for Q&A.

[Operator Instructions] I show our first question comes from the line of Ashish Sabadra from RBC Capital Markets.

Really solid results. Adena, you mentioned several AI initiatives across all segments and significant client adoption of your AI solutions. How has your thinking evolved on AI monetization? Are you primarily focused on driving better sales momentum, retention and pricing power? Or do you also see opportunities to charge separately for AI capabilities? And then how do you envision AI monetization over the midterm?

Great. Thank you. We actually take an approach that's product by product and frankly, capability by capability. So in some cases, we are integrating the AI capabilities into the core product and we would look to evaluate the pricing of that product over time based on the value we're providing to our clients. And that would be in the case of the Calibration Copilot and some of the work we're doing in Boardvantage and IR Insight. But then we also have other capabilities where we are charging as a new module, but we are taking kind of a freemium approach.

So with, for instance, in anti-financial crime, so Verafin and Surveillance, the GenAI news copilot within Surveillance and all of the digital workers within Verafin, we're basically offering a certain number of alerts for free. And then if they want to have the ability to have an unlimited number of alerts that they're working through the digital workers, then they would pay a subscription fee. It's basically an upsell.

And we do have -- our clients are definitely signing up for the upsell. We're in the process of contracting many clients actually for the upsell, but we also want to make sure we're driving usage because it's the best way for them to prove value to themselves and for us to prove that we can charge successfully for these great capabilities. So we're in the very early innings of monetizing our AI capabilities, but we're very encouraged by the way that the clients are moving from free to a paid subscription.

In terms of monetization overall, we're not providing any sort of details on that yet, but over time, we'll make sure that we continue to update you on the progress of our AI strategy.

And I show our next question comes from the line of Eli Abboud from Bank of America.

I was hoping to unpack the strong results in Trade Management Services. I think you flagged Trade Management Services as the strongest performer in your Capital Markets Tech business for a couple of quarters in a row now. To what extent are you seeing new trading firms come into your data center versus existing clients demand more bandwidth? And then how much of this do you think is tied to the use of generative AI in trading?

Sure. So it is really coming from new and existing clients, and it is definitely just demand for connectivity, for power and for the ability for them to drive their trading strategies. I would not say that it's really AI -- GenAI-driven. A lot of trading strategies are algorithmic AI, and that's been in the markets now for a long time. But it's definitely more from the fact that they have -- there's more trading. There are more strategies that people are deploying. They're trying to make sure that they're looking at multi-asset class strategies and things like that, that really drive the usage of our connectivity services.

And then also, we did have a pricing increase earlier this year that's flowing through the financials as well, as we mentioned in the first quarter, and that's also benefiting us. And one other thing I should mention on the AI strategy is also in data. We have been very intentional about making sure that our data is ready and available. It's kind of what we call AI ready to be able to be integrated into AI workflows. That would include our investment data as well as our Data Link data, which includes our market data. So by offering our data out through into these AI work -- and into the workflows, we are making it so that we have more demand, frankly, just for our data assets. So people should know that that's all part of our AI strategy.

And I show our next question comes from the line of Alex Kramm from UBS.

I found it interesting that you mentioned perps proactively, I think, 3 times if I counted correctly on this call. So considering that you're pretty far away from that topic, I think -- although I think you've gotten caught up in this narrative a little bit. But just wondering, it sounds like you're certainly evaluating what your role could be. So maybe you can elaborate a little bit, when you talk to regulators, how you think it's going to evolve, where you could potentially lend technology, offer some products yourself. And then maybe at the very least, are you getting some interest to maybe license the Nasdaq Index to some overseas perps providers? And how do you feel about that in general?

All right. Great. Thanks, Alex. I think perpetuals are definitely a topic that has come up obviously. And we did try to address it in terms of how do we see the overlap with our existing business today from a trading perspective and from kind of just overall what is a perpetual derivative, where are they today? They're really outside of the scope of the Nasdaq world today. If they were to come into the equities world, it would have to be the result of a joint regulatory approval from both the SEC and the CFTC.

So that's just a different bar that we have to pass. But we also provided you a hypothetical that were they to cross that Rubicon and bring them into the equity space, we still see very little overlap. And the kind of the qualities of perpetuals are very different than the qualities of options and futures in our space. I would say just to kind of give you a little framing and then I'll talk to you about the opportunity in front of us, if you think about what do perpetuals solve in the crypto ecosystem, they solve the ability for investors to trade on margin, meaning they solve the ability to trade with leverage, and they provide a more elegant way to short crypto assets.

Those 2 things are very, very accessible in the equities world today. And the benefit in the equities world with options is that you have convexity of return. It's not a linear return structure. So there are a lot -- and the carrying costs are much lower. So it's just there's structural advantages that are already offered in the equities world that I think address a lot of the benefits that investors use perpetuals for in the crypto world.

But when we look at it in terms of our opportunity in front of us, we have a few things. One is on technology. We are providing surveillance technology and also for trading technology. So our market technology, our surveillance technology are relevant to firms -- to markets that are looking to launch or provide perpetuals and then also to trade perpetuals, so NTS. And we also want to make sure that things like risk management and other technologies that Calypso offers, potentially regulatory reporting could also be covered. So we do see it as an opportunity for us to expand our FinTech division.

In terms of licensing, the Nasdaq-100 or QQQ, those are conversations that we would have with our partner, CME and others to consider as we move forward.

And I show our next question comes from the line of Owen Lau from Clear Street.

Do you have more color on the road map of asset managers leveraging tokenized funds or assets as collateral? I think in the third quarter, you mentioned there are 2 large asset managers completed tokenized collateral trades on the Canton Network. I'm wondering how Calypso can monetize it incrementally and the pace of adoption there.

Yes, sure. So the way that we're working with the industry is we want to make sure that Calypso -- we already have this great Calypso -- sorry, collateral management capability in Calypso that's used by hundreds of firms around the world. So we provide them a very good way for them to determine what's the optimal collateral they should have in every collateral pool that they have to operate with.

Now what we're working on with Canton is to make sure that we can facilitate the movement of collateral in a tokenized form. So we had 2 major asset managers. Essentially, I think it was like a proof of concept that we executed in the second quarter to demonstrate that we couldn't -- they take a tokenized money market fund that they've created, the asset managers created. And they're able to put it into the collateral network through Calypso and transfer that collateral using Canton.

So it's basically a proof of concept on how do we turn Calypso not only from collateral management to a collateral network in a tokenized form. And the way that we would charge for that, Owen, over time, because this is still a proof of concept, is it would be a new module because think of it as an upsell to offer the ability to actually manage collateral movement in addition to collateral management.

And so that's the way that we've monetized it going forward. But we're very excited because it was fun because the guys were there that day, and they basically like kind of came out of the room going victory. It's pretty easy. Yes, the money moved. So that was pretty neat. But we definitely feel like we can be a part of that tokenization effort with the buy side and the sell side going forward.

And I show our next question comes from the line of Patrick Moley from Piper Sandler.

Adena, I would love to get your thoughts on the IPO environment here. And then as you look out to the back half of 2027, how much of your IPO pipeline today is idiosyncratic megadeals versus what you would maybe view as a more durable broadening of the pipeline?

Sure. Actually, it really is a broadening of the pipeline. So we just are seeing a lot of really great companies coming out across -- and there are certain themes to it, but we are actually as focused on a broader pipeline as we would be on some of the larger opportunities.

I think it actually shows up a little bit in the second quarter where you had these really large marquee listings. Obviously, we had SpaceX, but we also had Cerebras. We also had Parabilis, and we had Quantinuum. And we actually had a major data center company come live, some very large raises, had SK hynix in the third quarter, but the pipeline is pretty broad across the themes of anything related to AI infrastructure and build-out including power and the things that will actually drive compute capabilities as well as we are seeing a pickup in health care and biotech listings, which is very exciting, given the fact we've had a dearth of that over the last few years. So we're very excited to see that.

And then the defense industry is also seeing some really good companies come out and companies that serve defense industry not only like actual building the defense systems but building the components to the defense systems like Arxis and other compounders that are really interesting coming into the market as well. And then also, we also are seeing more consumer companies coming out into the market. So it's becoming more and more broad-based, and we're very excited about that.

And I show our next question comes from the line of Alexander Blostein from Goldman Sachs.

I was hoping to zoom out and maybe talk about profitability in the business as a whole. Nasdaq's put out a couple of quarters of really good operating leverage now. And then I understand there is some kind of low-hanging fruit, higher incremental margin tailwinds and whether it's trading or Index. But as you think about just where you are and the efficiencies from AI, whether it's on the top line or the bottom line, how do you think about the margins as a whole over the next couple of years? And where do you think they can ultimately go?

So thank you, Alex. We've seen, as you have noted, for the first half of this year, really very strong performance. And what I think you are reminding everyone is the gap that we are creating between our revenue especially in solutions as well as on the operating expense. And that has been something which we've been very consistent with, which is we fund our investments very well, and that's why you're seeing that we're on the front foot as we are able to deal with information and becoming able to transform that into additional [ return ] and opportunities with our clients. But we are also working on efficiencies, and we've been very good at doing that and say, over the years, and that will continue with GenAI.

And I show our next question comes from the line of Simon Clinch from Rothschild & Co.

Adena, I was wondering if you could just elaborate a bit more. With all the AI tools you're rolling out to your clients and the good uptick you're getting from clients, could you give us a sense of, I guess, how rapidly and how sophisticated your clients are at the outset of using these products and how to think about the sort of momentum in that usage? Is it something that's really going to build over time? Or are they actually coming at it with a fairly sophisticated approach already and sort of getting really stuck in straight away?

Yes. Actually, it's interesting. I mean I would say that the clients are downright eager to be able to take advantage of the automations we're able to deliver because for them, it's a direct return on investment to them to be able to be more efficient internally. So first of all, the way that we're deploying the AI capabilities out to our product makes it very easy to adopt. It's not hard for them to say, yes, I would automate that workflow to make it so that I can investigate a potential criminal actor. I can make sure that I can see all the investigation. I can see this -- all the sites of the sources that the AI generated. I can also -- how did AI write the report? I can review the report, and I can click and go right into and submit that report.

So it's a very easy use case. Like these are easy use cases for the clients to adopt. They also recognize that it saves up to 80% of their time. So it's also -- it's an easy sell to be honest with you. But we also bring our clients together. We actually recently had an event in Boston with 150 of our anti-financial crime clients. And we are walking them through the pipeline of additional agentic workers that we're bringing. And they're -- we thought maybe they'd say, well, we can only take so many. Let's make sure that we pace ourselves here because we're talking about some acceleration. And instead they're saying, yes, please bring it on, but let's work together to figure out how to make sure that we can show to our CFO and our CTO the clear return so that we can adopt these as fast as possible. So it was a really -- it was very encouraging.

I think also, we are very mindful of how we orchestrate the AI into the tooling in terms from a security perspective or resiliency perspective so that it is -- they -- in terms of our clients, they're obviously doing reviews of us as we are introducing these tools, and we feel very good about the diligence they do on us before they adopt them. So it's been pretty smooth so far.

And I show our next question comes from the line of Brian Bedell from Deutsche Bank.

Great to see the really strong revenue progress across the solutions businesses. But I did want to talk about the actual -- the markets business and more of a broader picture question, Adena. Just your views on the future of Reg NMS just given the -- with the SEC proposals out and then more broadly, just the evolving market structure. Clearly, order protection is going to be important for your views, I'm sure.

But how about your views on strengthening the NBBO, allowing exchanges to sub-penny price, for example? And how would that interact with tokenizing securities in terms of tokenized securities trading alongside certificated form. And I think you said you're rolling your plan to start that in the first quarter of next year. If you could just talk about the timing on that.

Sure. Yes. It's a big topic. So let's start with Reg NMS and the order protection rule, which we call OPR, just so everyone knows if I use that acronym. So the order protection rule has been in place now for 20 years, and interestingly, I was at Nasdaq before the order protection rule was put in place. And at that time, we were not in favor of introducing that rule into the markets. So we have a long history of understanding it, understanding the effect of it, the consequences that come from it. And Reg NMS, there are some benefits to what order protection rule has brought, which is, of course, all the markets now are intimately networked together to create a lot of resiliency.

And I think that's important to recognize is because we have to route to each other, we've connected with each other. And by connecting with each other, it means that there's more resiliency in the markets. But there's also more fragmentation of order flow. And it has kept us from being able to innovate because in the -- coincident with the order protection rule, it basically says that everything has to be price time ordered. And it doesn't allow for us to have a more flexible structure around should it be price size. If you get size done, can you do that a penny away from the inside and still be compliant with best ex?

But if you have -- you take away the order protection rule and you think, okay, now we can innovate. We have 3 markets exchanges. We should be able to drive and experiment with different market models to see how they serve the clients' needs. Today, also, it's really a 2-tiered market between on-exchange and off-exchange. We really can't compete in the off-exchange space. We can't segment order flow. We can't do a lot of things that we think will serve investors better. And by loosening up the order protection rule and saying let's allow more innovation to come in, it allows us to think about how we can serve clients in a different way in working with the SEC.

So we see some benefits, but we also have to make sure we don't lose sight of the benefits OPR has brought in terms of the resilience of the ecosystem, the transparency of the best bid and offer and making sure that investors are protected in the process. So that's a big body of work that we'll be working on with the SEC and with our clients.

Outside of that, if you think about tokenized equities, we have 2 projects going on with tokenized equities. One is to collaborate with the DTCC as they're trying to make sure that they allow for the settlement of tokenized shares. All of that's post-trade. And then the other is to work with Kraken to say is there a new model that can be created, leveraging the Nasdaq token design and having a flow-through of the tokens through to instantaneous settlements and having the actual rights and everything related to the equity conveyed to the client, to the end investor with instantaneous settlement.

And for that, we do expect that to be something we launched in early next year with Kraken, but Kraken has been a great partner, but it is not exclusive to them in terms of our ability to distribute that to other trading venues. And so we're in the midst of it. I think it actually has combined with 23/5 trading. It really opens the aperture and accessibility of equities to more investors. So we see it as a net positive to us and to the industry in general.

And I show our next question comes from the line of Dan Fannon from Jefferies.

I wanted to follow up on Verafin and the momentum in that business. Curious about progress outside the U.S. And then as you think about the longer -- or the medium-term target of mid-20s growth, what do you think is a reasonable time period to hit those numbers?

Sure. So outside the United States, we continue to engage with marquee clients in Europe and demonstrate and prove out our solution. I would say sales cycles are slow. When you're trying to land an entirely new jurisdiction, it just takes a long time to get through the internal processes within the large banks. But we have been able to prove true value to them through our proofs of concept. So it's really more a matter of just getting through the internal process to say that this is a worthwhile investment for them versus the many other things that they're dealing with in their own regulatory environments. But we do -- actually, we still have a lot of confidence in our ability to go in and land and expand there, but it's just taking longer to make sure that we're showing some beachhead clients.

In terms of the medium-term outlook, one thing that I just to remind you of is we did mention earlier this year that we had a lot of the signings of our enterprise clients in the second half of last year. And it takes around a year to really onboard them fully and to recognize the recurring revenue that comes from them. So we would anticipate that the ability to show the benefit of last -- the second half of the year's signings would start to flow in the second half of the year this year. And so that helps. And then we also have, of course, 11 new signings so far this year. Upsells do -- actually are able to be implemented faster than new sales. So there is some benefit from that. So we still continue to underwrite the medium-term outlook for the business.

And I show our next question comes from the line of Michael Cyprys from Morgan Stanley.

I wanted to ask about Market Tech. Just curious how you're thinking about new and emerging opportunities for the Market Tech business and the world of DeFI where firms like Hyperliquid are enabling third-party builders and developers to deploy their own exchange and markets on their protocol. I guess what's the opportunity for a Nasdaq chain and blockchain native market tech offering?

Yes. So we don't have a Layer 1. I mean, that's not something that we've chosen to invest in. But we work with multiple Layer 1s. Our view is that, first, we should be interoperable. We're a horizontal market operator. We believe in the horizontal infrastructure really driving and maximizing accessibility to investors. So we -- everything we're building, we're building for interoperability across multiple Layer 1s.

In terms of like native DeFI venues, that's not a space that we've actually engaged in from a market tech perspective. We've been more engaged with what I'll call more central limit order book-style digital asset ecosystem players and as well as providing surveillance for those types of players. But the native DeFI where it's just peer to peer is an ecosystem that's still very nascent and I would say, has some structural differences that are pretty significant. And our view might limit its use case. But right now, we're much more focused on working more with, say, more established markets and new exchanges that want to take a more established approach to driving markets in the digital asset ecosystem.

And I show our next question comes from the line of Benjamin Budish from Barclays.

I was just wondering if you could talk a little bit more about the strength you're seeing in the data sales side. Just curious what you're seeing in terms of customer types. You mentioned there's some usage-based components, if you could unpack maybe how big that is. And then lastly, you mentioned some advantages to the data business from always-on market. So how do you see that as maybe another catalyst or where Nasdaq may be uniquely positioned to benefit from that trend?

Sure. Yes. So there are really 3 trends that are continuing to drive demand for our data. And it's a Nasdaq market data as well as third-party data that we distribute out through our Data Link platform. One is definitely AI use cases. And that's where -- and including investment where people are integrating our data into AI workflows. We're not selling our data to core training models. We're selling them to applications that are leveraging AI. We have very good visibility and ability to monitor usage by the way.

But AI use cases is one. And we just -- as we mentioned, we launched the MCP protocol to make it much even smoother for AI-driven workflows to be able to pick up and use our data. And the way that we charge for that, by the way, is in the -- there will be an up charge for the MCP layer in addition to the license fee for the data.

In terms of -- the second trend is digital assets where there -- whether it's outside the United States, the notion of tokenized equities but also just the ability for them to integrate market data into other digital asset ecosystems. And so we're definitely seeing more demand there.

And then the third is 23/5 trading, having more and more international demand for our data. That's been a long-term trend for us, particularly in Asia, but it's extending now into other -- the Middle East and other parts of the world where they're getting ready for U.S. equities to be availably traded in their home market hours. And so retails brokers are signing up to make sure that, that data is available to them on a real-time basis. So it's all 3 of those trends are driving sales right now.

And I show our next question comes from the line of Michael Cho from JPMorgan.

Sarah, I just had a quick modeling question. You called out some tough comps, I think, for Capital Markets Tech in the second half. Hoping you can flesh that out a little bit. I recall a few points of growth, but there's a number of moving pieces, and then you had a price increase in trade management as well. So just trying to get a sense of how those things offset for the second half of the year.

And then if I could just one more in, I just want to make sure I heard correctly on Verafin, the ARR uplift from the large deals signed late last year is still yet to come. I just want to make sure I heard that.

yes. So I'll just say yes to your last question and that's what Adena covered in terms of like we are looking at 12 months implementation from the second half of last year. In terms of the tough comps for Capital Markets Tech, we had some Calypso upfront, and you remember that those can be lumpy in both the third and the fourth quarter of 2025. And so I just wanted to make sure that I reminded you that as you look at your models, and of course, you've seen very, very strong Calypso upfront actually during this first half.

And so those things come in phases. And so we have great momentum in the business, but as you think about the specific type that generates the upfront, which is the renewal. I wanted to make sure you have that indication. Other than that, we have the Trade Management Services pricing increase, which that continues to accrue to us as you go forward since it's an annual increase.

And I show our next question comes from the line of Alex Kramm from UBS.

Just one quick follow-up. Over the last few weeks, there's been a lot more headlines around how AI is driving financial crime higher. So just wondering to what degree you're hearing that from your clients as you engage with them around Verafin. I'm not sure if what you offer today kind of addresses those kind of new types of financial crime, but just wondering to what degree we could maybe see some uplift in the future as you hopefully fight that.

Sure. Yes. We definitely are hearing that from clients. We've been hearing that for some time. I think there are few different styles. One is deepfakes and they're getting very good. But that's really kind of using better deepfake technology to perpetrate the types of financial crimes that we've seen for quite some time in terms of romance scams, elderly scams, things that are very, very insidious, but they're just getting better at them.

So I think the work that we're doing inside the engine of the alerting engine is also really, really exciting. I have to say, leveraging GenAI allows us also to look through the data in new ways and capture different signals within the data. And that is something that we've been very focused on. And again, we talked about this because we're also driving the AI across the business in terms of how they develop technology, how they use -- they are able to mine the data to look for new things, we are very excited about the efficacy of our ability to root out new forms of financial crime and also just to be better at connecting data across the network.

Just as a reminder, the data sits inside -- it's a consortia data lake comprised of all 2,800 financial institutions. We process somewhere in the range of 1 billion and 1.5 billion transactions a week. So that's a lot of data. So using AI to be able to root out different new behaviors, we can look at new patterns that are emerging but also to look across the network of clients in new ways is really quite exciting in terms of what we're going to deliver to our clients going forward. But it is a changing landscape, so we have to stay on top of it and support our bank clients in that way.

The only other thing I would mention also is in the cross-asset class work that we're doing in SMARTS because the other thing that you're also seeing is more sophistication of criminal behavior in the capital markets as they're using largely algorithmic data, AI to perpetrate crimes across asset classes and use more sophisticated strategies that way. Our new cross-asset class capability in SMARTS is -- actually uses a different alerting technique to make it so we can look at behaviors differently. It's not just rules-based. It's signals-based. And that also creates new ways for us to fight back criminal behavior as well.

And I show our last question in the queue comes from the line of Eli Abboud from Bank of America.

I wanted to dig into the impact of 24/7 trading on your FinTech businesses and the runway that's left there. How many of your clients are already taking the 24/7 version of your solution across Regulatory and Capital Markets Tech? And what does the ASV uplift look like when a client transitions to 24/7 trading?

Yes. So we only have a very handful of clients who are using our 24/7 architecture. Eqlipse was built to support 24/7 markets. A lot of them are 23/7. Some are 24/5. Some of them are even 23.5/7, but they also want to have a day, some period of time where they can deal with maintenance and also a crossover of the day. So -- but we do have a small handful who actually uses on a 24/7 basis.

In terms of that infrastructure there, like outside of looking at it for a client, we've also talked to our own clients about what would it take to think about moving mainstream markets like Nasdaq or any of the national exchanges and thinking about that on a 24/7 basis as opposed to 24/5. And I can tell you that it's a major lift for our clients and for us just because the architecture is different, and you have to replicate a lot of architecture to make it so you can basically operate without a maintenance window. And that is just a fundamental architectural difference.

And -- but I have to say that as we are engaging with clients, there is a growing pipeline of demand for moving to 24/5 all the way to 24/7. So we know we can deliver it. We have delivered it. We just want to make sure that we're working with them on the investment it would be needed to do it for them and their clients.

That concludes our Q&A session. At this time, I would like to turn the conference back over to Adena Friedman, President and CEO, for closing remarks.

Our second quarter results reflect the disciplined execution of our strategy and reinforce our role as a trusted transformation partner to the global financial system. I want to thank you all for joining today, and have a great day.

Thank you. This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for attending. You may all disconnect.

Good morning, everyone. Thanks for staying with us here. I'm Mike Cyprys, equity analyst covering brokers, asset managers and exchanges for Morgan Stanley Research. And it's my pleasure to welcome Tal Cohen, President of Nasdaq, leading our Market Services and Financial Technology divisions. Tal, thanks for joining us.

Yes. Thanks for joining us. I'm blaming the sparse crowd on the Knicks game last night. Some people just -- they were they couldn't make it.

Well, they're coming in here now. So the door is open there. So as many of you know Nasdaq to be a global exchange operator, but in recent years, Nasdaq has been transforming the business through a series of acquisitions to become a technology and platform provider, to serve corporates, investment managers and financial institutions as they navigate and interact with the global capital markets and the broader financial system. And we're thrilled to have Tal with us here to discuss the transformation.

I thought we'd start off talking on the Markets division here and the broader market backdrop, which we've seen a strong start to the year across your -- and the industry's cash equities, options, helped by volatility, retail engagement growth and short-dated options, which we'll dive into in the coming questions. So can you talk about how Nasdaq is seeing what you're seeing so far in terms of April, May, early June, talking about the activity you're seeing. How much of this feels, would you say, cyclical versus more structural? And how you're thinking about volume growth capture and market share from here?

Yes. So again, thanks for having me. And coming off the back of a strong first quarter where our Markets business grew 10%, and that was off a record year before that, we're seeing a number of macro structural trends that are worth talking about. One is, if you look through April and May, strong corporate earnings. Secondly is, you have strong retail engagement. You continue to have a constructive regulatory backdrop, which is very helpful for both the SEC and the CFTC. And then obviously, AI, and the AI trade continues to be a strong tailwind for us. So those are kind of the macro themes that are playing its way through the market in Q2 and for the most part, in Q1.

In terms of our markets themselves, I love the competitive positioning of our markets. We have, in the U.S. equities side, our capture is 70% higher than the #2 player in the market, and that's in part because of the technology we provide, the services we provided, the innovation that we brought into the market over the last 4, 5 years. So really proud of where we stand there. And Nasdaq is the single largest equities exchange, and it's probably the largest equities exchange by about 500 bps. So we're doing really well in equities. I like our competitive position despite the competition there.

On the options side, we're also the #1 player in multi-listed by about 500 bps over #2. And our index options business has grown over 60% year-over-year. So really, really healthy. Again, both of those businesses are positioned for growth. Competitive position is strong. And then we continue to invest in these businesses. On the options side, we are migrating to our -- what we call Fusion, our new global derivatives trading platform. Our sixth medallion is going to be migrated to that platform, and then we'll be complete. So we will have upgraded our entire technology stack on the options side by the end of the summer, really excited about that. And we just continue to invest in our technology, in our servicing. Of course, AI will play a role in the way that we do servicing going forward. But generally speaking, really happy about our performance and what the outlook is.

And is Fusion, the options technology, that's in the cloud or separate?

Great question. So we announced back in 2021, we took our first medallion, which is MRX, Mercury market, to the cloud, and now with AWS Outposts in our own data center. And what we were able to do is prove resiliency and performance in that -- in taking our market to the cloud. And we did that with Fusion. So it was on our new global trading and derivatives platform in the cloud. So that was really monumental for us because that also allowed our Financial Technology clients. So we serve 130 exchanges and regulators in the world. That's the blueprint for them.

Great. So Nasdaq recently received approval to move to 23/5 trading. So let's talk about that, with the go-live date expected for December 6. So where are you seeing the strongest demand? What still needs to be solved as you prepare to go live here? And how should investors think about the economic impact across your platform from this potentially?

Yes. It's a 2-parter question. Let me take the first half, which is how do we see the economic opportunity, and then I'll talk about the challenges. 23/5 is just part of a greater thematic, which is always-now or always-on. And on always-on, the way that we think about it is it's not just 23/5, there's tokenization, there's accelerated settlement, there's faster movement of money in securities. And as a result of that, we see an opportunity across the entire platform. From our data franchise, an opportunity for our data franchise to really embrace 23/5. From a financial technology perspective, we are looking at our trading business, our post-trade business, our surveillance business and our Calypso business. All have opportunities. So obviously, we provide trading and post-trade technology. Think about surveillance in a 24/7 or 23/5 world, a real great opportunity for us. For Calypso, it's collateral management. Collateral management is probably one of the biggest opportunities that comes off of the back of always-on and 23/5.

And then the third part of it, of course, is just our trading business. So right now, we see about 10% or 11% of average daily volumes occur after the close or before the open. About 2% of that is overnight. Most of that is retail. We expect that to grow over time. So across the entire platform, from data, to Financial Technology, to our trading division, we just see opportunity in the short term, medium term and long term.

And in terms of the challenges and this -- and we've spoken a lot about this, and we address them through the way that we're implementing here is, they cut across 3 things. One is infrastructure. We need to make sure that all of the infrastructure in U.S. equities, in particular, is ready and U.S. options for that matter. And that's the securities information processor, it's DTCC, OCC and it's, of course, the trade reporting facility. So all of that infrastructure needs to be put in place. The second one is operations. We want to make sure that we're handling corporate actions. We are putting volatility guards that manage volatility and movements overnight where liquidity could be thinner, price discovery is harder to come by. So we're thinking very closely about not just corporate actions, but how we manage operational excellence and resilience in the overnight session.

And then the last one is just technology, how we apply our technology in a 23/5 world. So how do you upgrade your technology over time? You're not going to have the weekends. You have a truncated or shortened periods of time to address any incidents or issues in the market, so how are you handling that from an exchange perspective. So we thought a lot about all 3 dimensions, and we feel really good about what we're coming out with on December 6. I think it's going to improve transparency, the integrity of the markets, and there's an opportunity to really unlock greater demand in the markets.

Great. Why don't we shift and talk about options where activity remains quite elevated across the industry, particularly around some of the short-dated 0 DTE exposure. So what's your take on the sustainability of growth in the options market? What are some of the risks that the industry needs to manage, particularly as you think about 0 DTEs? And what needs to happen before you could see this broaden out beyond the 8 stocks today and the Monday, Wednesday to eventually Tuesday, Thursday? How do you see that? And then what sort of risk might there be to the sort of growth from the CFTC ruling on perps, -- to what extent does that open the door for other assets for retail to trade and potentially impact demand for cash equities, options, 0 DTEs?

Yes, that's a 3-parter. So let me take the first part, which is -- and you're referring to single stock. So single stock, we did the Mag Seven, Broadcom and IBIT. Those are the 9 names we went out with. And we had a methodology that was objective, and we actually had a consultation with the industry around that methodology, and it had 3 components to it. It was liquidity, market cap and the float. So we looked at across those 3 dimensions. That's how we came up with these 9 names.

And as you said, we came out with Monday, Wednesday to start. And what we did is we looked at market quality and we looked at liquidity, and we wanted to make sure that both were healthy. And what we've seen so far -- it's still early days, by the way, but what we've seen so far is market quality is strong. So deep liquid markets, no impact there. If anything, it's neutral to positive. On liquidity, it's additive. We've seen an uptick about 15% to 20%. Market share has been very strong for us across that, if you will, grow the pie story.

And then as we think about expanding it, because you asked me about expansion, we think the opportunity is Tuesday, Thursdays, of course, we'll work with the SEC on that and the industry. And then we can figure out what names as we go downstream in the options market are applicable and what characteristics really lend themselves to short-dated options. And short-dated options for what it's worth has become a real, if you will, real important hedging vehicle, income vehicle, market sentiment vehicle for both institutions and retail.

In terms of just the challenges, which is part 2 of your question, of course, we're going to work with OCC and the industry. So those are the 2 biggest. One is OCC from a risk management perspective, how are you modeling it, do you understand what we're looking at throughout the trading day? Do we have the right and appropriate margin collateral requirements for that? On the industry side, it's education, do you understand how to use these products? They're not like inverse and levered ETFs. So let's not mistake it for inverse or levered ETFs or products like that, where they carry some inherent risk and some other educational components to them. So what we do in the industry is much more about the use cases and the utility of short-dated options.

And then your third part of your question was CFTC and yes, perps. So perps really -- so the beauty of perps, for those that are using them, and it's obviously in crypto, it's served the purpose, is, it's simple, it's 24/7, and there's a ton of leverage. And it's where price discovery happens in crypto. If you just then look at options, for example, and you think about what we're doing in the options world and NDX in particular or for short-dated options, well, the options markets are really incredibly vibrant. So there's great liquidity, great market quality there. We spent a lot of time nurturing and cultivating this ecosystem of institutional and retail players. So that has taken us 10, 15 years to cultivate that kind of community, that kind of liquidity, that kind of market quality, one.

Two is, the utility of options is much greater than what it is in perps. So perps for those -- I look at perps, I'm on a platform. And again, for crypto, it's super simple, but you've got to understand like the funding rate, how that works, and it's very linear in the way that it provides exposure versus where options, again, you have hedging, risk management, income yield and then, of course, expressing sentiment. And really, if you even think about short-dated options, most of that usage is around trying to understand events that are going to happen in the short term versus perpetuals thinking about kind of long-term linear views of the assets.

So in many ways, I think they complement one another. Perps feel much more like levered ETFs and maybe even swaps and CFDs than they do options. Again, the CFTC and the SEC hasn't even ruled on whether if it's a future or a swap. That's a really important distinction. So Jamie Selway spoke just last week and said, "Hey, legally, we haven't determined what these are in the U.S.," which is really, really interesting. So again, I think there's -- what we've done in options, incredibly strong franchise, great diverse use cases, the liquidity and price discovery function is really robust, and it's more complementary than it is competitive right now. And we'll take a look at it. If anything, it provides us with an opportunity to do more.

And one thing we announced, I should have mentioned at the beginning, we're going to do binary options, which have an element of perps to it. It's going to be, if you will, for event and predictions. And so we'll have that, if you will, binary 0, 1 type of outcome to it. We'll do it on financial and economic products. So as we see the regulators embrace innovation and allow us to do more, of course, we're going to do more and take advantage of it. And like I said earlier, we're already moving to 23/5.

And what does that, I guess, road map look like on the binary option side in terms of the product time frame? What would you say there?

So we're engaging the SEC right now. We're looking at year-end to launch that. We'll start with the NDX complex. We'll start with up-down type of contracts. And again, the advantage we have is it's -- we don't have a cold start. We're going to do it on one of our medallions. It's well regulated. It's centrally cleared. There's the entire risk management function behind it. So we're really starting with an incredibly strong foundation when we launch these products. And then we'll put marketing and sales efforts against that, a go-to-market effort against that. And then we'll partner with some retail distribution, which we already have very, very strong relationships with across the retail community.

So I'm really excited about what that looks like. Of course, it's going to be a crawl, walk, run scenario because we're going to have to educate retail. We're going to have to make sure that we're educating not only retail, but the regulators on what we see. And we want to be responsible whenever we introduce innovation and new products like this into the market.

Well, speaking of innovation, let's talk about tokenization, which can be helpful in supporting always-on markets. Nasdaq has been active here and has talked about putting issuers at the center of a tokenized equity design. So how do you see tokenization fitting into Nasdaq's broader market structure strategy over the next 3 to 5 years? And where is Nasdaq, would you say, most advantaged?

Most advantaged. Okay. So there's 5 dimensions that I think play very well for us when it comes to tokenization always-now. One, we have incredibly deep relationships with our issuers and investors because of the platform that we have. So we're able to, if you will, be the nexus between issuers and investors, bring deeper engagement, deeper understanding between those 2 communities. Our issuers trust us. We have deep relationships with them. And we touch investors in so many ways. And that's our second advantage, where because we provide Financial Technology solutions to investors, we are serving them in so many different ways outside of just our markets. So we have relationships with private companies, public companies all over the globe.

The third is the unique partnerships we've been able to put in place. We announced one with Kraken. It was nonexclusive. We're in discussions with others. We've done something with oerse Stuttgart in Europe. And so we've put together these really unique partnerships that complement what we do and the 2 strengths I just mentioned before. The next is we've taken a leadership position. We were first to have the SEC approve our tokenization filing. We were the first to come out with a token that considered issuer needs. And that, again, allowed us to have a voice with government, regulators and our issuers, which was incredibly unique when we came out with a Nasdaq equity token. And we talked about incorporating important characteristics for issuers inside the token.

And then last, and this is incredibly important. When you talk about tokenization or always-on or 23/5, you need to be global. You need to service your clients globally. So our Financial Technology franchise where we serve 130 exchanges and regulators, we're providing trading, post-trade technology, surveillance technology, Calypso and then, of course, our markets, you layer all of that, and we are touching all of our clients in different ways across the globe, and we are really thinking about ourselves as like the trusted fabric as we think about this always-on opportunity throughout the platform. So really powerful when we talk to customers about that.

And how should investors think about the economic opportunity for Nasdaq from tokenization? Do you see this becoming a direct new revenue opportunity through new services, new technology that you're charging revenue, charging fees? Or is it the bigger opportunity really about extending the core franchise as market structure evolves?

We've already announced 23/5. So we've talked a little bit about that. For Calypso, we've talked about supporting tokenization, tokenized treasuries, stablecoins. And that is really interesting because Calypso's -- one of its strongest modules is collateral management. And in the world that we live in, collateral management has become so important. And for us to build on that strength by offering tokenized assets off the back of that, really positions us incredibly well with Calypso. Those are just a few short-term opportunities. Again, I talked about data, and even in the index franchise, we see opportunities there.

And then longer term, what we said at Investor Day is we see a $3 billion to $6 billion market opportunity, and we stand by that. And we're seeing some momentum across the board on the things I've just spoken about, whether it's accelerated settlement, freeing up capital. And the thing about tokenization, by the way, is it's taking a static asset and it's putting that asset in motion. And once you put that asset in motion, that's where Nasdaq really shines because, again, whether it's surveillance, allowing you to see where that asset is, how it's playing out in the market, Calypso, even Verafin on the payment rails, if you think about real time, and it's going over digital rails longer term and then, of course, as it comes to our market.

So I think shorter term, there's a series of opportunities. Longer term, we've talked about $3 billion to $6 billion, and that excites us because of the positioning we have across the board.

Let's shift gears and talk about the Financial Technology division. This has become an increasingly important part of the Nasdaq story. You've seen strong growth across AxiomSL, Calypso, Verafin, Surveillance, even the broader Capital Markets Technology business. So what would you say are the biggest drivers of durable growth today? And what would cause the fintech growth profile to move toward the higher end of your 10% to 14% medium-term range?

So let's start with Q1. We were able to share with investors a great Q1 where we grew 18%. We were really proud of that, and that was because of the strong pipeline we've generated, strong client engagement and continued desire to see Nasdaq as a trusted partner. And if I take it from the top, what's really unique about our Financial Technology division is across Capital Markets Tech, Regulatory Technology and Financial Crime, all of those solutions are category leaders in one way or another, which is really unique because we don't have one particular solution that stands out. All of our solutions in each of our categories are really standouts, and we're really proud of the performance each one of them has.

The other thing is each one of those solutions are mission-critical. So when we talk about the environment we're in, we are having conversations with our clients around how to run the bank and how to transform the bank. Our solutions serve both sides of the equation. So if you're thinking about what it means to run your bank or run an institution over the next 5 years, we're a trusted partner. If you're thinking about transformation over the next 5 years, we have mission-critical solutions for you.

And the 4 themes that come up in every conversation I have. And I have the privilege of going across the globe, talking to Tier 1s, FMIs, all the way down to community banks, and there's 4 themes that stick out. One is modernization transformation, and it means different things to different folks, whether it's cloud, AI or simply automation. The second is complexity. The world we live in where you have geoeconomic divergence, geopolitical divergence, regulatory divergence, reducing that complexity through automations and the tools that we provide and the solutions we provide are very important.

The third is just the pace and intensity of regulatory change. Just look at Basel III Endgame. There's a proposal out there. It looks like it's going to go through, actually presents a really interesting opportunity for Axiom now. So that is the pace and intensity of change around regulation, is a big opportunity. And then the last one is just the integration and adoption or adoption and integration of AI and cloud. And so being a market operator, what makes us unique, we have credibility the second we step into a client's premises because we're sharing our own blueprint, what we're doing with our own markets, how we consume the technology we're selling, that allows us to really go in and with empathy and understanding, talk about what it means to integrate and adopt these technologies. So it's been great.

And then the growth algorithm, we shared this on Investor Day. Our growth algorithm is obviously -- and we have a number of vectors here. New logos are about 20% of it. The other 80% cuts across the land and expand strategy we have, which is our upsell motion and our cross-sell motion. On our cross-sell motion, we talked about on Investor Day, having 43 cross-sells, a run rate of $45 million, and we are very confident that we can continue to meet our $100 million revenue run rate goal by the end of 2027. So we have a number of different ways that we can grow across, if you will, the spectrum.

Great. Maybe diving into Axiom and Calypso. Last year, there was a lot of discussion around integration, cloud migration, the elongated sales cycles. Where would you say we are today in that journey? What would you say is changing today in the client decision-making process? And how much of the opportunity ahead is about replacing legacy infrastructure versus expanding into new workflows, ones that Nasdaq embeds?

So we're just about -- we're going to come up on the 3-year mark of our acquisition of Adenza on November 1. We actually announced it, I think, on June 12. So it's just about 3 years from when we announced it. And we're proud of the way we've integrated those assets to become part -- an important part of the Nasdaq family, foundational to our Financial Technology division. Our clients have really embraced Nasdaq owning these assets. We have a right to own these assets. And our investment thesis when we bought them was that we can simply accelerate and amplify the strategy and the growth of these assets. And we've been able to do that, whether it's been by modernizing these assets and thinking about their cloud strategy, their AI strategy of these assets, opening up doors with clients that had not yet met because of the brand halo that we have.

And in terms of growth, there's -- it's really interesting. We have a tremendous opportunity as you look across the globe, in particular with Calypso, to go in where there aren't any solutions, where they're still using Excel spreadsheets or thinking about how to transform manual processes into automated processes across the globe. So we can convert operational spend into technology spend. That's a great opportunity for us on the Calypso side. And then on the Axiom side, there's 2 things to highlight there. One is we have a down market opportunity or a mid-market opportunity. It's an incredible platform. It's truly one-of-one in terms of how global and comprehensive it is. It's in 66 countries. We have a library of over 6,000 reports. We serve most of the Tier 1s. But now being able to package that solution and go downstream has been really interesting. And when we do that, we start to run into Verafin clients. And that's really interesting if you think about the cross-sell opportunity there.

And then the final one is with Axiom is AI and cloud. And Axiom is built on modern rails, has a great data management platform and our ability to think about how AI really powers Axiom for the next generation. We started to build out a suite of agents or agentic capabilities end-to-end from everything, from data discovery, to any question you might ask, to identify correlation analysis, to anomalies in your reporting and having a master agent empowering you, so your workflow is streamlined is incredibly interesting and attractive for our clients. And in some cases, it's what's propelling our clients from thinking about, "Let me go from on-prem to cloud" because we have AI capabilities. And by the way, we have managed service capabilities.

So AI just on its own is compelling. But when you think about some of our on-prem clients that we're moving as you asked that question, it really does, if you will, accelerate our cloud and managed services strategy as well.

Why don't we shift and talk about Verafin, which continues to be one of the fastest-growing parts of the Nasdaq portfolio? So can you update us on the opportunity across Tier 1 and Tier 2 banks? Where are you in the enterprise pipeline here? And how the product changes -- how the product changes as you move into larger and more complex institutions?

Definitely. And my voice is getting low because I was yelling last night at the TV. But so Verafin, we continue to view it as a mid-20s grower, again, it's really truly a one-of-one. And since the acquisition, we've been able to sign 22 enterprise clients. In 2025, we signed 9, so it's accelerating. We also announced a cross-sell deal after -- with the Tier 1 after Q1 of this year. So we're really proud of the way that Verafin has been able to grow and expand its footprint. Of course, we have the international expansion efforts. I talked a little bit about cross-sell and how it fits really nicely now with Axiom and Surveillance in terms of customer personas and the go-to-market motion that we have across all of our financial technology products.

And I think we continue to see Verafin's prospects in terms of who it serves and why it serves them as a growing opportunity. Because if I go back to always-on and you think about real-time payments and increasing fraud and the importance of addressing fraud and what a drain it is on the economy, not just here but across the globe, this is interesting. Every conversation, I go into a client and I talk about all of our Financial Technology solutions, and I spend 5 minutes and I walk through with a prospect or a new client, they'll always stop me on Verafin and say, "Could you just talk about that again? How does that work? And I talk about our consortium data lake. I talk about the fact that we have 2,800 clients, 700 million accounts and how we do it and how it's cloud native and in fact, AI native. And really, the opportunity for Verafin continues to be large and global and one that we're really focused on in terms of growing upstream and then taking them into new markets.

And given Verafin's cloud-native architecture plus the consortium data set that it has, how are you embedding agentic AI into the workflow? What have you learned so far from some of the early usage and adoption that you're seeing? And what are some of the biggest client benefits?

So good question. So we have 2 agents that are live now on Verafin, and we spoke about this on Investor Day. We have the sanctions agent and an enhanced due diligence agent. And we're seeing incredible productivity gains that our clients are capturing value. And we actually -- when we go to clients, we show them the ROI calculator. We have an ROI calculator for clients, which is incredibly compelling and tangible in terms of what we're providing clients in terms of value. And then it allows us to capture some of that value and share in that value creation. And then off the back of that, there are 6 more agents that we have on our product road maps. So there's a robust product road map.

Our agents are being well received. Since Investor Day, we now have 500 clients on it, which would be a 40% increase just since Investor Day. So we're seeing real traction, uptick in our agentic workforce. We're seeing real productivity gains, real value that we're able to capture for our clients. And therefore, over the long run, I think there's a tremendous amount of value we'll be able to capture off that as well.

And AI touches many parts of the Nasdaq organization. So talk about where AI is driving some of the most tangible benefits so far and what you're seeing in terms of client demand, cost efficiency, how do you think about creating new products or even revenue streams over time with AI?

So I'll pick a couple. And we think about AI as on the business and in the product. On the business is focused on engineering and, what we call, client experience, which would otherwise be thought about as client success, professional services and client support. Just on the business for a second, we are seeing productivity gains across the entire product development life cycle.

We have developed agents and the master agents. So a series of agents, for example, for our Surveillance solution where everything from business requirements to turning that into technical, to QA, to be examining the results of QA and then that full life cycle of working through any exceptions, we're starting to build all that out. We have 4 agents in the Surveillance PDLC, we'll have 12 when we're done with it. And that just shows you the kind of productivity gains we can have across Surveillance. And what will that do is it's not just productivity, very importantly, it allows us to drain our backfill faster, which means we can deliver to clients faster. And it improves the quality of the software we're able to deliver, really, really important.

On the client success side or client experience side, we are deflecting tickets. So we're putting agents in place that allow us to address client questions, Level 1, Level 2, Level 3 type of questions that we'll get from clients. There's always a human in the loop or on the loop monitoring this. But over time, we think there's an ability to truncate the period of time between a client question and our ability to address that and then obviously, to scale that capability as we think about our platforms and as we think about our growth profile.

In the product, just a few examples, one in Surveillance, we launched Calibration Copilot. So when you set up alerts -- it's a little bit of a trial and error. When you set up your alerts, we now set up an agent that allows you to calibrate your alerts. So it's not a trial and error. And there's, if you will, a collective intelligence component to it and a compounding intelligence component to it because we're taking information from all of our surveillance clients to inform this agent, which reduces the amount of time to calibrate your alerts, and there's 2 things that come out of it. One is you have less false positives. Two is you're more accurate in identifying areas of market abuse.

Why is that important? Because when you're calibrating these alerts, your regulators may knock on your door and say, "Hey, you have all these alerts. Why do you have all these alerts?" And then you need to hire staff to look into all of these alerts. And if there -- if it's a 90% false positive rate, that's a tremendous amount of overhead on a bank, and your bank and every other bank would experience that. And then you think about that in the context of 23/5 markets. Think about that in the context of perpetual futures. Think about that in the context of prediction markets. And this is just like an overflow of how do I manage all of this? I need a surveillance solution, a market abuse solution that is powered through AI. So we're really, really excited about that.

And maybe the only other one is, and I kind of talked about it before, what we're doing with Axiom, really proud of that. I think, again, that's a full suite of agents, end-to-end workflow, managing that workflow for clients. On Calypso, just because I haven't mentioned that, one particular agent we've launched that has been very popular with our clients is Settle Guard. So it's a settlement failure predictor agent. So we'll take data, public data and some unique data and allow our clients to understand the potential for settlement failures in bilateral transactions and get ahead of that. And think about how important that is in a world where you're trying to manage collateral where settlement failure is a real cost to the business and being able to get in front of that, especially in the OTC bilateral world, is of value to our clients.

Great. Well, I'm afraid, with that, we're out of time. Please join me in thanking Tal Cohen. Thank you.

Thank you. Appreciate you having me.

Thank you.

Good to see you.

Yes. Bye.

All right. Next up, it's my pleasure to introduce Tal Cohen, President of Nasdaq. Tal leads the Market Services and Financial Technology divisions at Nasdaq. He's responsible for North American and European Market Services businesses as well. Also the company's portfolio of marketplace technology surveillance, risk management, regulatory reporting solutions. One of the central voices behind Nasdaq's always-on markets vision 24/7 trading, big topic here at this conference. So Tal, thanks so much for joining us.

Yes. Thanks for having me.

So I'll start off with a question on perps. Big news on Friday. CFTC approved Kalshi's Bitcoin perpetual futures contract to put some pressure on the exchange names here recently. So with perps seemingly on a path to becoming onshore in other asset classes, how is Nasdaq thinking about this? Is it an opportunity? Is it a threat? Is this overblown? What's your take?

Yes. And it's great going after David and hearing what he had to say on perps. So I think what came out of the CFTC, folks construed that and extrapolated that and said, okay, if you can do that for Bitcoin, maybe they'll provide approvals for equity-linked products. And I think that's the extrapolation that folks are making. And there's a couple of points I'd make there.

One is from a Nasdaq perspective, when we first looked at it, we were kind of surprised at the reaction you just talked about because we don't think it has an impact on our equities or options business, and I'll describe why. The first is options have great utility. It's hedging, risk management, income generation and obviously, you can express sentiment with options. And when we look at perps and our understanding of it, it's more kind of a linear exposure product. And you heard about the funding rate and you heard some of the things and some of the use cases for perps.

The second is, and this is an important one, is when we think about our index options franchise, we've invested in that to curate an ecosystem of institutional and retail investors. And as a result, we have great liquidity, great market depth, great market quality. And that's hard to replicate from a price discovery perspective when we continue to invest in our index options franchise.

And the third is, I just -- I would say that it's centrally cleared, it's scaled, it's well regulated, and it has strong risk management around it. So when you think about retail participation, we want retail and institutions to be in our markets for the long run, and we want that experience to be positive. If you take everything I just said in terms of the utility of the product, the scale that we have in that product, that product being essentially cleared and the economics that we have around it, it's pretty compelling.

And then I just would garner to say is like we're already pretty competitive with the futures market. So like Nasdaq's products compete with futures products that are highly levered, 13 to 17x leverage on the minis on the futures. So we're already in a competitive environment. And then again, I think these products are more akin in the way David was describing it to like a swap or CFD and maybe some off-exchange products that we see today.

The other thing I just want to weigh in on is just a process, and this is important to Nasdaq and I think to others as well. You need to balance innovation with a good regulatory process for things that are new and novel and complex. And what I mean by that, it needs to be an open collaborative industry consultation that whether you're the SEC or the CFTC, we want to see you engage in because when it's new and novel, we think the input from the industry is going to lead to better outcomes for investors. It's going to lead to better outcomes for issuers, investors and the markets in general. So that is one thing around the process, I would note.

And then the third is just in terms of just the opportunity. It's a massive opportunity for Nasdaq in that regulators are open for business. And they're willing to have conversations around innovation. So we're moving our markets to 23/5 in equities. We're extending trading hours and options. We're doing binary index options on the tokenization front. We got our filing approved. We announced the Nasdaq equity token. So we're really excited. We're embracing innovation. But at the same time, we're trying to do it in a responsible way that generates outcomes for investors and issuers that not only in the short term, but in the long run, look positive.

Maybe just to follow up on that. Something Terry Duffy has talked about is the leverage in perps and worries about the U.S. importing that leverage structure that you see in Europe and Asia into the U.S. and the stress that, that could put on U.S. capital markets and equity markets. Is that a concern to you at all? Or do you think that will be -- should be something that's addressed by regulators as we kind of go down this path?

That's why we have to have the open consultation process, which is there is -- and I think Terry spoke about this yesterday, and I've heard us speak about it more generally, which is there's leverage in the system today, whether it's 5x, 10x, 15x, but it isn't 100x, 200x. And people understand the products they're in and some of these leveraged products, and you heard about the funding rate and how that works, and that's an arbitrage mechanism, but it can also be used for a squeeze.

So it has to be an open consultation process. People have to understand that. And retail, in particular, when they're using these products as tactical products, we want to make sure the retail understands what they're getting into and what the auto liquidation mechanism that works on pro franchises, it's really important to understand how that works when you're at 100x leverage.

Okay. All right. So moving on, another very timely announcement recently on May 1, you implemented meaningful changes to the Nasdaq 100 methodology. You added the fast entry rule that lets top 40 IPOs into the index within 15 trading days. Can you just talk about what went into the decision to make these changes now? And is this primarily about index integrity or about competing more aggressively for the IPO listings in the ETF ecosystem?

Yes, great question. So just a context, because you asked me how we came to this decision. This process started for us in the fall of 2025, and we opened up a consultation process with the industry. So it was open and transparent and the methodology of the index, most importantly, is open and transparent. So we engaged the industry had a consultation process, and we actually took in their input and made some changes as a result of that, and I'll talk about what those were.

The second thing is we understood that other indexers were updating or modernizing their methodologies. And the reason was we all saw this, and it's not just this year, we've seen this coming for the better part of a year or 2 is market dynamics have changed. Companies are staying private longer, IPOs, you have larger companies with smaller floats. So market dynamics are just changing and evolving. So what do we want to do about that?

And then the third is, for those that might recall, we had some large switches last year that were Nasdaq 100 eligible. And then we also anticipated some of the larger IPOs. So all of that kind of went into the decision-making, and that's the context setting for the decisions we made. So the changes we made, and I want to talk about what it was and what it is. The first is we had an annual rebalance, and we went to a quarterly rebalance. Why did we do that? Because companies could be outside of our index for the better part of a year. If we didn't do that. So think about the great companies that are coming into our market being out of an index up to a year and not being able to access that pool of capital that is becoming more and more prevalent and important and think about investors' preferences on that.

The second, and you mentioned the free float adjustment, we had a free float adjustment that worked like this prior, where if you had 10% of your equity free float, we showed you at 100% market cap. That's how it worked. There's a minimum of 10%. And once you cross 10%, we showed you at 100%. What we've done is actually made it more in line with the liquidity in the market. So I think it's much more elegant with how it matches up against liquidity where the example is now if you have 5% of your equity free floating and say that represents $25 billion, we'll put a 3x multiple on that. So now we represent you at $75 billion, but not at your market cap. And so that's much more tied to what the liquidity and the underlying markets are. And once you hit 33%, which is much higher than the 10%, then we reflect you at 100%, right? So we do like a 3x on the free float up to 33% and at 33%, you go to 100%.

So if you think about it, it actually lines up with the liquidity and the trading in the market. And that was one of the suggestions. And by the way, great suggestions from the committee that we had. We said, should it be 5x committee and consultation process, they said, no, it should be 3. So we implemented that.

And then the last one is just the fast entry, the fast track rule. The way that works is really simple. If you're a top 40 Nasdaq company, so Nasdaq-listed nonfinancial company, and that means your market cap is about $120 billion, so a pretty big company. If you are, we're going to fast track you. And the reason we're doing that is if you have a company that large, investors and issuers, the preference there was to show it within the index and not wait, for example, up to a year.

And so we've done those 3 changes based on the consultation process. It's been generally well received, but there's been a lot of debate about what this means with respect to whether it's like SpaceX or other incoming IPOs. So we've just been really open about here's what we've done, here's why we think it benefits the markets. Here's how we think it plays out for investors. Here's the conversations we've had for issuers. But it isn't about an issuer. It's about changing market dynamics that we and other indexers have noticed over the last 2 to 3 years and anybody who's been in the market is seeing the same dynamic we have.

Sure. Sure. Zooming out, the macro picture this year has been volatile, but it seems recently to be trending in a more favorable direction. Capital markets activity seems to be picking up. From your seat overseeing financial technology and market services, what is the state of those businesses today? And how would you characterize the tone of conversations with issuers, clients, market participants?

Yes, there's a lot there. So just on the macro side for our markets, there's 4 things. There's corporate earnings, very constructive. Obviously, AI is a backdrop. The regulatory environment, constructive and retail engagement is high. So all of that has been really constructive as a buildup into the markets. And volatility has been generally well behaved. I mean there's been volatility intraday and in the markets, but if you're looking at the VIX as an indicator of that, it's been pretty well behaved. So that has been a really good backdrop.

And then from a market perspective, we're generating alpha in a high beta environment. I love our competitive positioning. We continue to invest in our markets, whether it's in the technology, the service side, what we offer in terms of features and functionality, I really love our competitive positioning, both in options and equities, and that's been showcased in whether it's like our revenue capture or our market share or just our engagement with our clients, which is most important.

Going to the financial technology side, ignoring just the macro backdrop we just talked about, there's 3 or 4 trends that I hear. So we have 3,800 clients across 6 continents. Tier 1 all the way to your smallest community banks. And let me share with you what they're telling us every single day we talk to them, whether it's in like Latin America, Southeast Asia.

There's 3 things going on in the environment that is top of mind to them. One is modernization transformation. And those words mean different things to different people, but everybody is thinking about modernization and transformation, whether it's going to the cloud, adopting new technologies like AI or simply automation.

The second is complexity. The increasing complexity in the global landscape where you have divergence, geoeconomic divergence, geopolitical divergence, regulatory divergence, complexity is increasing and our customers need solutions to help them manage that.

The third is just managing risk. If you're talking about like an always-on world, 24/7 with automation, the more granular, the more real time you can manage your risk, the more successful you can be in the businesses you run. That is an obvious statement, but our clients are struggling to figure out how to do that. And our solutions are unique in that they're all mission-critical solutions. They're both run the bank and change the bank solutions. And that makes us really, really unique in how we can come in and have those conversations.

So as a result of that, customer engagement has been great. It is -- the sales cycles have been strong. And you saw that in the first quarter, where we had 18% growth in financial technology. So really nothing has changed there, and we feel really good again about our positioning product by product.

Sure. So I want to double-click on always-on markets at Investor Day, you laid out kind of the vision for that. Adena, I think last year talked about 23/5 targeting that for 2026, back half of 2026. You spoke about it at Investor Day, too. But where are you today on that rollout? And when do you expect Nasdaq to go live with extended hours trading?

Yes. And I can't remember who coined always-on, but I feel like we were really early to the concept of always on. And so always-on has a few defining features in the innovation economy. And that's what you said. We think about 23/5 accelerated settlement, the mobility and the velocity of capital and collateral throughout the system and faster movement of money in securities. All of those things kind of come to end tokenization, of course, come together to form always-on.

And a couple of things we're doing. One is -- at the ground level, we have on our fintech side, an exciting opportunity with Calypso, which is a treasury and capital management or collateral solution. We serve 24 central banks. We serve a number of Tier 2s, Tier 3s and some Tier 1s. And everybody is talking to us about collateral management and optimizing for that in a 24/7, if you will, tokenized digital asset world. And so we have a real opportunity across collateral management. 23/5, we've announced in December 6 of this year. We're taking our equities markets to 23/5. We're extending trading hours in our options market, and then we have the approval for tokenization.

And on top of all that, what we're seeing is demand for solutions like surveillance. So as we go to 24/7, a lot of clients are coming to us and say, well, we need to survey the markets 24/7, how do we do that? From a trading perspective, because we're taking our markets to 23.5 and some of our markets to 24/7 ultimately, a lot of our market technology clients are coming to us and saying, you're highly regulated, you've taken your own technology there. How can you help us? And we service 130 institutions, exchanges and regulators across the globe. So it's a tremendous opportunity for us.

So when you combine all of that, always on, really, there's a flywheel with that across all of our businesses, including the businesses that I'm not part of, which is the data business and the index business.

Yes. So switching gears to the fintech business. The One Nasdaq cross-sell strategy, another term, I think you obviously coined was tracking ahead of plan last year. Pipeline mix is at about 15% and you're targeting $100 million of cross-sell revenues by 2027. So could you help us get a better sense for how that's come together? I think at Investor Day, you said you were already at $45 million there. And where are you seeing the most traction across Eclipse, Calypso, AxiomSL and the others?

Yes, great question. So on Investor Day, we talked about achieving that $100 million target. We are confident that we're on track to do that. And since then, we've seen real uptake, and I'll talk about that in a second. So the buildup to that is on Investor Day, as you said, we talked about the $45 million run rate, 43 clients signed. Since then, we also announced for Verafin, we had a Tier 1 bank. We shared that with the investment community. That was very well received. And our pipeline continues to showcase above 15% of our pipeline is cross-sell, and we've seen that quarter-over-quarter. So that's been a consistent trend, and it's building. So that gives us the confidence that we can achieve that.

In terms of our go-to-market strategy, where we've seen the real uptake is in a couple of places. One is Verafin with Tier 1 banks, global expansion, that's been really exciting for us to see. Two is, as Axiom, which is our regulatory compliance and reporting solution, goes down market, we're seeing real synergies with Verafin, which is really, really interesting, and that is opening up more discussions for us. And then we have Calypso and our trading and post-trade platforms. So we're able to go into financial market infrastructure operators and actually provide them with post-trade solutions for both exchange clearing and OTC clearing and help them with cross-margining and cross-collateralization. So that's been a door opener for us.

And then we have new products like the intelligence platform that we developed, which is really -- it's a data and analytics platform that's very, very modern. And when we go into a lot of clients and we're looking to replace a vendor, they'll say to us, do you have a data management solution? I can't just rip out my trade management solution. I need to have a data solution under that. Do you have that for us? We have that now. So the intelligence platform plus Calypso has formed a really, really nice, if you will, complementary set of capabilities for us.

And then on the surveillance side, I talked a little bit about surveillance and always on, but surveillance and trading have always gone together, and that's been a strong cross-sell opportunity for us. So we have a number of go-to-markets that we implement every quarter. We've been pretty successful. Customer reception has been strong. I just kind of noted a few there, and I think we'll continue to build on that. But it's really important to note one thing, which is that's just one part of our entire revenue growth algorithm. We have upsells, new logos. All of that comes together in terms of our revenue growth algorithm.

Sure. So I want to ask about AI. At Investor Day, you also announced a $100 million efficiency target that you were expecting to receive. I think AI had a lot to do with that. So from your seat, where are you actually getting operating leverage from AI today? And where do you think the next kind of inflection or acceleration is going to be in that area?

So we talk about AI in 2 areas. One is in the product. The second is on the business, and I think that's what you're referring to. In the product, let me just start there because we're seeing great traction with our clients there. A couple of highlights. Verafin since Investor Day now has 500 clients using its agentic workforce. That's up 40% since Investor Day. That's incredible. We've seen Axiom, which has a suite of agentic capabilities from Reg-Copilot to agents to workflow management, all of those, and we call it Reg Investigator, Reg Simplify, Reg Navigator, we have names for it. It's a workforce, if you will. We've seen great traction there. Because we're empowering our clients to take control of regulatory reporting and think just about the pace and intensity of regulatory change and having an end-to-end solution. It's also pushing more discussions on cloud and managed services for us. So it's not just what AI does for us. It's what AI does for us from a perspective of cloud and managed services.

And the third one to note is on surveillance. We recently launched what we call Calibration Copilot, which is basically how you set your alerts how do you calibrate your alerts. And what we're doing there is there's a collective intelligence or a compounding intelligence piece to it where across our entire client base, we serve most Tier 1s, we can share with you how to reduce false positive, be more accurate about your detections and help you instead of like that trial and error that most people go through around how do I set my alerts, we can actually use AI to help you set it correctly earlier and manage that through the process. Think about what that does for your conversations with regulators and your clients.

So all of that's been really good. On the business, because you just mentioned that, we have the $100 million run rate expense target for the end of 2027. This is about transforming Nasdaq from an engineering perspective and a client success perspective. Obviously, we have that in how in our coding, in our QA process, the whole PDLC process. If I could take you through it for one of our products, we have a, if you will, a collection of agents from business requirements all the way through QA that we've developed for one of our products, surveillance. And you kind of see the string of agents that are coordinated and orchestrated through a master agent. So we got a master agent up top, and we have all of these individual agents of like business requirements, QA, testing, all the way through the process that allows us to enhance the productivity of our developers.

But more importantly, it generates higher quality code and our cycle times have come down. So we're able to get into that backlog that everybody has, all of our products have a backlog. We're able to basically burn through that backlog faster, deliver higher quality code and have our engineers and our client success teams focus on higher-value activities. And we're kind of stringing that along through all of our products. So that's just a great example of how we're thinking about it across Nasdaq and how that really transform us beyond just the $100 million efficiency, there needs to be a benefit for you all.

All right. So I want to end on a big picture question. I think the last 10 years or so for Nasdaq, there's been a lot of focus on the non-exchange business. I think going forward, the Market Services business, there's a lot of exciting things going on. There's a lot of tailwinds for volumes. You have the Pattern Day trading rule today going away. You have AI trading agents. You have all these big IPOs that people think could boost option volumes by upwards of 10%. So -- as we move in that direction, 24/7 trading, tokenization, all the other things I mentioned, do you think market services will become a more meaningful driver of growth for Nasdaq in the next 10 years?

Yes. I'm not independent on that question. I'm a markets guy. So the markets are always going to be Nasdaq's foundational business. It gives us the credibility to go into financial technology and talk to our clients about their modernization efforts. So if you're a highly regulated institution that's trying to modernize, do you want to talk to somebody who just sells software or somebody that actually uses that software is highly regulated and is going on that journey as well. And that is incredible -- that establishes credibility when you walk in the door. And that's really important to us. And the foundational business is growing. It's been a great business for us. We love that business. We love it during volatile times. We love it during nonvolatile times because we kind of structured that business to be successful in different market environments.

And what I would say to you is we're investing in that business. That's the important thing to note is for 24/7, I'll give you one example we're really excited about. Some people might have heard me speak about this. We have a digital twin now that we've stood up, which is basically a replica of our production environment that we spin up through AI, and we spin it up in the cloud. We designed it through AI, and it's an exact replica of our trading environment.

What makes it special is we place agents on top of that. We give the agents personas. You are a retail broker, you are a high-frequency trader, you are a global bank, you are X, Y, Z. And then we have them inject orders into this environment. And so we're able to replicate extreme market conditions, raise conditions, edge conditions much faster. Why is that important? In a 24/7 world where if you have an issue, you don't have the downtime to actually remedy that issue or you need to stop the market, and that's a big deal anytime you stop a market or pause a market.

So our ability to have a much more robust simulation environment that's cost effective, that allows us to replicate all these different conditions, use AI for that and then also be able to offer that as a product through financial technology, that's the connective tissue right there for you. Then we can go to our clients and say, we can offer you this. And that's an incredible game changer for us in the way that we kind of communicate with our clients. So that is why that foundational business is so powerful and so important to us. And that's just one simple example of how we're using AI in our foundational businesses to drive a flywheel across our greater businesses.

All right. Well, I think we're out of time. But Tal, thanks so much for joining us.

Thank you. Appreciate it.

Good morning, everyone. Why don't we go ahead and get started here. My name is Jeff Schmitt. I cover wealth management and capital market stocks here at William Blair.

I'd like to introduce NASDAQ, which has really transitioned into more of a technology company through the years with a much kind of better growth profile. We're pleased to have Adena Friedman here, who's the Chair and CEO, to discuss the business. And of course, before we begin, please go to our website williamblair.com, for a full list of disclosures. But with that, I'll open up to Adena.

All right. We're going to talk a little bit about Nasdaq today. I have a lot of slides. So we're going to fly a little bit, but I'm looking forward to having a great conversation with you this morning.

Fortunately, we did have an Investor Day in February. So a lot of these slides come from the Investor Day deck. So feel free to peruse the complete presentation that's on our website. But I want to talk a little bit about how we form our strategy and what is that -- how has that resulted in great results for us and also kind of reposition Nasdaq for the future.

So the first thing we do when we develop our strategy, and we go through this process every single year is we evaluate what are the trends that are going to define our industry over the next decade. And of course, we don't actually know, but we really do try to look out in time and say what are those durable trends that are redefining our sector, redefining our clients' experience and what technology trends are really coming in to redefine the business.

And over time, these are 4 durable trends that we've been re-underwriting every year that I've been the CEO that really kind of drive and form the basis of our strategy. Data is the new fuel to the industry and the economy. You may know that I ran the data business at Nasdaq for 9 years early in my career. So data is near and dear to my heart, but also we have used data as a foundation for every decision we've made.

The harnessing the power of technology. Technology is an unstoppable force, and it includes that unstoppable force in our industry. And because our industry is so data dependent, it means that technology comes into our industry very, very quickly. We tend to be a leading industry in adopting and adapting to new technologies. And the technologies that we've been focused on very consistently over the last 9 years has been the power of cloud, AI and blockchain. And as we look forward, we also would say that we're doing a lot of research now on what quantum computing and quantum networking can also deliver to the industry.

We also then have focused on the connectivity of the financial services, financial system. While we have -- we've been looking at all these technologies that are coming in, the globalization of the clientele, the rise of retail investing from a global perspective. And what we're seeing is that the connectivity and the technology that allows for the capital markets to be more global, more connected than ever with a broader investor base and more accessible to investors all over the world. That gives rise to new asset classes and new instruments that are coming in as well as the notion of always-on markets, which I'll talk about.

And then lastly, the growing risk and complexity of everything, but certainly in the industry and how our industry processes risk and complexity, how do we help them as a strategic partner in managing that risk and complexity in new ways, leveraging that great technology that's available to us.

So we have come to 3 pillars of our strategy. The first is to architect the world's most modern markets. We leverage technology, and we are constantly innovating in our technology to be the best market operator in the world, here in the United States across our equities and options markets in the Nordics, where we own and operate almost all the markets in the Nordics. But also we provide technology, and we power 130 markets and regulators around the world with our technology. And that is -- and so therefore, we are really the player and the provider that's really driving the industry forward in how technology can transform markets.

We also are powering the innovation economy. And that, of course, is we are very fortunate to have an incredible group and network of listed companies that come to Nasdaq, and those companies are the greatest innovators of our day, really redefining industry, redefining the economy. But we also -- we want to make those companies accessible to billions of investors. So we have a large and scaled and growing index business with over $900 billion of assets under management today tied to indexes that are underpinned by our listed companies. And we also provide a whole suite of solutions that allow corporates and investors to connect better together to make smarter asset allocation decisions through investment and to build out and manage their IR programs more successfully with our IR services.

And then the third pillar is building trust in the financial system. We believe very much that the pillar -- if we're thinking about the 3 key components of running a successful market in a durable market in a fair market, it's going to be liquidity, transparency and integrity. So we have really dedicated our time and energy and our technology towards driving that integrity across our markets, but we now also provide surveillance technology, regulatory reporting and anti-financial crime technology to hundreds or actually thousands of banks all over the world. And we're really proud of the fact that we can be that partner to really help our clients really manage risk and integrity across the financial system.

So what has that done to our business? Well, over the last 5 years, we've gone from $2.9 billion of revenue to $5.2 billion of revenue with a 13% revenue CAGR and a 14% ARR CAGR over that period of time. We've also really recalibrated our divisions. So more and more of our revenue is coming from more, I would say, stable and steady revenue from our solutions businesses with our trading business at 23% of our overall revenue base. Now of course, trading has also been a great growth pillar for us, but we have really focused on making sure we have predictable revenue streams to drive our business forward.

And as I said, we've had really strong revenue performance as well as our solutions revenue, that's everything other than our trading revenue has had 16% CAGR, and we've had a free cash flow CAGR of 17%. And our EPS CAGR of 11% over 5 years, but in recent years in 2025 and in the first quarter '26, it surpassed 20% as we've continued to really scale up and scale out our platform. And we're really pleased with the ongoing performance of our business and how we've been able to accelerate growth and overall performance.

And one of the great things about our business, it is a cash flow machine. So we've delivered $2.2 billion of cash flow in 2025 with a 17% cash flow CAGR and we have a 109% cash flow conversion within the company. So it's a relatively capital-light, high growth, high EPS and high cash flow business. And a lot of the software suite and software investors today do use this notion of the Rule of 40 to evaluate the quality of companies that are in the technology sector.

And when we look at Nasdaq, in 2025, we were a Rule of 70 company. When we also look at it in comparison to the S&P 500, there are only -- we're one of only 18 companies in the S&P 500 that can say that they're greater than a Rule of 60. So we are really -- we feel really proud of our outstanding financial performance that really is coming on the back of really delivering great things and great capabilities and great returns for our clients.

So now let's turn to our business divisions. As I talked about our 3 key pillars, we're almost organized around those pillars within our divisions. There's a little bit of overlap. But we have Market Services, which is our trading businesses, Capital Access Platforms, which serves corporates and investors; and then Financial Technology, which serves banks, brokers, regulators and exchanges. And we have some powerful flywheels that we have that cut across our divisions to deliver outcomes for our clients.

The first of which is our listings franchise and how that really kind of creates a flywheel across our trading and index businesses as well as then always-on markets as we move to modernize markets even further with always-on trading and how that's going to deliver new capabilities and growth across, frankly, all parts of our business, including index and our Fintech division.

And then these mission-critical solutions that we do deliver for our clientele, we did an acquisition in 2023 to support the growth of our fintech solutions. And we committed at that time to have $100 million of cross-sells in terms of cross-sell run rate revenue by the end of 2027. And at our Investor Day, we did say that we're at $45 million of that $100 million to date. So we're well underway in showing the power of bringing those mission-critical solutions together into a powerful platform.

So if we turn to our Market Services division at a glance, we make -- in 2025, we delivered $1.2 billion of revenue and had very strong growth in this business. And you can see over a 5-year period, it has had a 6% revenue CAGR. But one of the things that we really focused on accelerated in recent years was double-digit growth in 2025 and in the first quarter of 2026. We really focus long and hard on, number one, being the best at what we do. The most deterministic, the lowest latency, the most resilient, the highest capacity, and we deliver that at enormous scale.

We also really focus from a business perspective on how we develop long-term relationships with our trading clientele. We want to have -- we match market share with capture. We really focus on how are we bringing in sustainable order flow that is really value-added to our markets that can be -- that can bring in others that's kind of liquidity begets liquidity notion, but we don't chase share that we don't think is durable. So we really do focus on durable relationships, durable order flow and driving a capture rate that is best-in-class in our industry, including having a 70% higher capture rate in our equities business than our closest competitor.

So why is that? What is driving our ability to deliver that? Well our listings franchise. And we will talk a little bit more about the listings flywheel in a minute. But -- that listing franchise, we now are over half of industry volume is Nasdaq-listed companies. And for companies that list on Nasdaq, we have higher market share during the day. We have a relationship with them on the open and close and delivering the opening closing cross. And we think that it is also because of the quality of our markets, and we have great data to support that we have just an exceptional quality of our markets compared to our peers that, that, of course, then drives more companies to list on Nasdaq. So it's a great listing flywheel.

One really exciting thing that's happened this year is that as of Investor Day, we had higher market cap of our listed companies that are U.S. domiciled companies than our competitor down the street. But as of 2 weeks ago, we now have crossed over and we have more market cap listed on Nasdaq than our closest competitor has in the world. So we are very, very excited. I've been at Nasdaq for 33 years. So I can tell you that this is a big mark -- this is a big mark for us. So we're very excited about the fact that the listings and the companies that are shaping the future of the economy are partnered with Nasdaq.

As we look forward in our markets business, we are extremely focused on this notion of always-on markets. On December 6, we will be launching 23/5 trading on the Nasdaq Stock Market. Yes, we will still have a U.S. session and open at 9:30 and a close at 4:00. But then we will start a global session. And that global session will run for over the evening. There will be a 1-hour break between 8 and 9. But otherwise, it will be a continuous market for the global session.

The idea is today, outside of U.S. market hours, about a little over 10% of the trading is occurring outside of U.S. market hours. It's just occurring in the dark. So we want to bring it into the light. We want to introduce guardrails. We want to introduce critical infrastructure to make it so that this market can evolve and expand over time.

But by doing that, it also parlays to the benefit of other parts of our ecosystem, including our surveillance technology, our trade infrastructure technology called Calypso and Collateral Management, our index business and demand from international investors for that as well as the need for our corporate solutions, the need for corporates and investors to connect even better together.

So speaking of corporates and investors, I will talk for a minute about our Capital Access Platforms business -- check the time. So Capital Access Platforms is -- consists of our listings, our market data, our index business and some analytics solutions that really support corporates and investors in managing their lives in the public markets and the private markets. We had $2.1 billion of revenue, and our CAGR over the last 5 years has been 7% with a double-digit CAGR -- double-digit growth in 2025 and into 2026. And you can see that what we really focus on is also a very strong margin in this business. We've had an 800 basis point improvement in our margin in the last 5 years.

When we think about what's in this division, we have a suite of capabilities that I mentioned across the listings, Corporate Solutions, our indexes and our market data. And when we think about the flywheel of the innovation economy and how our -- this capital access platform is really designed to really power that innovation economy, we have these deep corporate relationships. We then deliver very interesting and thematic indexes that really underpin the innovation economy and other investor outcomes that people are looking for, and we make those globally accessible to billions of people around the world.

We leverage our gold standard data to also allow our clients to make smarter asset allocation decisions, get access to unique alternative data that might power their investment decisions and trading outcomes and make sure that we deliver unique IP in terms of helping corporates understand who are their investors, why are they changing, who should they target, but also helping investors look at and asset owners understand how should I think about allocating my assets to different asset managers, both in the public and private markets. And it's a very exciting and interesting flywheel has developed.

We also are bringing AI across our franchise, including in the CAP division. In eVestment, we have delivered this AI-ready data set that our clients are using to really, I would say, modernize their data management inside their own organizations within the asset managers. And what we've heard is that the data that we're delivering is actually 70% more token efficient as you're bringing this data into your organizations to manage your investment management decisions.

We also have IR Insights. 74% of our clients are using our AI-driven modules to be smarter about how they communicate with investors on things like sustainability, but how they reach investors and target investors. We also have Boardvantage, which is a board portal tool and 51% of our clients are leveraging board summarization capabilities and other AI features in that solution. And then in index, we're using AI to really drive index creation in more unique and more innovative ways and be able to accelerate our ability to bring new products to market.

Moving to financial technology. We have $1.9 billion of revenue there. We've had 11% adjusted growth year-over-year. And this is a newer division. So this division, many of the assets in the division did not exist in 2020. So we do not give you the 5-year view, but the 2-year view has been really, really substantial growth across everything in that division.

We have 3 subdivisions: Regulatory Tech, which is Regulatory Reporting and Surveillance. We have Capital Markets tech, which is Market Technology, giving our technology to other exchanges and regulators as well as Trade Management Services, which is connectivity and other services to support our markets. And then Calypso is a trade infrastructure technology suite.

And then we have Anti-Financial Crime with our Verafin solution and all of which have really strong growth vectors and a large clientele. We serve 3,800 clients around the world, and we're really proud of that. We have 2,800 clients in the United States leveraging our Verafin Anti-Financial Crime solution. And I bring that up because of the fact that it is an AI-ready. It's actually always been an AI-driven product, but it has been -- we've been able to amplify that tremendously since the dawn of Gen AI. So in our Verafin product, we are allowed in the United States to bring data together across banks to manage crime better on their behalf as a third-party provider.

So across 2,800 banks, we process over 1 billion up to 1.5 billion transactions a week where we can look at payor and payee data. We look at specific topologies of criminal behavior to make sure that we can route out criminal actors more effectively and efficiently, take down false positives and find more fraud and make sure that their AML programs are more effective.

Now with Gen AI, we're able to automate massive amounts of workflow for those clients so that they -- once they go from an alert to a regulatory report, that entire process can be automated. And we're working really, really well within -- with our clients to develop and deploy these at speed to really automate that part of the AML -- and I'm sorry, AFC experience for our clients.

With AxiomSL, we're using this to make sure that we're being much smarter in thinking about regulation that's coming out and how it's developing. We're also on the business doing a reg-to-code implementation of AI within our teams to be able to manage changes in regulation more effectively, and we have a whole suite of AI tools. Calypso, all about risk management. Can both algorithmic and Gen AI, can we manage risk more effectively and efficiently, collateral management being more efficient. And that just unlocks liquidity back into the financial system. And then, of course, surveillance is also a perfect use case for AI as we look for market manipulation inside our trading and other criminal behaviors inside of trading rooms and inside of markets around the world.

So I'm sure you guys are going to talk about AI all day, but I will say that we thought a lot about our platform and its readiness for the AI era. And we focus on 4 key assets inside our organization: We have our embedded client community, we have our gold standard data, we have our engineering excellence, and we have integrated client solutions. So let's start with our community. We serve 10,000 corporates, 5,000 institutional investors, 3,800 financial institutions and 135 markets and regulators around the world with our solutions. So it's a very scaled community that we're serving.

And when we apply gold standard data and we think about how that data, if we can bring it together effectively, we can deliver more value within our solutions and across our solutions to our clients. It's extremely exciting to think about the power of our data. We have built because we've been cloud-first for the last 12 years, we have moved every part of our infrastructure to cloud and our client-facing solutions into a cloud-native state. So we're either fully deployed in cloud or we're deploying our clients in cloud today. That allows us to have access and embedded data that delivers better value. So I mentioned in Verafin, eVestment is a similar one. It's a network effect product that -- where asset managers put their data in to make it so that they can expose themselves more effectively to asset owners and asset owners bring data in to make it so that they can make smarter asset allocation decisions.

In Calypso and in AxiomSL, we now are cloud native and how we're delivering, and we have more and more of our pipeline as well as more and more of our sales really driven into cloud-native versions of those products. It's very exciting, but you can see how scaled we are in the data that we offer and how we think about data strategically across the enterprise.

We then have incredible talent, and I'm sure many technologies -- technology companies have incredible talent. Our talent is built for hyper-resilient, hypersecure machine-to-machine capabilities at scale and speed. Think about hyper low latency with about 500 billion messages coming into our markets every day.

How do we process that with a 20 microsecond latency on order to trade? But that's an incredible engineering feat. But what that means we have that great embedded talent that we're now applying to all of our solutions in terms of moving everything into a hyper real-time basis. We understand machine-to-machine communications and how we can optimize that. We understand cloud and how we can optimize that. And we definitely are bringing all of those capabilities to everything we do across Nasdaq.

Now as we think about it from a client's perspective, what do they care about when they're thinking about choosing partners, especially partners in an AI era. The first thing is, do they have critical data that's going to serve me and deliver more value for me? Am I using that solution for something that is mission-critical, so where precision is absolutely critical to success. Do we have -- is that partner hyper secure and resilient and making sure it's always available, it's always on, it's always secure, but also where we can bring an immense amount of innovation into those solutions.

We also -- we look at the depth of our integration and connectivity with our clients, and that runs very, very deep down to their core, core systems in the depths of their organizations to extract data that they may not even be able to extract easily to put into these solutions to make it so they can manage risk better, manage financial crime, make sure that they can trade more effectively and efficiently.

And then we have an immense amount of domain expertise. And I would say domain expertise in our industry isn't just about scientific knowledge. It's really about judgment as to how this -- how the markets work, how they're connected, how you want to make sure these solutions are optimized for outcomes in a very complex global capital market ecosystem and making sure we can deliver and show them compelling ROIC.

We also price our products on an enterprise basis. The vast majority of our products are priced at an enterprise level. The only products that are not are really geared towards very small teams inside of organizations. So IR Insight and governance. We're talking between, I would say, anywhere between 3 and 30, maybe 40 people leverage those products within each organization. So we have a very broad clientele across those solutions. And we also have -- we really focus on contract duration as well.

So the last thing I would say about kind of how we think about our platform and delivering to our clients, we deliver against a very large serviceable addressable market of $38 billion, and it's growing 9% a year. And I think that -- and also, as we go and look at the TAM at $86 billion, that's important because the more that we can automate capabilities for our clients and take out manual workflows, the more the TAM becomes our SAM. And we are very focused on that across these 3 key pillars of growth for Nasdaq.

We have our Expand pillar, where we are expanding our current solutions to a broader clientele, opening up new markets around the world, cross-selling more of our solutions and making sure we're upselling land and expand across our enterprise clients. We want to evolve our platforms by making them more efficient and modernizing workflows, making sure that AI, the product road maps all have an AI-first orientation to them.

And then we also have some interesting and strategic partnerships we've developed because as a platform provider, we might find that we may not be the one to deliver the last mile solution, but with other strategic partners where we can leverage our relationships and our data to make it a win-win for both of us.

And then we're continuing to transform the markets, transform the client experience, also thinking about private and public markets and how that's symbiotic and the solutions and how we offer a lot of the cap solutions into the private market ecosystem. We also are focused on always-on markets and the convergence of asset classes and trading across the world.

So all of that has given us the confidence at Investor Day to increase our medium-term outlook for the business. We talk about medium-term outlook as being a 3- to 5-year growth projectile. And so within Capital Access Platforms, it's 6% to 10%; financial technology is 10% to 14%; and our total solutions revenue of 9% to 12% against our operating expense growth of 5% to 8%. We do not provide a medium-term outlook on our trading businesses just because it's less predictable, but we have seen really strong growth and expansion of those business -- of that business as well.

And when we -- when it comes down to it, then as a result of all of that and that great cash flow that I mentioned of $2.2 billion, so what do we -- how do we think about capital allocation? We want to continue to be that great growth company that we've become. And so we are continuing to drive organic growth and organic investments across our business, and we use something called a Horizon framework to make sure we're allocating towards growth and expansion and innovation.

So we look at all of our -- the return on invested capital of all of the capital we spend in product management and product development to make sure that we're driving towards a growth orientation in Horizon framework. We want to deliver and we are delivering -- we're actually this year crossing back into the 10% on the back of the acquisition we did 3 years ago. We're now back into a 10% enterprise ROIC. We have venture investments as well as potential bolt-on M&A that we consider on an occasional basis. But we are extremely focused on organic growth because we have so much -- so many growth vectors within our business. We have a leverage target of mid- to high 2s, and we obviously want to maintain our investment-grade rating.

And then we focus on share repurchases. We repurchased a little over $500 million worth of shares in the first quarter of the year, and we're continuing to see that as a core component of our capital allocation with our dividend of having a progressive dividend based on how our earnings grow over time.

So in summary, we really -- our vision is to be the trusted fabric of the world's financial system. I think we are really achieving that goal with our clients and the strategic orientation to our business. And we also want to be their transformation partner, and we're doing that across all 3 of those 3 key pillars of architecting the world's most modern markets, powering the innovation economy and building trust in the financial system. And we do this with financial discipline and execution discipline that's delivering great results for all of you, our shareholders.

So with that, I want to thank you very much for listening, and I hope you have a great day. Thank you.

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to Nasdaq's First Quarter 2026 Results Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded.

I would now like to hand the conference over to your first speaker, Ato Garrett, Senior Vice President and Investor Relations Officer. Please go ahead.

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today to discuss Nasdaq's First Quarter 2026 Financial Results. On the line are Adena Friedman, our Chair and Chief Executive Officer; Sarah Youngwood, our Chief Financial Officer; and other members of the management team. After our prepared remarks, we will open the line for Q&A. The press release and earnings presentation accompanying this call can be found on our Investor Relations website.

I would like to remind you that we will be making forward-looking statements on this call that involve risks. A summary of these risks is contained in our press release and a more complete description in our annual report on Form 10-K. We will discuss our financial performance on a non-GAAP basis, excluding the impact of acquisitions and divestitures as well as the impact of changes in FX rates. Definitions and reconciliations of U.S. GAAP to non-GAAP plus adjustments can be found in our earnings presentation as well as in a file located in the Financials section of our Investor Relations website at ir.nasdaq.com.

And with that, I will now turn the call over to Adena.

Thank you, Ato, and good morning, everyone. Today, I'll start with a review of our first quarter financial results, and we'll then review the operating performance across our divisions. I will then hand the call over to Sarah to walk through the financial results in more detail.

Nasdaq entered 2026 with strong momentum, and our first quarter performance reflects one of the strongest starts to a year in our company's history. We delivered the highest Q1 organic growth since 2021 across net revenue solutions revenue and operating income as well as our highest ever quarterly revenue growth in the Financial Technology division. The results this quarter demonstrate the breadth and depth of the client engagement we are experiencing across our platform, which is resulting in meaningful growth.

As we outlined at Investor Day, the power of our platform enables us to serve as a trusted transformation partner to our clients, underpinned by our embedded client community, deeply integrated solutions, gold standard data and engineering excellence. This is a dynamic moment for the world and for markets, underpinned by an accelerated pace of technological change, persistent geopolitical tensions and concerns about the stability of the private credit market as well as overall complexity across the global economy.

In the U.S., softer labor conditions and inflation pressures are offset by resilient spending from higher income households and continued capital deployment in AI. Investment in AI continues to be a meaningful driver of economic activity, especially in the United States through large-scale data center and infrastructure build-out. Within this overall environment, macroeconomic growth remains balanced and constructive in the U.S. and across other major economies.

Smart regulation is also starting to take shape across the capital markets and banking industry. And as a result, clients are moving forward with investments in the modernization of their core infrastructure. Within the banking sector, we're experiencing increasing demand for cloud-based mission-critical solutions that include AI features to support workflow automation. Within Capital Markets, we're experiencing demand for solutions and services related to the transition to always on markets and the tokenization of assets. As the industry addresses these trends, Nasdaq is well positioned to reinforce its role as the trusted fabric of the global financial system.

Turning to our financial results. In the first quarter, we delivered $1.4 billion in net revenue, a 13% year-over-year increase. Our overall annualized recurring revenue, or ARR, grew 12% year-over-year to $3.2 billion. Expenses were $608 million, up 8% year-over-year. Operating income was $799 million, up 17%, and we delivered 21% diluted EPS growth. Within our divisions, Capital access platforms generated 10% revenue growth and 7% ARR growth. Financial Technology delivered 18% revenue growth and 16% ARR growth. And Market Services delivered 10% net revenue growth.

As we move into divisional performance, I'll cover how our results reflect disciplined execution against our expand, evolve and transform growth framework from delivering on 1 Nasdaq across our core franchises to evolving our solutions with new innovations to transforming the business in key strategic areas.

Starting with capital access platforms, where I'll first discuss data and listings. In our U.S. listings franchise, we welcomed 15 new operating companies raising over $5 billion in proceeds during the quarter, including 7 of the top 10 IPOs. Early in the second quarter, we were pleased to welcome Arxis and Kailera Therapeutics, 2 of the biggest IPOs in Q2 so far. While the IPO environment has been uneven amid market volatility, issuer engagement remains strong. Companies in our pipeline continue to prepare for market entry. We see encouraging environment -- we are seeing an encouraging environment for improving IPO activity entering the second quarter, and we believe that we are well positioned to support that activity as momentum builds.

In our data business, we continue to deliver strong revenue growth, highlighted by 32% year-over-year growth of enterprise license agreements and continued momentum in Asia and the Middle East. Looking ahead, we see continued progress towards always-on markets, creating meaningful operations for our data business, enabling trading activity in regions where demand for Nasdaq's proprietary market data is already rising.

Our index franchise delivered $79 billion in net inflows over the last 12 months, including $6 billion in the quarter, exiting the quarter with ETP AUM of $836 billion. Our average AUM this quarter increased 32% year-over-year to reach a record of $877 million. Net inflows were modestly positive, impacted by sector rotation and a risk-off environment tied to market uncertainty in March. We view this impact as short-term tactical behavior and not representative of structural trends. Although we don't view early quarter flows as predictive, we are encouraged by the momentum we've seen to date in the second quarter with $15 billion of net ETP inflows as of April 20.

Our index performance has been underpinned by our success in product innovation. 46% of inflows were driven by product launches over the last 5 years and 25% were driven by launches over the last 3 years. Institutional adoption of our index products grew among annuity providers contributing to a 30% increase in insurance-related revenues.

International expansion was driven by strong demand from EMEA and APAC this quarter. This contributed to 19% of total ETP AUM coming from non-U.S. clients. We launched 31 new products in the quarter, including 12 international products and 11 in the institutional annuity space. We also launched the Nasdaq Private Capital indexes, a way for investors to benchmark private market investment allocations, an asset class that has historically lacked transparency.

We were also pleased to announce that we will expand access to the Nasdaq-100 later in the spring with 2 new carefully selected partners, BlackRock and State Street, while continuing to work closely with our long-standing partner, Invesco. The pricing terms related to the index license for these upcoming new U.S.-listed ETFs will be consistent with the QQQ pricing terms. We are excited to continue to grow and expand distribution of our flagship index to new investors across the U.S. and globally with all of our high-quality partners. For example, with Invesco, we continue to create new marquee products to address investors' evolving needs.

Recently, we expanded the Invesco QQQ innovation suite with the launch of the Invesco QQQ Equal Weight ETFs. Additionally, with the expanded partnerships with BlackRock and State Street, we look forward to working with them to make the Nasdaq 100 more accessible to their investor universe and to help drive additional institutional adoption.

Turning to workflow and insights. Revenue grew 6%, driven by continued strength in analytics. Analytics delivered solid revenue growth, underpinned by eVestment's strong performance, which benefits from powerful network effects and sustained demand in volatile markets. With an investment, we continue to expand the reach of our data assets to meet the evolving needs of our clients and to enhance the value that we bring to asset owners and asset managers, including in private markets.

This quarter, we integrated our data with Databricks to broaden entitled access to eVestment's comprehensive institutional investor data. Across analytics, we're leveraging our gold standard data assets to support our clients' AI strategy. The investment AI-ready data has been adopted by global asset managers, GPs and institutional investors representing over $9 trillion in assets under management. and helped drive a 29% year-over-year increase in Q1 bookings.

In Corporate Solutions, AI adoption is strong with 74% of IR Insight users and 51% of Boardvantage users leveraging our AI solutions. Overall, the corporate buying environment remains muted, driven by lower IPO activity compared to historical levels.

Turning to Financial Technology. We delivered record revenue growth of 18%, driven by sustained global demand for our mission-critical technologies. We continue to deliver on our One Nasdaq strategy with strong bookings performance for Q1 signing 64 new clients, 1 cross-sell and 85 upsells during the quarter. The division sustained compelling land and expand momentum, driving more than 50% year-over-year growth in ACV bookings. while supporting clients transition to cloud. Cloud-based solutions accounted for 80% of ACV bookings in the quarter.

I would like to call out a key expansion this year of an existing AxiomSL and Calypso Tier 1 bank client that brings our cloud, AI and on Nasdaq strategy to life. In Q1, we completed a significant renewal and expansion of AxiomSL driven by our ability to deliver cloud and AI-enabled regulatory solutions. Early in the second quarter, we expanded the relationship further with a cross-sell for Nasdaq Verafin, our cloud-based AI native financial crime management solution. The expansion of this relationship illustrates the power of our platform as we deliver innovative technology to address our clients' top regulatory and risk management needs.

Turning now to a review of the subdivisions, starting with financial crime management technology. Nasdaq Verafin delivered another strong quarter with 21% revenue growth across a growing client base of more than 2,800 clients representing nearly $12 trillion in collective assets. During the quarter, we signed 58 new SMB clients, driving a 24% year-over-year increase in ACV bookings from that client segment. In enterprise, we signed 2 renewals and 1 expansion with existing clients and early in the second quarter, we added further momentum with an enterprise upsell and a new Tier 1 client cross-sell that I mentioned a moment ago.

Nasdaq Verafin is evolving its platform through strategic partnerships, including our recently announced partnership with FIS. This agreement expands our ability to deliver leading AML and fraud solutions to FIS' banking and payments clients. We continue to lead through advanced AI-driven innovation. Our Agentic-AI workforce is now deployed by more than 500 clients, up 40% since Investor Day. Later this quarter, we will launch our new drug trafficking analytic, which embeds generative AI directly into our models and synthesizes open-source intelligence, social media, and third-party research to help clients more effectively detect potential drug trafficking activity.

Regulatory technology delivered sustained momentum supported by new capabilities introduced across our product suite as well as structural trends impacting the industry. These trends include the transition to always-on markets, sustained investment in infrastructure modernization and improving clarity of the regulatory environment.

Specific to AxiomSL, this momentum is translating into meaningful client expansion and new wins across regions as global institutions deepen their use of our regulatory reporting and capital management solutions. For instance, a large international bank significantly expanded its U.S. footprint with us, extending the use of our platform to support CCAR reporting. Another large bank expanded into cloud-based broker-dealer capital management and regulatory reporting, underscoring growing confidence in our cloud-enabled regulatory infrastructure. We also secured a new client in Europe for consolidated reporting across capital, liquidity and financial regulatory requirements, highlighting continued momentum across the continent.

We are realizing the benefits from investments we've made in our cloud capabilities as approximately 90% of AxiomSL ACV bookings in Q1 have been for cloud-based solutions. We're also experiencing strong interest in our AI solutions within AxiomSL, including Reg-Copilot, REG Simplify, RegNavigator and REG Investigator, the products we detailed during Investor Day. In surveillance, we delivered strong growth this quarter, supported by upsells and renewals, including a renewal of a global Tier 1 bank.

We are experiencing interest in our crypto surveillance services, both with new clients and upsell opportunities. We are also continuing to invest in our core product to sustain strong client engagement and demand. For example, we recently introduced our calibration copilot, an AI-powered tool that's enabling clients to optimize workflows, reduce false positives and increase accuracy of detection. In the second quarter, we will release our Gen AI platform extension, which connects news and market events to trade data. In beta, this capability has proven to be an effective solution for clients to uncover risks faster and more effectively.

Capital Markets Technology delivered an excellent quarter with strong demand driven by broad-based growth across the sub division. In trade management services, we had outstanding results, driven by robust demand and pricing increases that Sarah will address in her remarks. In Market Technology, we continue to experience momentum in our managed trading services business with a new cloud-hosted trading client for tokenized assets in addition to an expansion of services with several of our large clients.

We also continued progress on the rollout of our Eclipse product suite with 2 significant client implementations for trading and clearing completed in the first quarter. This progress demonstrates the strength and readiness of our modern cloud-enabled platform. Calypso, we delivered 4 new sales, including on cross-sell. One of these wins was a new cloud-based booking for an enterprise-wide derivatives platform with a large U.S. insurance company, supporting the company's broader technology transformation efforts.

Now turning to Market Services. The division delivered 10% organic net revenue growth driven by record volumes in our U.S. markets in both U.S. equity options and U.S. equities as well as elevated volumes in our European markets. We're experiencing strong industry-wide momentum and short-dated options and our market share and volumes align with our established leadership and equity options. We also continue to expand our opportunity within index options with revenue more than doubling year-over-year.

Looking ahead, we're excited to be leading the transition to always-on markets. With SEC approval to extend our market operations to 23-5, we are focused on expanding access, resiliency and continuity for global market participants with the projected launch of December 6, 2026. We are excited to set a new standard for how regulated markets operate in an increasingly global and digital economy.

In parallel, the FCC's approval of our proposal to enable the trading of tokenized securities allows us to enhance how investors access markets and how issuers connect with shareholders. We will continue to collaborate with DTCC and the industry to build the infrastructure needed to launch tokenized equities. Building on this foundation, we're advancing the Nasdaq equity token design that takes modernization a step further by putting issuers at the center of ownership rights. This approach will give issuers greater control over how their shares are represented and managed in tokenized form. As stated in our initial announcement, we expect to provide early benefits of the Nasdaq Token design in the first half of 2027.

Looking ahead, the broader forces shaping the global financial system, including rising complexity, investment in AI and the need for resilient trusted infrastructure continued to reinforce the role that Nasdaq plays at the center of the financial ecosystem. Supported by the scale of our platform and disciplined execution across our priorities, we remain confident in our ability to create durable value for clients as well as long-term value for our shareholders.

And with that, I'll turn the call over to Sarah to walk through our financial results in more detail.

Thank you, Adena, and good morning, everyone. In the first quarter of 2026, Nasdaq delivered exceptional results. headlined by solutions revenue growth of 14%, record financial technology revenue growth of 18% and diluted EPS growth of 21%. The strong performance in the quarter demonstrates the engine of profitable and durable growth we have created and the outstanding execution of our teams, particularly in the context of the volatile macro environment throughout the quarter.

Let's start with quarterly results on Slide 11. We reported net revenue of $1.4 billion, up 13% with solutions revenue of $1.1 billion, up 14%. Operating expense was $608 million, up 8%, leading to an operating margin of 57% and an EBITDA margin of 60%, both up 2 percentage points. This resulted in net income of $549 million and diluted EPS of $0.96, up 21%.

Slide 12 shows the drivers of our 13% net revenue growth for the quarter. We generated 10 percentage points of offer, driven by new and existing clients and product innovation. Meanwhile, beta factors contributed 3 percentage points of growth this quarter, driven by higher overall volumes in market services, onetime items in FinTech, representing just under 1 percentage point of beta and higher volumes in index derivatives.

Let's review division results starting on Slide 14. In capital access platforms, we delivered revenue of $565 million, up 10% with ARR growth of 7%. Data and listings revenue was up 9% in the quarter with ARR up 8%. Data revenue growth was strong and driven primarily by upsells and pricing. Listings revenue benefited from the improving IPO environment, pricing increases and a $2 million onetime benefit from prior period application fees partially offset by delisting and lower amortization of prior period initial listing fees, in line with our previous comments.

Index revenue was up 14% in the quarter, with ARR up 6%, driven by record average ETP AUM of $877 billion. The quarter's performance reflects Index's ability to deliver inputs in a volatile macro environment, including the Nasdaq-100 declining 6% in market performance in the first quarter. ETP AUM reflected $79 billion in net inflows over the last 12 months, including $6 billion in the first quarter. As Adena said, we are encouraged by the momentum of ETP inflows we are experiencing earlier in the second quarter with $15 billion of net inflows as of April 20.

Annual rent based growth was partially offset by a decline in volume-based revenue versus the prior year period, driven by continued mix shift in derivative volumes from higher-priced muni contracts to lower-priced micro and mini contracts due to higher retail volumes and a year-over-year decline in capture. Those factors were partially offset by record derivative volumes, up 9% in the quarter.

In Workflow and Insights, revenue was up 6% in the quarter with ARR growth also at 6%. The revenue increase was driven primarily by analytics, mainly investment and Datalink, with both businesses benefiting from strong sales momentum, client engagement to the platform's AI capabilities and demand for data to power AI. Corporate Solutions revenue was essentially flat, driven by the trends we have previously described. Quarterly operating margin for the division was 62%, up 2 percentage points versus the prior year period.

Moving to Financial Technology on Slide 15. The quarter reflected record revenue and ARR growth. Revenue was $517 million, up 18%, with ARR growth of 16%. Our business continues to experience strong demand across all fintech subdivisions and high levels of client engagement. We had very strong ACV bookings growth of more than 50% in the quarter versus the prior year period, setting a new first quarter bookings record as we executed on our land and expand strategy. 80% of those ACV bookings were cloud-based deals, reflecting our position as the trusted transformation partner to drive modernization for our clients.

The division signed new clients, 85 upsells and 1 cross-sell in the quarter with another cross-sell signed early in the second quarter. Gross sales continue to represent over 15% of the Financial Technology division pipeline with strength across all 3 subdivisions. Financial client management technology revenue grew 21% in the quarter. with AR growth of 17% and net revenue retention of 110%.

We signed 58 new SMB clients in the first quarter compared to 35% in the prior year period with a 24% year-over-year increase in ACV bookings from SMBs. In enterprise, we signed 1 expansion and 2 renewal deals during the quarter as well as 1 new Tier 1 cross-sell and on upsell early in the second quarter. As we discussed last quarter, the sequential revenue improvement in the fourth quarter was primarily driven by professional services fees related to SMB and enterprise client implementations. And as such, we did not expect to maintain those levels over the first half of 2026 based on the implementation timing for deals signed in the second half of 2025.

Regulatory Technologies delivered revenue growth of 12% and ARR growth of 13%. Revenue growth in the quarter reflects strong performance in surveillance and solid growth in AkzoMasel, driven by our successful sales execution as well as sequentially improved professional services revenue, consistent with our previous comments. Capital Markets Technology revenue grew 20% with AR growth of 18%. This quarter's exceptional performance reflects ongoing momentum and broad-based demand across Calypso, Market Technology and trade management services. Specifically, we had strong demand for data center services in trade management services.

A large increase in upfront revenue recognition versus a year ago related to on-prem Calypso deals signed and renewed in the quarter and 2 onetime items which were termination fees related to M&A in Market Tech operators, representing 4 percentage points of capital market tech revenue growth in the quarter. Financial Technology quarterly operating margin was 47%, up nearly 3 percentage points versus the prior year period.

Turning to Market Services on Slide 16. We had record net revenue of $317 million, up 10%. Growth was primarily driven by record market volumes in U.S. equities and U.S. options volumes increasing in European equities and strong volumes in Canadian equities due primarily to market volatility in commodities. We also continued to deliver alpha as reflected in strong revenue growth in index options elevated market share in U.S. equities and U.S. options, strong initial adoption of newly launched short-stated options products and elevated capture in European derivatives. This was partially offset by lower capture in U.S. equities and U.S. options driven by the strong volumes we mentioned in the quarter coming with a mix shift towards lower revenue capture order flow.

We continue to manage effectively the balance between capture and market share while maintaining our strong lead in U.S. equities capture and in U.S. options market share. Quarterly operating margin for the division was 63%, up 2 percentage points versus the prior year period.

Moving to expense on Slide 17. We had operating expense of $608 million in the first quarter, an increase of 8%, driven by investments in people and technology to support revenue and drive innovation and higher compensation costs related to delivering strong revenue performance. The first quarter operating margin was 57%, and the EBITDA margin was 60%, both up 2 percentage points versus the prior year period. We are updating our non-GAAP expense guidance for the year to a range of $2.485 billion to $2.545 billion from $2.455 billion to $2.535 billion. given the strong revenue performance we have experienced year-to-date.

Our updated guidance assumes an FX impact consistent with our previous expectations. Looking ahead, we expect a higher expense growth rate in the second quarter than the first quarter, driven in part by the timing of our annual compensation cycle consistent with the prior year. We maintain our 2026 non-GAAP tax rate guidance of 22.5% to 24.5%.

Turning to capital allocation on Slide 18. Nasdaq generated free cash flow of $629 million in the first quarter and $2.1 billion in free cash flow over the last 12 months at a conversion ratio of 12%. Without the impact of the timing of tax payments, the conversion ratio would have been 108%. We paid a dividend of $0.27 per share or $153 million in the quarter representing a 29% annualized payout ratio. As a reminder, we announced at Investor Day that our Board has approved an increase in our dividend by $0.04 per share to $0.31 per share going forward, which will be reflected in the June payment.

We ended the quarter with a gross leverage ratio of 2.8x within the mid- to high to target we established at Investor Day. We took advantage of market volatility and accelerated our share repurchases. In the first quarter, we repurchased $548 million as compared to a total of $616 million of repurchases in all of 2025. In combination with the dividend, Nasdaq returned over $700 million to shareholders in the first quarter.

In closing, Nasdaq delivered excellent results in a dynamic operating environment. reinforcing our track record of delivering profitable and durable growth across macro cycles. As we highlighted at our Investor Day in February, we are the trusted transformation partner to our clients as they navigate structural shifts in the financial markets and accelerate their AI journey. The exceptional solutions revenue growth and record financial technology performance we delivered in the first quarter are important proof points of the Nasdaq story. They give us the confidence that we are achieving our ambitious strategic objectives and generating long-term value for our investors.

With that, I'll open the call for Q&A.

[Operator Instructions] And I show our first question comes from the line of Bill Katz from TD Cowen.

So at the Investor Day, I thought you guys did a great job of just sort of debunking some of the concerns around Agentic AI and it seems like there's some really good stats here this morning as well to that score. So maybe a 2-part question. Number one, can you maybe step back and help us frame out the Agentic AI capabilities for the Nasdaq platform itself? And then secondly, can you unpack some of the growth that you saw in the first quarter from clients just in terms of where you see the greatest uptake around Agentic-AI adoption?

Bill, and when you say -- just so I can understand, when you say the Nasdaq platform itself, are you -- what do you mean? What are you referring to?

So your core business, like your expense structure, innovation, that kind of efficiencies, et cetera.

I just wanted to make sure. Okay, great. I just wanted to make sure we were on the same page. So thank you for the comments and the question. So as we mentioned at Investor Day, we do have an internal program to drive AI adoption within the operations of Nasdaq, and we say that's AI on the business. And we are focused in some key areas, and we have a program in place where we are striving to achieve $100 million of expense efficiencies by the end of 2027 and we also did mention that the majority of that will show up in 2027 because we also are making investments in AI to make sure that we can achieve those efficiencies.

And so as we are focused -- where we're focused is certainly on making sure we're automating key elements of the product development life cycle, making sure we're creating new automations and capabilities for our clients in the client success area in terms of client service, implementations and managing our client interactions as they're working with our systems and our products. And then also, we have other areas across our expert teams, too. We have automation and finance, in marketing, legal, HR, all of those areas have benefits that are coming in from the Gen AI capabilities that we see across the business. It's an exciting time. I have to tell you to understand and tap into the technology and the benefits it can provide.

If I were to highlight on product development, I think the most exciting part of that is our ability to speed up the ability to deliver new capabilities to clients. to use automation to really make sure that the code that we're delivering is really clean. It's fit for purpose. It's really and you can be more creative as a product team, if you know you can deliver things faster. So it's pretty exciting in terms of how we're thinking about the product road maps as well. So hopefully, that answers your question on that.

In terms of the areas where our clients are seeing the most benefit from our AI capabilities, anti-fincrime is a key area because we have so many ways to automate workflows associated with financial crime management in terms of there's a lot of manual work that goes into investigating potential actors to managing on the regulatory reports. And that -- all of that, we have automation tools around. We're now bringing some of those automation tools into the surveillance area and into the AxiomSL regulatory reporting areas. So we're also kind of building once deploying many in terms of the skills that we're learning from these deployments.

And then as we mentioned, AxiomSL, we have some clients that are signing up and going to our cloud-based solutions because we are only offering our AI capabilities through the cloud-based solutions, and they really like the automation that we can bring in from a regulatory reporting perspective. And then in CAP, we have AI deeply embedded in our Boardvantage tool to summarize Board documents and board and also Board agendas to make it so you can auto build board agenda in addition to an IR. So it's kind of everywhere. Some of the products we purposely charge for and some of the products are embedded in the products so that we work with our clients on thinking about the value that they're getting upon renewal.

And I share your next question comes from the line of Alexander Blostein from Goldman Sachs.

I was hoping we can double-click on trends you're seeing in fintech, in particular, in Capital Market stack. Sarah, you highlighted to a couple of drivers this quarter. But given the really strong momentum in ARR even sequentially, I was hoping you can give us a little more detail on where you're seeing the incremental uptake, particularly within cap markets as well as your view for the rest of the year within that segment.

Great. Thank you. So there -- as we mentioned, there's actually good momentum across all 3 elements of the Capital Markets Tech business. We start with trade management services where we offer connectivity services to our clients who trade within the Nasdaq exchanges. There, we're definitely seeing more and more interest in having -- bringing in more connectivity capabilities to make sure that they can manage the volumes in the markets, but also to drive new strategies that they want to execute within our markets.

And so that has been -- and also, as a reminder, we did expand our data center last year. So I think that -- 2 years ago, sorry. So we have more opportunity to offer capabilities to our clients now with the larger data center footprint that we have. But it does -- and we're working on some new innovations within the data center, too, in terms of making some investments in like cooling and other things to really continue to allow our clients to drive new strategies in the markets. So that's exciting. And as Sarah mentioned, and I think I did too, that we did have a pricing increase as well in that business this year.

With regard to Calypso, the key areas that we're really seeing -- we're seeing a lot of demand across the world for 1 thing. The second thing is collateral management, as you know, is one of our strongest modules within Calypso and we definitely are seeing really strong momentum in collateral management demand from our clients. And then I think that within -- and also international, it's really -- we have a lot of demand actually both, I think, domestically and internationally in Calypso. So in market technology, we definitely see a lot of trading opportunities with new asset classes, new areas of new markets that are coming up.

In addition to modernizing our core clientele, we have had really good success and bringing our clients into the next-generation trading and clearing solutions. And then also, we launched an intelligence suite, which we kind of allow our clients, we have it internally. But basically, a modern way for them to manage all their data within their infrastructure. And that's been a really great, I would say, add-on sale to our clients as they're thinking about how they leverage AI they're leveraging us to kind of help them modernize their data management infrastructure.

So those are the areas of demand, Alex, that we're really focused on, and it is driving good momentum. We don't give outlook kind of specifically we give long-term or medium- to long-term outlook. But we are definitely seeing really good demand and momentum across all 3 areas of fintech and Capital Markets day.

And our next question comes from the line of Dan Fannon from Jefferies.

I wanted to expand upon your comments on the strength in data. I think you've mentioned 24/5 and some of the growth internationally from clients. So I was hoping you could just expand a bit upon that and how you see that progressing as we think about the year.

Sure. Well, it's been interesting over the last really 5 to 6 years, we've seen a broad-based increase in demand internationally for Nasdaq's market data. And I think part of it is the fact that there's just more demand for the companies that are listed on Nasdaq and U.S. equities in general from global investors.

The second thing is that retail investors have really kind of grown and expanded around the world, and there's just more accessibility to the U.S. markets by retail investors. And so retail brokerage platforms around the world want to be able to provide real-time access to the market data from our markets. And so all of that has been driving kind of a longer-term trend of global expansion of data. We have though seen some acceleration of that in the last, I would say, a year, so it's not just in this quarter but over the last year, as 23/5 trading in U.S. equities is both there is some trading that already occurs in the dark today.

But as these firms are getting ready for 23/5 trading with lit markets like ours and central transparency, I think they're getting themselves ready to be able to offer those capabilities so they can trade in domestic hours and that is definitely driving more demand for enterprise license deals with our clients around the world.

And I share your next question in the queue comes from the line of Ben Budish from Barclays.

I wanted to ask about index revenues in the quarter they were down a bit sequentially when your volumes are quite good. Average AUM was up. I know there's a dynamic with the CME fee sort of resetting at the beginning of the year, but it looks like the volumes are quite strong. So I'm curious if there's anything else going on in the quarter, if there's any color on the timing of that fee reset and what that means for Q2.

So what we've experienced is a mix shift in futures. And I talked about that as the retail is driving more micro volumes and that at a lower capture than the mini. So that was the main driver. The volume in futures was actually good. And then there is a second, but let's say, smaller driver, which is in a little bit of a continued mix shift, and that's the story we've been telling in the ETP AUM as we go towards a bit more institutional.

And on the reset, I think that definitely, we achieved -- you're right that the fees -- the kind of sharing agreement resets of the year-over-year -- and we saw that we kind of had -- we've now gone to the higher tier as of the end of Q1. So that will come in -- start to come in at a higher level in Q2.

And I share our next question in the queue comes from the line of Owen Lau from Clear Street.

So far your tokenization strategy, could you please give us an updated time line on your tokenized trading capabilities? I know you have 23/5 trading going on, but what are the remaining hurdles you need to cross before you can execute the first 3?

Sure. Well, we are very active in working with DTCC and with the industry can make sure that we're doing this in lockstep and we're doing it in an organized way. I think that DCCC has significant efforts underway, and they have at least expressed an interest in trying to get to that first trade that you mentioned before the end of the year.

So that's, I think, the goal that they have and they're working collaboratively with us as well as with industry players to goes through the whole process, make sure that they're advancing their systems, doing some -- they're going to want to do test trades as they get further into the year and that allows us to be able to get to that, as you said, kind of first trade.

I would say though, it's likely that this will still be an early -- kind of an early phase by the end of the year to make sure that we're -- the end-to-end is working seamlessly. So it's going to be a little while, Owen, but it's -- I mean, we're doing a lot of work together and it's going well so far.

I show our next question comes from the line of Brian Bedell from Deutsche Bank.

Maybe just Adena, you talked about the impact of always on markets, helping data, but can you also talk about the potential impact across your fintech platform as the clients increasingly need to respond to always on, particularly in the Calypso and Capital Markets business. I know we talked about in the past the initial guidance from the Adenza businesses didn't contemplate crypto as much and that's already been a help. To what extent do you see this always on dynamic advancing growth in these businesses?

Yes. So I think that the areas that we're seeing -- we're having a lot of conversations with clients, and in some cases, already clients are signing up for expanded services I would say the first one is surveillance. So even without the established markets being there, they do want to be able to surveil activity, trading activity, if they are, in fact, offering it to clients during the during the international hours that exist today. So that's already driving demand in terms of surveillance clients. also our trading.

So our clients around the world who are other markets who are looking at how do they want to expand their trading hours and really kind of continue to modernize our infrastructure around trading that is driving more demand for our Eclipse trading platform because it is built to be able to support 24/7.

And then the third thing is in Calypso, as you mentioned, collateral management, risk management, capital management, just core trade infrastructure. While Calypso generally supports OTC instruments, there is just a move and desire to make sure that they are able to support collateral management across all their markets and they are connected into both clearing firms and clearing houses. And certainly, the U.S. markets move there. I think that, that's something that they're definitely seeing more demand for collateral management.

And then trade management services within Capital Markets Tech also as firms are thinking about how are they going to be support 23/5 markets themselves, and they want to come in and have more colocation capabilities that's also driving some demand. So those are areas that we are having active dialogue with clients as we prepare for 23/5.

And our next question comes from the line of Michael Cho from JPMorgan.

I just wanted to touch on the index business again. I think one of the benefits you cited in terms of licensing it to BlackRock and State Street is on access to new investors. And so I was wondering what kind of incremental investor segments do you think BlackRock and State Street might provide for Nasdaq?

And then just longer term, how are you thinking about the potential for AUM and product expansion from the index licensing versus any licensing fee changes that might M&A in the coming years. I'm just looking at the evolution of other flagship index providers who have been more susceptible to that than Nasdaq in the past.

Sure. So well, just to touch on the pricing point, just to make sure we're clear, with the new relationships that we have with BlackRock and State Street, the index pricing licensing terms are the same as for QQQ. So that's not changing our pricing paradigm. What we're really focused on with BlackRock and State Street is they have their own unique investor universe. So they have incredible distribution out into the institutional ecosystem as well as broad-based retail investor base. And they complement Invesco, who has been and continues to be an amazing partner to us.

So we're at this point where the Nasdaq-100 is really becoming a core component of an investment strategy. among asset owners, insurance companies. And we want to make sure that we can distribute it out through the channels that they usually use right? So they're not having to -- they can leverage the relationships they already have with BlackRock or State Street in order to get access to these products in a seamless way. And so it does feel like the right next step for us, in a way, a new chapter of growth and expansion for the Nasdaq-100 as we continue to execute on global growth, as well as institutional growth of that index.

It also -- we already do work with State Street and BlackRock and other product areas. So it just kind of continues to -- an evolution of our relationships there. to make sure that we can leverage the strength of their platforms for our flagship product, while we also work with them on new product expansion. In terms of just generally across the index business, we are very fortunate to have an index franchise that's really focused on innovation oriented and thematic indexes that we work really collaboratively with our partners. We use all of our marketing assets to be able to drive distribution and adoption of these products.

And I think the way that we partner with our clients allows us to have a fee base that we feel very confident that we're delivering great value to them, but also value to us. And we would expect that to continue as we launch other new products.

And our next question comes from the line of Elias Abboud from Bank of America.

Anthropic's new Mythos model is expected to post significant cybersecurity risks for financial institutions. So as one of the largest bank software vendors, I was wondering if you previewed Mythos and if you can speak to the extent to which the release poses risks or creates liability for Nasdaq. And then separately, does it create any new opportunities? Is bank cybersecurity an interesting adjacency for you? Or is that too far afield from your current business?

So I'll answer the second question first, which is that there are amazing cyber companies, many of which are listed on Nasdaq that provide very, very advanced cyber capabilities to us and to our bank clients. And we would expect that we will continue to partner with them and we'd expect the banks to continue to partner with them. And speaking of them, we have a lot of engagement with our cyber partners, with our hyperscaler partners with the banks and with the government on how new models are being introduced into the financial industry.

We're very careful in how we bring new models into Nasdaq. We do leverage Bedrock, which is AWS' AI platform infrastructure to support a lot of our AI infrastructure here at Nasdaq as well as we work with Microsoft and like Azure. So we have these great partners that help us make sure that we're protecting ourselves. We do a lot of extra production. And then we will test models extensively before we bring any new models into our infrastructure, we do a lot of testing of models.

So we're not going to just race forward with any new model and bring it in. We do a lot of work first to determine if it's got utility and then to do incredible IT security reviews on it. And then we'll bring it in and determine how it can be best used for our purposes. I also think as these new models come in, there obviously are going to be new protections that both the LLM providers, but also their partners will provide to make sure that they can be brought in securely.

And I show our next question comes from the line of Patrick Moley from Piper Sandler.

Big picture one for me on tokenization. You mentioned the equity token design, putting issuers at the center of ownership rights, governance, investor experience. So is tokenized settlement and 24/5 trading becomes a reality, Adena, I'm wondering if you see this fundamentally transforming the IPO process itself particularly as it relates to expanding global retail access and reducing some of the frictions and costs associated with traditional underwriting. And if so, does this represent any sort of structural opportunity that investors might not be Nasdaq's ability to grow the list.

Yes. So I think the first thing I'd say is there are multiple paths to the public markets today in terms of you can have a direct listing, you can have a SPAC combination, you can have an IPO. So there are choices. In terms of trading and organization changing, I mean, I do think that the nature of securities, I mean, the actual construct of the underlying CUSIP and the technological capabilities that provides are interesting and obviously allow for the free flow of capital allowed potentially for companies to have more direct interaction with investors over time.

But I also think that the IPO process or the go public process is a huge after taking to engage with both institutional and retail investors to make sure that you're unlocking that demand prior to the day that you enter the public markets. And there is value to that process. Whether it's through a direct listing or through an IPO or SPAC combination, that engagement with investors leading up to it, and in some -- certainly, the underwriting for new capital being raised and making sure that you're getting support in the stock in the first few days and weeks of trading, I think, is important.

But I can't say that I think that tokenization has an opportunity to unlock and expand investor reach during that process. It can improve engagement with retail investors as they're going through that process. But I'm not envisioning a fundamental change in the IPO process, I have to say. I think only time will tell if that's an opportunity.

And our next question comes from the line of Jeff Schmitt from William Blair.

You'd mentioned you're working on outcome-related options in Market Services. Would these be similar to prediction market products? And could you just provide some more detail on what you're doing there?

Yes, sure. Yes, they are -- essentially, you can call them outcome-oriented or event options. Think about them as -- and the first one that we are seeking approval from the SEC is an option on predicting the future performance of the Nasdaq 100. So it's some people call binary option, I guess, now, is it going to go up or down kind of thing. And so it is a way to bring the notion of our prediction market construct into a regulated market.

The nice thing is with our options business is it is fully overseen by the SEC, and we have a lot of regulatory controls in place. We're working with OCC, which is the clearing house to make sure that we think about the risk models around it and the margin models so that we can kind of introduce the notion of, what I would call, entry-level options into a marketplace that has a regulatory framework that's very well established. So it is our first effort in that area.

And I share our next question comes from the line of Ashish Sabadra from RBC Capital Markets.

Very strong ACV momentum in Verafin and you also talked about the Tier 1 plant signed in 2Q. My question was, can you talk about the pipeline for Tier 1, Tier 2 clients. And just a follow-up there would be, as we think about these implementations going live, is it fair for us to assume that we start getting the ARR growth back into the midterm range as we get into the back half of the year?

Great. Thank you. Well, actually, as Sarah had mentioned, with a lot of the signings that we had in the latter half of last year. So our momentum in enterprise signings really picked up as we went through last year, we had, I think, more than double -- it's not triple the number of signings last year versus the prior year. But a lot of it has happened in the second half. So -- and we don't recognize ARR in the clients until they're fully implemented. So we are still in implementation mode for a fair number of those clients in addition to obviously, anything we signed in the first quarter.

So we do anticipate that the benefits of those deals will start to flow in later in this year. I think the second thing is that our pipeline is very strong. We have amazing engagement across a wide range of clients either in POC where they're testing us or in contract negotiation or we're having really just good dialogue with them as you're thinking about modernizing their [ ASC ] capabilities. So the pipeline is strong. The activity and the signings have been very strong, and we're excited to start to show the benefit of that as we implement the clients.

And I show our next question comes from the line of Alex Kramm from UBS.

Just wanted to come back quickly on the capital markets disclosures that Sarah gave on those cancellations. So first of all, is that fully in the run rate? Or is that still coming out of I think you mentioned a 4% onetimer. So does that mean that maybe there's a 1% headwind to growth? Or maybe you can just size up what kind of headwind that is? And then overall, as we think longer term with the expectation that bank M&A may be picking up, do you expect to see more of these? Or do you think these are kind of like onetime events here or unusual events.

Yes. So I would say that the impact going forward is actually not very much that the 4 percentage points you have very correct, which is that is a positive this quarter which we have put on as described as M&A related. It's a of market operators, which is really different than bank M&A. And so we're not seeing very much of that happening. It just so happens that we had that hit this quarter. And those have been a long time in coming in terms of like our awareness of them. So we're not seeing a sequence of those as a trend at all.

And I think Sarah also, the termination fees are not commensurate with the actual ACV value. It's different. So the ACV value of these as they're going to come out of ARR is quite modest versus the termination fees that we received as a result of the changes.

And I share our last question in the queue comes from the line of Michael Cyprys from Morgan Stanley.

Just wanted to ask about 23/5 trading that's expected to launch. I heard you mentioned on December 6. I was hoping could update us on the steps that you're taking between now and then, how do you see this rolling out? What sort of milestones do you anticipate in the first year. We also hear some hesitation from certain market participants out there, some hesitation just around including around potentially limited liquidity in the overnight session. So I guess, just what sort of steps are you taking to address some of those concerns out there?

Sure. So in terms of -- I'll actually take the last question first. I would say anytime that you have change in the industry, there are people who are excited about it and people who get nervous about it. That's just -- I think that's actually quite healthy because you want to make sure that you're thinking through concerns as you're trying to progress the market. Today, if you look at the volumes that occur today.

So we operate from 4:00 a.m. to 8 p.m., our systems are open for trading during that period of time outside of our hours. So from 8 p.m. to 4 a.m. U.S. time, the -- there is about 2% of volumes is occurring today. So 2 percentage points of volume. So there is volume occurring outside the hours of operations for our business. So we are excited to be able to tap into that demand that market activity, but also to really use the infrastructure that we're putting in place and that the industry is putting in place to make sure we can grow that.

And so what we're doing is making sure that as we go forward, as of December not only is Nasdaq launching its venue, but the tape has announced that they're launching the consolidated tape to be -- make it so that all national best bid in offer and less sale will be available. Obviously, our market data will be available. And so you'll have a more market environment. You'll also have -- we also have MarketWatch, expanding our hours of Market Watch, expanding hours of our market operations team, our tech ops, our network ops, all of those organizations will be expanded to make sure we can we can support the clients that are coming in and trading across the globe.

And then we also will make sure that as we launch that we have a lot of investor education. We want to make sure that we're working with retail brokers and through the -- when we make a sale of our market data, we often work with them also on education and other things that they can do to promote and make sure that their investors are ready to be able to trade our securities. So it's a holistic effort, and we would expect over time, but I also would say it's an evolution, not a revolution to see expansion of investor interest across the globe to have the opportunity to trade in their home hours and to have liquidity throughout the 23-hour period.

I would point out that the Nasdaq futures, Nasdaq-100's futures trades 24/5 today. So the idea of being able to trade in the future, trade the ETFs and trade the underlying all in domestic hours for that -- for those stocks is exciting, but it is going to be offered to every stock across the U.S. equities market. So I see it as a natural next step here, but it will take time to make it so that there's a lot of penetration.

That concludes our Q&A session for today. I would now like to turn the conference back over to Adena Friedman, President and CEO, for closing remarks.

Great. Well, thank you very much. We are very pleased with the performance and momentum across Nasdaq as we execute our strategy to modernize markets power the innovation economy and build trust in the financial system. Thank you very much for joining the call, and have a great day.

This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect. Goodbye.

I'm Elias Abboud, Craig Siegenthaler and I cover U.S. exchanges here at BofA. And I'm pleased to be joined on stage by the CFO of Nasdaq, Sarah Youngwood.

With 4,500 companies on its exchange, Nasdaq is the largest listing venue in the United States. It is, of course, a leader in both stock and options trading. But since 2017, it has been in the midst of a strategic pivot to being a scaled technology and info services provider.

Today, nearly 80% of Nasdaq's revenue is from nontrading businesses. This includes indexing, data, corporate services, marketplace technology, regulatory reporting and financial crime management technology.

Sarah was appointed CFO in 2023. Before coming to Nasdaq, she was the CFO for UBS, where she played a key role in modernizing the bank's infrastructure and facilitating the acquisition of Credit Suisse. She also has 25 years of experience at JPMorgan, where she was -- she held senior roles in investment banking and Investor Relations and as the CFO of Chase and JPMorgan Chase's technology unit. Sarah, thank you for joining us.

Thanks for having me.

So Sarah, I think it's safe to say that AI will be the topic of the day. So let's start there. At the Investor Day, you went through many areas of the business where Nasdaq is using AI today. At this point, it seems like almost every Nasdaq product has an agentic worker. So my question is, what's next? How much runway is left? How much more is there for Nasdaq to do with AI?

Thank you. And yes, it is a very important topic. So what's very important for us is we started early. We did, as you say, put it really across our products. We are very well architected for it, and it's just starting. And so if I go through those points, we started early. We've talked about the cloud 12 years ago. Adena talked about data also 12 years ago, and then AI 10 years ago. So that's like a great foundation because we're not just getting started now in terms of like the foundation, but more in terms of the client adoption.

We've done it right. So when you think about what we've done, we've done it at scale in a resilient way, and we've done it with network effort and effect to actually deliver value to clients. So you remember that page, which many people have referred to in our Investor Day presentation where we talked about the gold standard data, the hyper resilience, the domain expertise, the connectivity, the ROIC to client and all of those elements together actually create our Gen AI differentiation.

So when you take all of that, you then put it in all of the products, you end up with a lot of differentiation, which enables you to earn the title of trusted transformation partner of our clients. And this is really an earned position, not something that you can actually want if you don't have it. And so when you take all of that, then you go like, is there more? And we think there's a lot more.

A stat that we used is that 89% of our clients have Gen AI somewhere in their infrastructure, but only 7% really have fully deployed Gen AI. So we're just at the beginning of helping our clients go through that journey.

And if you look at it in SAM, we have a $38 billion service addressable market that's growing at 9%. So again, tons of opportunities. And one of the things that I said at Investor Day is that, in fact, we think that, that SAM is going to continue to borrow from the TAM as a lot of our financial institutions clients use some of the spend that was dedicated to people towards vendor spend, i.e. working with people like Nasdaq.

So we feel very well positioned. We feel we have a right to win, and we are really excited about the path forward.

How are you monetizing AI use cases in your data business? Are you selling any data directly to the big LLMs like Gemini and ChatGPT and Claude?

So without being specific, about what we do with whom, we have a very long history of selling our data to intermediaries that then get it to the consumer. So you have our data, for example, in your Apple phone and in many, many other places. And we have already done that with an AI-powered search company.

The reason why we do that well is, first of all, because we have really a very long experience in doing so. We are not putting in place the controls, the parameters, the governance, the trackability now to prepare for Gen AI. So what we -- and Nelson talked about like we have a patrol, like we really have very good governance to make sure that we have controls around what governance, what usage and is trackable. And what's great is it's real-time data.

So once you have it, it's really valuable for a very, very short amount of time. And so you need to respect the contract in some ways because otherwise, we would stop having that contract. So it's something that's important and something that we do well and something that we're excited to continue to do and amplify.

Can you talk about what Gen AI has meant for your anti-financial crime unit? So this month, the World Economic Forum warned that AI is supercharging a global fraud crisis. What has that meant for demand?

Yes. So lots of problems, lots of demand. So you're mentioning an important report. We did our own view and analysis since 2023, we've seen 19% growth in the problem. So we had talked about $3.5 trillion. Now we're talking about $4.4 trillion of issues related to financial crime in the world. So we've got a lot that we can help to address, and we've been very well equipped to do that.

If you start 20 years ago, which is where Verafin started with a consortium approach, all in the cloud and all with AI. So like that's just like remarkable that they had that intuition 20 years ago. You end up today with over 2,760 banks with $11 trillion in assets with up to $1.8 billion in transactions per week. And you have data that ranges small banks and large banks. And actually, that's really the key because fosters are going to be mixed in their approach between the small banks and the large banks.

So having that scale, that variety is what gives us a very, very strong asset. And because it's consortium-based, you can't buy that data. There is no other way to get that data than to do business with Verafin, which means that we've had a lot of business done. 2,760, just since our acquisition, we've added 750 clients, included 22 on the enterprise front. And then we've put Gen AI because from AI, we had the data, I would say, very well organized to be able to do Gen AI. And we've been at the forefront of doing that, and therefore, we are continuing to catch the opportunities to help our clients.

Zooming out, you reiterated your mid-20s guide for AFC at the Investor Day. That's a business that's grown revenues, 22%, 2 years in a row. What gives you confidence in a reacceleration?

Yes. So when you look at it, I just talked about Gen AI. That's a component of it. And so when you're thinking about agentic AI, we've got 2 agentic workers that are already in the market. We've got 6 that are in design, and we are focused on continuing to accelerate that value for our clients. And so we have engagement with our clients, 350 clients engaging with us. We've got the ability to really work with them to identify the most important pain points, and where our workers are going to be most effective, efficient at reducing their costs, therefore, driving an ROIC and the ability to drive value. So that's the first thing. Gen AI.

Partnerships, you've heard from our partnership on BioCatch and on FIS. And then the growth in enterprise as well internationally. And so enterprise, I just mentioned 22 enterprise clients, and the acceleration is really what's going to be important here. We've got 9 of those that were last year, and that's 4x more both in terms of number and ACV, what we had the year before. And so it does take 9 to 12 months to come through the numbers. And so with a little bit of patience, you're going to start to see towards the end of the year, the impact of the signings that we had last year.

And then in international, we've got this POC that has been very fruitful with 30% less false positives. So again, that gives us a freehold in one part of Europe and then continuing in other places.

At Calypso, your #1 competitor is spreadsheets and proprietary software. Now with Gen AI, spreadsheets seem to have become a lot smarter and proprietary software a lot easier to build. What is the impact on Calypso's competitive positioning from Gen AI?

Yes. So if I take a step back, Calypso is across 250 clients and 60-plus countries and provides your pre-trade, trade, collateral management, treasury infrastructure. And that's a complex critical mission to solve. And we do a lot of things there, which basically puts us in a position where we believe actually that the more complicated it is, the better it is because yes, spreadsheets can be amplified. But if you are effectively implementing trade, capital markets are going to need data, data and insights, insights and connectivity.

And that data, sometimes resources from like 50 systems within the company. And then the connectivity is really across the entire markets in all of those countries. And it's because we have very deep understanding that's based on collective intelligence of the data sets that we're dealing with, that we're able to really fine-tune the risks that enables us to basically help our clients and what's important to them, which is add value to their business, add returns while managing the risks and the regulations.

What do you view as the biggest moats around that Calypso business?

Yes. So basically, back to what I was saying, it's the ability to have data lineage, into, call it, 50 -- up to 50 financial systems, then connectivity. And if you add to that, the intelligence. So that data is really not just taken as such and not even just lineage and calculated, but then it's helped to understand like a bond has characteristics, it can have credit characteristics.

Now all of those things are amplified by all of the value, the millions of data points that we have had over the years to help to drive the right decisions to help to do that within a risk appetite that is defined and to help to then also have that sometimes daily liquidity reporting back to the regulators. So it's one thing to have that collective intelligence. But in addition, it's embedded, it's system of record, and it's connected.

Let's talk about your oldest business.

Yes.

Cash equities, you had 31% year-over-year volume growth in 2025. In the past 20 years, that growth rate is surpassed only by the pandemic and the financial crisis. How much of that strength do you feel is driven by structural factors?

Yes. So I love the question. If I take a step back, Market Services last year was 17% growth. And in equities, not only do we have a fantastic structural growth, which is driven by retail. But we also have the ability to be ahead of competitors. And so we have 74% more capture than the #2 in 2025 in equities.

I felt pretty good about that. And why is that structural? What's structural about it is it did start wit's the pandemic and with people doing more on equities. But then the ecosystem has really built upon itself, and we've seen really very steady growth and also pretty sustainable growth as we went through, I wouldn't call them real cycles since the pandemic, but many cycles. And then you go towards the future and you look at 2035 which should come towards the end of this year or the second half at least.

And we are continuing to feed that demand because now you have equities participation from the rest of the world into the U.S. ecosystem. And when you look at where we are positioned with 52% of the trading volumes and 56% of the U.S.-domiciled companies on capital markets in the U.S., we are extremely well positioned continue to have that strong capture and that strong share in a growing environment.

You filed for regulatory approval for tokenized equities?

Yes.

What types of firms are demonstrating interest so far? And when do you expect a launch date?

Yes. So we're looking at -- and we did -- and we're very pleased to get the SEC approval for the 8 stocks. So you take the MAG7 and then you add Broadcom. And then in addition to that, we had the Bitcoin ETF that is traded on Nasdaq. So those are where we started, and we've started very intentionally with a group that's super liquid and where we can do it in a very responsible way. And what has been really great about that is that it has been a little bit over a month at this point. But when you look at the volumes we have had, those volumes have actually been additive.

So when you look at it over that short but relevant period of time, we've got net volume additivity. And I was talking about our lead in terms of like equities for capture. But in options, our lead versus the #2 is really on market share. We have a 5 percentage point lead in market share. And when you take that and you say, okay, but does that hold? In fact, in those very short-term options, we've seen a share that is at or above our regular market share of options, which is at that 5 percentage point lead.

Got it. And what does the product development road map look like from here? When should we expect more 0 DTE symbols, Tuesday, Thursday options?

Yes. So we are very intentional. We want to go slowly. We want to make sure that what we do is a very intentional, responsible. And therefore, we are going to make sure that we see the indicators that we want to see. And you're right. If we see those indicators, which are net additive volume, as I just mentioned, that is starting and good feedback from retail, from the SEC, from the other interactors in the market, then we are certainly open-minded to doing more, and it could take, as you said, the form of more symbols or Tuesday, Thursday.

Got it. And where do we stand on the tokenization of cash equities proposal?

Yes. So that is something which is brand new as we were just discussing before going on stage. And since Investor Day, i.e., just this week, we announced that we are going to help the issuers be at the center of the tokenization topic. And we think it's really important to put the issuer at the center. And so our -- we are announcing that we are going to have a tokenization form for equities that will enable the issuer to be in control of its ownership rights to connect with investors to have transparency and to have governance.

And what we're doing is taking a trend which has so far not been issuer-driven, and it's our role in the market to do 2 things: preserve integrity, liquidity, transparency and make sure that we do things that are consistent with regulation. That's the first part. Second part, doing it with the issuers at the center connected to the investors. And so we think it does exactly that, and it helps to connect the fiat world with the tokenized world, and we'll work with industry participants to make sure that we can add effectively services and leveraging the composability of the tokenization.

Got it. And can you refresh us on the listings backdrop? How big is the pipeline? Where does that stand?

Yes. So if you look at where we were a year ago, we had a very strong pipeline, and we already had actually a pretty active market. When you then -- and at that point, we were for the seventh year in a row, we're the lead in terms of the proceed raised. We had the largest IPO, and we also had the largest transfer. So we feel very good about the positioning as we enter.

Then we have a very strong pipeline. It's a very diverse pipeline also, both in terms of size, including some extraordinary companies that are thinking potentially of tapping the markets, but also in different industries. And so we feel really good on that, that pipeline is there and that the private capital that has been supporting the markets is very eager to catch opportunities in the public market. We've seen activity at this beginning of the year, although the activity is probably more to come than what we have seen, given some of the volatility that we have experienced.

And how much of the pipeline is software? Just so we can get a sense of the sensitivity around that recent AI-related sell-off in the software space?

Yes. So we think of it as a small part of the pipeline, call it, 10%. And so it's not like going to be material to Nasdaq. We obviously think that it's important for all of our issuers to be rightly valued for the value that they bring to their shareholders. But from a specific pipeline point of view or impact to the financials of Nasdaq, it's not material.

Got it. And bringing us to a close, Sarah, with another look toward the future, what opportunities get you most excited over the medium term?

Yes. So in some ways, we've talked about a really broad range of things, and I tend not to say I'm more excited about this than about that. What's really exciting to me. is that we have structural change on the horizon, whether it is the structural financial markets, whether it's Gen AI. And those 2 things are accelerants for a company like Nasdaq that is extremely well positioned to win in this environment.

We believe that because we are a trusted transformation partner, and we have positioned ourselves very intentionally so to be that trusted transformation partner, we are able to capitalize on those 2 vectors of growth, in that $38 billion SAM that I talked about, and have a growth of 9% to 12% in solutions. That's a growth that we've proven in 4 of the last 5 years and that we're very, very well positioned to execute. And once you have that durable growth, you add the financial discipline, which we believe is also very important, whether it's expense, whether it's free cash flow generation, whether it's capital allocation to add value to shareholders. And so I think that there's nothing better than adding value to shareholders.

Perfect. And thank you for joining us, Sarah. This has been great.

Excellent. Thank you, Eli.

Thanks so much.

Good morning, everybody. We'll go ahead and get started here. I am Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Capital Markets Technology analyst here at Raymond James. And presenting this morning, we have Nasdaq. And on their behalf, we have Chief Strategy Officer, Jeremy Skule. Format is just going to be a Q&A fireside chat. So with that, Jeremy, welcome.

Thank you. Good to see you.

So it's great to have you here. It's your first time attending the event. So maybe just to start out, can you share your background and your role with Nasdaq?

So I joined NASDAQ 14 years ago. I joined to basically turn around their brand and reputation at a particular moment, led marketing for them. I also rebuilt the marketing function, go-to-market strategy and the whole tech stack. From there, I took over the strategy function. We introduced a new strategic framework. We codified the vision and direction the company is going to move in, worked on some new capital allocation processes and procedures, targeting some new growth vectors and then about 1.5 years ago, added to the Verafin financial crime management team and had the fortunate opportunity to work with all the great people, part of that business, and I am Executive Chairman of the Financial Crime practice as well.

Lot of hats to wear.

It's a lot of hats. It's a lot of fun.

So Nasdaq refers to itself as the trusted fabric of the world's financial system. You're the Chief Strategy Officer. Can you talk about how that role for Nasdaq extends across the company's 3 segments?

Absolutely. So we talked about really 3 pillars. One is modernizing markets; two, driving the innovation economy; and three, building financial integrity and trust into the system. And so when you think about our 3 divisions of Capital Access Platforms, when you think about our scaled Financial Technology division and you think about our Market Services division, that is what we are doing and focused on to become the trusted fabric of the financial system. And all of that wraps up in an awesome $86 billion TAM that we are going after. And so it's a huge opportunity. The team is very focused around this concept of the trusted fabric and ensuring we deliver on that for our clients.

A recurring topic during last week's Investor Day was how the 3 segments operate as One Nasdaq and how that translates to flywheels throughout the organization. What are some of those examples?

Yes. So I'll give you some that we talked about at Investor Day, and I'll just give you some other anecdotes that I think are super interesting about how our business operates. So certainly, the listings business, 7 consecutive years of most capital raise than our competitor. We have the largest switch in history in Walmart. All of that fuels our trading business, our index business. When you have the most innovative companies that are part of your index, you tend to attract great capital flows, and we've certainly demonstrated that. Our mission-critical nature of our technology, the synergies that exist across the Fintech division and what we provide our clients. We now have some of the largest banks and brokers in the world asking us what more can you do for us? And so we have a scaled financial technology division that is delivering risk, financial crime, surveillance, et cetera, to all the banks.

And then third area is really what's coming in terms of 23/5 tokenization. Those represent phenomenal opportunities for us to bring new international participants into our markets to reduce fragmentation of liquidity around the globe and then also for our data business represents a significant opportunity to grow that franchise. The anecdotes of this, I would say, are interesting to me just in the way Nasdaq works.

So when you think about our Market Services and Trading business, it is a scaled Nordic business, and we also have a financial technology sales operation that is scaled in Europe. Those relationships have been instrumental in opening doors for our financial crime business to go into Europe. Similarly, when you talk about One Nasdaq, we are scaled financial crime business in North America with 2,700-plus clients. When our listings business wants to spend time with small to midsized banks that are listed on Nasdaq or possibly going to list or transfer to Nasdaq, we leverage the Verafin relationships to create scaled opportunities for our listings franchise. So that is how One Nasdaq works. It is really a phenomenal one approach to delivering for our clients.

Very interesting. A key goal for Nasdaq has been driving resilient growth that can persist across various macro cycles. Can you drill down a bit into how that manifests itself at Nasdaq?

Absolutely. So one of the things that I really appreciate about the Nasdaq platform is the balance of the business. So when you see volatility in the markets and you may see, okay, some extreme volatility could impact possibly a slowdown in corporate activity. But usually, during that time, we are seeing phenomenal performance on the trading side of the business. And so there's a balance there.

And then what we've realized in this amazing fintech business that we've established is mission-critical technologies are durable across cycles. And we saw that across Liberation Day, and we're seeing that today, too, that these are just businesses and products that people need and want regardless of macro cycles. And so we feel really good about the balance and durability of the model that we've built, and that's what gave us a lot of confidence to raise the medium-term outlook on solutions.

Nasdaq has some businesses that can be intensely competitive, listings, which you mentioned earlier, equities and options exchanges, even some areas probably within financial technology. Why is Nasdaq winning competitively pretty consistently throughout the organization?

Yes. I would say it starts with our people, like we love to compete. And over the last decade plus, as you know, Patrick, we've seen competitors come in on listings. We've seen competitors come in on trading of equities and options. We've seen emerging fintech start-ups. We've seen all of it, and we have had success through those competitive influxes. And it's just our people love to compete.

Our products are extremely competitive. And we feel really good when we look across and you see you've got a phenomenal market services business that has more organic opportunity in front of it than I've seen. You've got a fintech business where we've got -- I think it was 1/2 of our top 300 clients are only using one product. So phenomenal opportunity there. And when you look at the listings business, the index business and our data business, they are the envy of the industry. So we've got great people, great businesses and great assets to compete.

A big theme in the conference this year has been how software and service providers may or may not face a disruptive threat from AI. I think that was a topic that Nasdaq addressed quite well last week, pointing to several aspects of your businesses that create a competitive moat. Can you touch on some of those attributes that you think are most important?

Yes. I mean, for those of you that saw the Investor Day, we had sort of like 6 attributes and then where each product kind of fit on the scale of extremely differentiated to moderately differentiated. And when you look at our product portfolio, the vast majority are extremely differentiated products. And we spent a lot of time doing analysis on these products to make sure that we could come across as credible to our investors in this analysis. And when you look at, for instance, one of the attributes was gold source data. And when -- obviously, I work with the financial crime business quite closely, our consortium data set is unmatched. It's unparalleled. And it is really, really delivering a phenomenal work product to our clients.

So it's a give-get model. And the more clients we sign up, the better the algorithms get in rooting out fraud. So we've added 700-plus clients in the 5 years that we've owned Verafin, and the model has improved dramatically. So we feel really good about that set of golden source data, and there's other products. Then you talk about like -- I'm just going to give some examples, embedded workflow and embedded subject matter expertise. And when I think about Calypso, that is a product that is extremely embedded with our clients that we bring a tremendous amount of insights to a tremendous amount of know-how and that is embedded into the product.

And then the mission-critical nature of our technology. When you think about our market technology franchise, we are running and building capital market ecosystems all over the world. But I would say that's universal in terms of the nature of our technology franchise that we build. And then you talk about secure and resilience. Obviously, when you think about security that's critical to any exchange operation, and we are able to bring that level of exchange-grade security to all of our products. And then obviously, if you're delivering for your clients, you're delivering a high level of return on investment.

And we highlighted last week several examples of delivering extremely high levels of return on investment. But in that chart, we talked about 2x return on investment, and that was something that every product in our portfolio is delivering on and well above. So this is something we're extremely passionate about. We feel like we've got a product set that is, as you highlighted, Patrick, phenomenal attributes that insulate us from any AI threats. And in fact, as Adena talked about during her presentation, we started our AI journey almost a decade ago. So we are well versed in building this technology into our product road maps and understand what it takes to make sure that our products are protected.

And then again, as you kind of building off of that point, so you also spoke last week about how your cloud capabilities and your unique data position Nasdaq to drive innovation with AI itself. What are 2 or 3 areas where you're already monetizing AI?

Yes. So one that's near and dear to my heart is the agentic workforces that we've rolled out in our financial crime business. We rolled out an enhanced due diligence agentic workforce and a sanctioned screening workforce. We have seen phenomenal interest and uptick amongst our clients. Over 350 clients are already using the product. But it will be a process as people get comfortable using agentic workforces, as risk departments get comfortable bringing this technology into the institutions. But it has been a phenomenal, phenomenal reaction from the client base. And I think it also speaks volumes about the opportunity set when you have a scaled client base that trusts your products and services, how quickly you can scale new products and initiatives into that client base.

So that is a process that we started with sort of a freemium model where they get a certain amount of usage and then we'll move into charging separately, which will be new for the financial crime business. And then we're going to take that technology and we're going to look at our surveillance business, where we're processing 1 trillion transactions a day across 200-plus countries and say, okay, if we're going to leverage agentic across these workforces, how do we take what Verafin is doing and move it into our surveillance product areas. So there's a lot of opportunity for monetization in the future. And then just so everyone's aware, we hold regular product road map reviews at Nasdaq. And within those product reviews, we are looking at the road map and how we are embedding AI technology, how we are building agentic workforces into that product road map, so we stay competitive and are delivering products that deliver for our clients.

So the AI-driven market sell-up has led to Nasdaq being aggressive recently in its share repurchase efforts. But is it also perhaps making or providing some attractive valuations as you contemplate potential tuck-in acquisitions? And related to that, as you're looking at potential M&A, you guys have kind of rolled out large-scale M&A. Kind of what's a broad framework for how you are thinking about things?

Yes. So we are extremely focused on organic growth. We've got a $38 billion SAM that's growing quite nicely, and we feel really good about the opportunity on the organic growth front. And so that is the focus today. As we think about doing potential bolt-ons, considerations would include -- does it enhance our product? Does it deliver in something as we evaluate buy versus build, is this something that we definitely feel like we can't buy? Is it additive to our financial profile? Is it something that is a cultural fit within Nasdaq? So those are the things that we are going to look at as we look on bolt-on. But I would just say this, the organic path in front of us is very real and meaningful, and that tends to be the focus right now.

Makes sense. Tokenization and always-on markets were another key topic of your Investor Day. What's a realistic time line for 24/5 trading and tokenized equities to receive SEC approval and start gaining market adoption?

Yes. It's a great opportunity in front of us. And I think when you talk to people that have been in and around the markets, they will say this is a moment in time for sure where markets are fundamentally changing and evolving. We have said that -- we see this as a second half of 2026 opportunity for 23/5. Tokenization will also take time, but we are actively engaged. And what is unique, I think, in what Nasdaq can do is we can represent the entire market. We can represent issuers and investors and bring together solutions that are compelling to both. And so that's what we're focused on doing in a regulated environment. We see this as a big opportunity certainly for our data business. We see this as an opportunity for our trading business, and we see this as something that we can bring to our issuers as another consideration for them as well. But this will take time to evolve. It definitely will.

If I can just drill down on there real quick. So you said like it's an offering that you can provide to issuers as well. Is this something that issuers are coming to you right now and saying, "Hey, this is an opportunity that we want to have better dialogue with our investors?" Or is this kind of still kind of to be determined in terms of what their attitudes about it would be?

I would say it's -- they're curious, but it's to be determined what their attitudes will be. And we want to do this when and if we do this in an issuer-friendly way.

Makes sense. Another current event topic is event contracts. And it sounds like Nasdaq is looking to get into that space via binary options contracts. How do you think about the opportunity to build a competitive moat in that space as well as the potential revenue opportunity?

So it's interesting. So we are going to do this, as you saw in our filing in a very regulated way. And we got approval for our Nasdaq 100 options, which are European-style options, which are going to basically allow -- it's a very intuitive option for retail investors, allow them to bet directionally on the movement of a Nasdaq 100 and the like. So that is something that we're focused on and implementing. And so we're excited about that. But we want to do this in a regulated manner. We want to create safe guardrails for investors, retail and institutional. And so that is the mechanism in which you're going to see us operate. But it's a first step. It's a first step, and I think you'll see more from us on this front.

Speaking of your trading businesses, you spoke last week, again, at Investor Day about how retail is now responsible for around 1/4 of U.S. equities volume and maybe 45% or so of U.S. options volumes. I think it's a fascinating topic overall, what's your growth upside from here?

So we see it as durable. One of the things -- and Patrick, you know this better, but one of the things that I'm extremely proud of at Nasdaq is we took the time over the last 5 to 7 years to invest significantly in the capacity to handle and be ready for the opportunities that are present now. And the volume growth, whether it's options or equities has been phenomenal during that time period, and retail has been a big part of that.

We see it as a durable trend, especially as we innovate on the product front. And I would tell you that the -- as I said earlier, the Market Services franchise sees a lot of organic opportunity through product innovation, to continue to stay in front of it. So the growth has been phenomenal. Obviously, it's hard to tell. We don't make predictions on volumes and things of that nature, but it seems like a very structural trend that's changing. I'm curious, do you view it as that?

I think for the most part, yes. I think just the growth of the brokerage platforms and the number of accounts they have in their education and derivatives, in particular, I think, seems very structural.

And if you think about 23/5 and if you think about tokenization and how that could evolve over the years to come, it feels like it could continue.

Yes, I think that's fair.

Yes.

Beyond Market Services, Nasdaq is now targeting 9% to 12% annual revenue growth in your collective Solutions businesses. Underlying that is an outlook for 10% to 14% growth in financial technology. What drives your optimism that financial technology can continue to post double-digit growth over the next 3- to 5-year period?

Yes. It's a great question. We feel really good about the financial technology franchise. We are seeing phenomenal engagement with our clients on the product suite that's offered. As I mentioned earlier, we're getting questions from our clients about what more can you do for us. When you think about the 300-plus that only use one product -- or excuse me, half of the 300-plus that only use one product, there's an amazing, amazing upsell muscle that's available to us that we've already been exercising on. As we talked about at Investor Day, we're about $45 million into our $100 million target.

We see that as something that -- and that's on the cross-sell. And we see that's something that's certainly achievable and that we're going after. And when I think about each of the product areas, they're experiencing really good traction with their client base. And so I know that we are -- when I look at Verafin, we're at 22-plus enterprise clients. When I look at the upsell motion across 2025 in fintech, you're at 450-plus upsells across the fintech franchise. So you're just seeing the traction in these businesses that gives us the confidence that we can stay within that range in growth.

And also, we've had certainly some market cycles that we've had to weather over the last 2 years plus and to be able to move through those cycles and achieve what we've achieved gives us a lot of confidence that we're on the right path here in that business. And on the 9 to 12 solutions growth, I think we've got a lot of levers there that we can pull to get to be within that range. But I think people should understand we've been within that range for 4 of the last 5 years. So it's something that we feel really comfortable in achieving.

Yes. That's a really good point. And one of those businesses that's helped you deliver those results has been your Index business. And you expect your Index franchise to deliver high single-digit to mid-teens annual growth over that next 3- to 5-year period, which would actually be deceleration from what it's done in the prior period; 36% of inflows into linked ETFs in 2025 came from products launched during the last 5 years. I thought that was a really interesting statistic. I think a lot of people just think it's the cues. So what are some of the areas that you're having success within index?

And 54% of the AUM came from products in the last 5 years. So it's really -- I mean, I'm sure you all know this, it's a phenomenal growth business with really attractive margins. And I would say this, this is a team of people that are constantly innovating, constantly rolling out new products and our brand is enormously helpful in attracting assets. And so while we didn't put in our sort of attributes slide brand, but when you talk to each of the business and this one in particular, brand really matters.

And so we bring a lot of credibility and trust to that and people trust the quality and the precision of the work we do in the index franchise. And so product innovation is going to continue at pace, and that's what gives us a lot of confidence in the growth of the franchise. The Qs is without a doubt an amazing anchor and certainly, in my view, the envy of the industry. But the diversification of the AUM and product set is really phenomenal, and I would expect that to continue.

Makes sense. And then lastly for me, just as we finish up here, what are some of the key takeaways that you want to make sure people walk away with them today?

Yes. For me, when I joined Nasdaq, we traded at 7x earnings. And we have built a phenomenal franchise. We have a scaled financial technology division that's growing double digits with great margins. We have a market services franchise that has got more organic opportunity in front of it than I've seen before. And we have a data listing and index business that is the envy of the industry. So we have phenomenal assets that are highly engaged with our clients and that is delivering great value for shareholders. So having been here 14 years and seeing the evolution of this organization, I'm super proud of it. But I sit here today looking out and saying, I think there's more opportunity in front of Nasdaq than any time in my tenure. And so it's a quite exciting time to be a part of this franchise, and I think we're going to do great things in the years ahead.

All right. Terrific. Well, we will wrap it up there. There will be a breakout downstairs after this. Thanks, everybody, for joining us, and thank you Jeremy.

Great. So we're going to go ahead and get started. For important disclosures, please see the Morgan Stanley research disclosure website at morganstanley.com/researchdisclosures. If you have any questions, please reach out to your Morgan Stanley sales representative.

Good morning, everyone. I'm Mike Cyprys, lead analyst covering brokers, asset managers and exchanges for Morgan Stanley Research, and it's my pleasure to welcome Sarah Youngwood, the CFO of Nasdaq.

Thanks for having me.

Many of you know -- may know Nasdaq to be a global exchange operator in recent years, Nasdaq has been transforming the business through a series of acquisitions to become a technology and platform provider to serve corporates, investment managers and financial institutions as they navigate and interact with the global capital markets and the broader financial system. So we're thrilled to have Sarah with us here today to discuss the transformation and to dig in. So welcome, thanks for joining us.

Happy to be here.

Great. So let's kick off with your Investor Day last week, spanned over 4 hours digging in to all different parts of the business. AI was a major theme, a dominant theme. So just curious what takeaways you walked away with Sarah? And why raise your bar for the medium-term solutions revenue guide and create a higher bar? Why raise your guide?

Yes. So I'll start with the key messages. So we are a leading technology company that is a trusted fabric of the financial system, and we architect the world's most modern markets. We power the innovation economy. We built trust in the system, and what we've established at Investor Day is how we're positioned in this world, which is our position for transformation with AI, which is positioned for transformation in the financial system for -- being our clients' trusted financial partner.

So it's very important here that we have now realized the scale and the relevance to be that trusted financial partner because they'll need to choose how to go GenAI, and we believe their solution is going to be very much us. So that was the first point.

The second point that we've made is that, that transformation has also generated a very strong profile of durable growth. And we'll come back to that outlook that you're referring to. And in addition, to that durable growth that is established with cycles that is well positioned for growth vectors. We actually also have financial discipline. And that is expense, capital allocation, free cash flow. And so with those in place, we have the ability to add value for shareholders on a very sustainable basis. So those were some of the key messages.

Now to your question on why raise the bar? The first answer is because we've been doing that for the last 5 years. So you've seen us increase our medium-term outlook, and we have operated, of course, within our medium-term outlook for the last 5 years. In addition, we've actually operated within this new medium-term outlook of 9% to 12% for 4 out of the last 5 years.

Then we looked at the market opportunity, and we talked about a $38 billion SAM going at 9%, we did a small retrospective to show that actually, we've outperformed based on organic growth, what we had said 2 years ago. So hopefully, we have some credibility there. And that gives us an anchor that 9% at the bottom of that 9% to 12% range.

And then lastly, we think we're very well positioned as mission-critical with additional growth opportunities in cross-sell as well as digital assets and GenAI. So with all that, we feel that we're just getting started, and we definitely were very comfortable raising that medium-term outlook.

And the guidance raise was notable because I think it was the fourth time in 4 years that you have raised your guidance.

That's right. Fourth time In 5 years, but still really good.

The market has been a bit volatile at the start of the year, maybe a bit more than many had expected with AI disruption risk, across markets, taking up a lot of mind share yet Nasdaq continues to deliver with accelerating top line growth. So what do you see as some of the biggest misconceptions that you may want to correct?

Yes. So in the last few weeks, we've seen GenAI taking a very generalized view on the sector. And we spent a lot of time at Investor Day establishing the difference and how we think about the differentiation. So first of all, gold standard data, we spent a lot of time talking about data and everything that makes most of our products at the level of gold standard data, and we didn't use those words lightly. We really detailed what that meant.

And the second piece is being mission-critical, very important to how our clients effectively do the most important things through us and also connect to the financial system to us.

The third one is hyper-resilient. The regulated institutions turn to us as a regulated institution ourselves to understand what we are doing, and what they want is really for us to understand which we do, that the cost of error is extraordinarily important. And so that hyper-resilience is incredibly important.

Then we have tremendous innovation and we embed that, we engineer that into our system. So it's domain expertise and innovation both things coming into our systems and 450 patents, just like 1 example of that.

And the connectivity, very important we talked about. And then lastly, we have the -- return to our clients. At some point, if you have all of those things, it becomes really difficult to want to do something about it. But in addition, it's not worth it financially, then why would you? So those were some of the elements that differentiate us. We spent a lot of time with that.

The last one being the enhanced ROI...

Yes exactly. We have a 2x ROIC to our clients, which is very, very strong, if you think about the investments you have to make and whether it's a great investment. It's a tremendous investment. And then in addition to that, when you think about, do I want to renew? We have also a 2x net benefit versus net costs on an ongoing basis, which, again, makes every year that decision a very easy decision.

Now Nasdaq has been on a journey for a number of years now, transforming the business. Can you talk about maybe 2 or 3 of the biggest strategic choices that Nasdaq is making today to accelerate growth and the evolution as you look out?

Yes. So I was thinking through that, and the reality is that we are extraordinarily well positioned, thanks to decisions we made more than a decade ago. And actually, we're talking about GenAI today. And if we were making the decisions today, we would be late. I'd say 12 years ago, we decided to go to the cloud. 12 years ago, Adena Friedman, our CEO, became the CEO of the data business and realize the importance of data, both offensively and defensively. 10 years ago, we got started on AI. And all of the nomenclature and organization of the data, all of that skill set positions us extremely well for GenAI.

So now, of course, we are not sitting on those decisions from 10 years ago. In addition, we have an ROIC framework to prioritize internal organic investments. And we have talked at Investor Day about how we are doing things through a new growth framework, which is expand within our TAM or SAM, then evolve as we really evolve the technologies and the delivery to our clients within our SAM. So that's taking from the TAM and going into the SAM.

And then lastly, transform. And there are some important changes to the financial industry with tokenization with 23/5 private markets and of course, transforming the client experience through GenAI for our clients. And so the great news is that we were able to do that today, which is really growth-oriented because we have the foundation we laid 10 or more years ago.

So let's dig in a bit on that growth framework. We'll come back to the latter points on transform. But look, a key component of your strategy across the fintech business is to land and expand. So can we talk about where you're having some of the most success there without maybe getting overly granular, can you frame cross-sell in terms of the pipeline, attach rates, conversion timing?

Yes. So one of the things you guys always like, stats. So we started with telling you, 20% is the land. That's new clients. And then it is for fintech and then 80% is the expand and that would be upsells, cross-sells and everything else. So when you think about debt, we actually had 460-plus upsells, just last year in 2025.

And if I talk with upsells, that upsell can be very powerful, like 2 examples. One would be in India where Tal described that a large bank was taking us for 1 single implementation. And then we were able to give them the full coverage for an Indian bank. That was a 3x on the ACV. So upsell can be very powerful.

A second example would be Verafin. We talk with enterprise very much about lending with wire fraud. And in 2 cases already, we've been able to extend with ACH, and that multiply the ACH by 2. So that's the upsell. And then on cross-sell to your question, First of all, we've got this $100 million plus target, which we're very well positioned to achieve that year-end 2027 run rate.

And we have already 42 of them, $45 million of the target is already signed. And we have seen an acceleration. We have a nice graph in our Investor Day that shows really an exponential graph showing how we've delivered those 42 cross-sells.

In addition, we have a great pipeline as we have been talking for a while, it's important to maintain that pipeline. And so it's growing at 20%, and it represents 15% of our fintech pipeline. And then when you have all of that, you also think through, okay, what's my baseline. Well, we've got top 300 clients, which are the ones that really actually need more than 1 client, only half of them have more than 1 client -- more than 1 product.

So again, just a lot of opportunities to depend to cross sell to penetrate further.

Maybe we could dig in a bit on the sales initiative, sales team here. Maybe talk about how you're aligning incentives across the sales organization to avoid single product selling. It seems like there's a big opportunity of only half of your top 300 clients have more than 1 product. So more broadly, what adjustments have you made to the sales team and the approach over the last couple of years? And where might there be scope for further tweaks as you look out from here?

Yes. So as soon as we did the come AxiomSL and Calypso acquisition, we said, 1 sales team, and we started literally in that January with 1 sales team. That was very important. It's also 1 incentive framework. And that is very important because that incentive framework does give credit to the cross-sell and to driving that motion.

The other thing we've done is on the top accounts, which doesn't go as deep as the 300. But on the top accounts, we've done a One Nasdaq representative. So we've got the ability to look at it as 1 firm and to make sure we're hyper coordinated. And then to complement that, you've got the C-suite relationships on both sides at Nasdaq as well as at the client to make sure that we are very much listening to our clients and continue to do things that are important to our clients to drive that cross-sell has transformation partner that I talked about, which is really critical at this time because they are looking at the world out. Everybody needs to do something. And we feel and we're hearing from our clients that we're very well positioned to be the transformation partner, and that means taking more from us.

In the fourth quarter, your Verafin business launched 2 agentic workers. let's talk about that. Can you speak to some of the learnings you've had and what the client take-up has been on that? And more broadly, can you speak to some of your ambitions and aspirations for agentic AI at Nasdaq in the next 12 months versus if you look out over the next couple of years?

Yes. And so if you're looking at Verafin, we launched in the fourth quarter, our first agentic worker. We followed it within 2 months with our second one. And today, we have 6 that are already planned, in the road map. And that is really working with our clients, looking at the areas where efficiency can be most importantly achieved and actually starting to build that fleet of workers.

And we already have 350 clients that are working on a daily basis. with our 2 workers that are available. And so that's a very, very fast adoption for something that is pretty much brand new, and that helps to create for our clients, the ROIC case for them to be able, at some point when they are past the [ $3 billion ] period to actually pay additional upsell fees to be able to continue to have those workers.

So that has worked very well. We think it's very important for all the clientele, and that's also very powerful. So the small- and medium-sized banks are the ones that are the majority of those 350 that are currently engaging with it. And then it applies also to medium-sized banks and we're hearing very much from the large enterprise banks that this could be very interesting as an upsell for them. And you know that they are the ones who have the largest population that could be very much in target for those efficiency gains.

Great. And what would you say is one of the most compelling AI initiatives that maybe you're most excited about that investors may be underappreciating today.

So that's always the hard question. Which of my children do I prefer, in real life I have 3 but in this life, I have a lot of children. But I'm going to pick 1 that is, in fact, not Verafin because that's one that is quite appreciated by the market. But that also addresses fraud. In this case, Surveillance is addressing the trading fraud. What's really interesting about Surveillance is the scale of what it process, 1 trillion daily messages across 215 million marketplaces or data sources, including our clients' input.

And so then you take that and you normalize it, you consolidate it across our proprietary way of doing it, which we've established for a very long time. You add technology, including more recently, AI, that's where AI comes in. And suddenly, you were able to deliver on a daily basis 250,000 alerts. Then you've got the collective intelligence that starts working for you where clients actually give us feedback on those alerts, which then inform back the process and on what we are very fortunate is that we have the right contractually to evolve our understanding to improve the product and to train the alerting system with the data of our clients on an aggregated and anonymized basis.

So then when you have all of that, you end up with something that's very valuable, especially because this is a principle based type of regulation. So if you think about rules-based, you do this very specifically. But principle-based, it's like you, shouldn't do that kind of things. But it doesn't give you exactly the time. It doesn't give you the specifics. So it's very important to look through the learned experience of not just 1 client, but all of the clients and then apply GenAI through those signals to be able to actually derive conclusions and feed that feedback loop.

And so that's what we're doing with GenAI right now. That's what you couldn't do with 1 client data set, but we've become the standard of doing it and adding detection through all of the things I've described. And then lastly, we also are positioned to start doing some agentic workflows to then process those alerts even more efficiently. So that's an example. And again, I could spend a lot of time on all of our examples that I have a lot of passion for. So this one, we speak bit less.

Very helpful. Why don't we move on and talk about some of your other businesses and get to the transform element of the strategy? But first, let's talk about index. Nasdaq has an incredible brand and a set of listed companies, including many that are here at our TMT conference. And so just curious how you're thinking about some of the biggest opportunities to broaden monetization of your index business and how you're attacking this?

Yes. So this has been something which we've been continuing to do since our last Investor Day. So just for scale, 2025, we grew at 20%. Last 5 years, we were at 21% and we had in 2025, $99 billion of inflows, and that's on $882 billion of AUM in 2025. So it has become quite an important part of what we do. And we have 3 pillars of growth.

The first one is adding products, new capabilities for our clients. And so, we have added over 200 products in the last 2 years, which is 50% faster than the previous 2 years. If you think about that $99 billion of inflows that I have given you. Those new products are 36% of the $99 billion. So that new product capability is a very important part of how we are generating alpha.

The second pillar is international. And so here on we've been growing even faster than the 21% in the last 5 years. We've been growing at 34% in international. And it's not a small base anymore. And now it's $163 billion at the end of '25 in international AUM in the ETP AUMs. So this is very significant and it's really across the world in terms of geographies where we are operating.

Then you're looking at institutional. And again, you're recognizing those themes from not just this Investor Day, but 2 years ago, this has been something that we've been evolving in a very steady and very productive manner. And so institutional is a $700 billion opportunity where we've been gaining market share. We've been growing at 20%, and it's now $66 billion. So again, starting to become an important part of what we have.

While we're on Capital Access Platforms, which the index business is part of, when we talk about listings, you previously noted some optimism around a strong IPO pipeline for this year. So question is what needs to happen for that to translate into a sustained multiyear listing cycle. And then what implications might there be to IPO activity over time should tokenization of private companies gain traction?

So maybe a step back, in 2025, was the seventh year where we were the leading exchange in terms of proceeds raised. We also had the largest IPO once again. And we also had the largest transfer Walmart to our exchange, and so very well positioned.

The pipeline is very much there. So last year, we had 180 companies in the pipeline at the time of the year, 210 this year. What's going to be important is, of course, to have an environment, what is windows, pockets of stability where people can have confidence in actually going public. There is tremendous appetite both from the companies and their owners. for that to happen. And so we believe that with a little bit of stability, which today might be a difficult day to say that.

And we should be extremely well positioned on -- what's also very attractive about the pipeline that I referred to is that how broad it is. It's not 1 sector. It's AI, it's space. It's like -- many different types here, also different sizes of companies, including some of a very, very large scale, which we are very much ready for, should they come to market.

So those are the elements now in terms of like multiyear cycle, it's already difficult enough to talk about 1 year. But what really makes a difference to investors, and I think you would certainly agree with that as investors is, to have the performance of those who go continue to show that there is interest in the following ones.

So this is very much a virtuous cycle. And so we certainly, along with banks like Morgan Stanley, work to make sure that we strike the right balance to make sure that there is a great experience for both the sellers and the buyers in those processes.

So in terms of tokenization when you try to think about the liquidity, the depth, the transparency, the nano seconds at which we operate, there's nothing today that matches the depth of the public market. You're talking about $127 trillion versus $15 trillion for the private markets. And so tokenization can be additive to being a public company. But it's not a replacement. We're not seeing it as being a replacement for that.

So you don't see cause for if tokenization gains traction, private companies could stay private for longer and may not need to raise capital and go public?

What you need is the scale that I talked about, the $127 trillion, with the integrity, with the price discovery with the transparency. And so we actually are working on tokenization ourselves. And we talked about that at investor Day too, because we want to be part of it, and we think it's a very, very good technology that can be additive, but it can be added if you're making it part of the process of being a public company rather than not accessing that massive pool of liquidity through being a public company.

Great. Speaking of market structure, innovations, 1 of the other things that we have seen a lot of traction of late is the short-dated options that continue to grow across the index space, but you recently got regulatory approval and launched a set of short-dated options and select named stocks with Monday and Wednesday expiries that complement the Friday expiry. So questions here, what do we need to see for Tuesday, Thursday expiries to come online? What do we need to see for this to expand beyond, I think, in the initial 8 symbols. And then what are the considerations that you're taking into an account here, what may come first and what's been the feedback and action that you've seen?

Yes. So this is a space where we're being very intentional on we're being actually quite slow but intentionally. So we are being very resilient in the way we want to structure it. So we're starting with, as you said, 8 securities, the MAG 7, plus Broadcom plus IBIT, which is the Bitcoin BlackRock, ETF that is on our market Nasdaq. So if you take those, they're very, very liquid and they are a very good place where you can actually have 0DTE. Then we're watching it. And what we've observed for the approximately 1 month that it has been in place is actually that the volume, the net volume has been additive. So that's 1 of the things that's very important to watch.

The second thing is we are listening to the market participants' feedback, whether it's retail, whether it's the SEC, whether it's other participants. And it's all right now, very, very well received. So to see a need for Tuesday or Thursday or for additional securities, we would give it a bit more time to continue to see those additional volume. By the way, our market share has also been really interesting. We have a very large market share. We have a 5 percentage point versus the #2 in options. And in those 0DTE over the short period we've been observing it, we've actually had that or more in market share also.

So seeing that everything is operating as we intended that we're seeing net additions and that we are in volumes and that we're seeing a very orderly and good feedback from the market. It's going to be important to want to do more. And again, we would do it in this very slow intentional measured way.

Fair enough. One of the pillars under your Transform agenda, if you will, in terms of the growth initiatives is to expand market hours. So 23/5, you've outlined plans to enable 23/5 equity trading in the second half of this year, pending regulatory approval and industry alignment. So where are you seeing demand, to offer such extended hours, how might you size the volume opportunity compared to what you already do today in the pre-trade and as well as the after trade -- after hour session and talk about what the path looks like here?

Yes. So we think 23/5 is very much an exciting opportunity. You are seeing in our data already that there is great appetite coming from international players to participate in the U.S. markets. So if I go back to that set of $127 trillion that I gave you, half of that is in the U.S. So it's a really -- and the rest of the world is sharing in 16%, 16%, 3%, 4%, small numbers. And so the rest of the world would like to operate in their trading hours. And we're very fortunate to have that.

And now what we need to do is to see the volumes come in, is to make sure that we have the right liquidity, joined that session in other people's trading hours, and also the right operational framework. And so we're working with the industry to make sure that we put in place the guardrails to have all of that. And we expect the volumes to start probably slow because I think everybody is going to want to go in it in a measured way, but it could accelerate over time.

And it's 23, not 24.

We like 23/5. That doesn't mean that over time, it couldn't go to further than that. But again, back to as you do it, you want to do it with enough liquidity and you want to do it with enough operational maturity. So we think 23/5 is a very good place. And of course, we need to have regulatory approval and the other infrastructure market participants ready. We're going to be ready in the second half of this year.

So it's the operational resilience systems need a little bit of downtime, I suppose, for updates and other sort of things.

Yes. And also, I mean, so far, we are not seeing that much demand for the weekends. And so we want to make sure that liquidity there when it is open.

Fair enough. With the remaining couple of minutes we have left, when do we bring it all together across the market, solutions, fintech, capital allocation, how should investors think about Nasdaq's long-term growth algorithm the scope for margin expansion as the business continues to become more software data-centric and a platform company.

Yes. So if you start with this medium-term outlook, solutions, medium-term outlook that we started with, that 9% to 12% is very much founded in the macro topics that I talked about at the beginning. But if you go in it by division, we took Capital Access Platforms from 5% to 8% to 6% to 10%. And we just talked about 23/5 as a driver for data. That's certainly 1 of the accelerants but data in general has very strong structural growth associated.

And we also talked about index and index has a lot of alpha drivers, which are continuing to drive the Capital Access Platforms growth rate. In fintech, we talked about the upsell and cross-sell motions, which are extraordinarily important and we talked about GenAI. We touched on tokenization. There was more than what we touched upon there. When you take all of that and the critical nature of our solutions, we see the possibility over time to continue to grow within our 10% to 14% range.

Then Market Services, we've got a tremendous share. We've got a tremendous capture. We're balancing those 2 things. We have leadership versus the next competitor in both of those, and with that position, we are able to then create new areas of growth. And we talked about 0DTE being one of the examples, but Index option is a very important driver, too. So we're not just growing our pie. We have structural trends that are favoring that we have new opportunities to create alpha even in market services. So with that, we've got durable growth, and that is profitable growth.

You are 400 basis points of efficiencies. And we say 400 basis points, I'm talking about the last 2 years since Investor Day from 52% to 56% operating margin. And so now you have us at a rule of 70. So there are only 18 companies that are in S&P 500, and that are actually above the rule of 60. And so that is rule of 60 with scale of $5 billion of revenue or $2 billion of free cash flow and 8% growth. And we're 1 of 18 that belong to that very good group, and we are at 70, 12% and 58%, a 12% revenue growth and 58%. So then you take all of that and you add free cash flow, free cash flow conversion is at 109% on an absolute basis and related basis extraordinary. That enables us to do a lot with our capital allocation.

And we shared how much we've done, for example, in share repurchases of $500 million since the beginning of the year, the focus on organic growth and the possibility to add bolt-ons to the extent that it augmented organic growth. And certainly, you have a mix of growth investments, capital return to add sustainable value to shareholders.

Great. Well, I'm afraid we're out of time. It's very helpful. Appreciate your time, Sarah. Please join me in thanking Sarah Youngwood.

Thank you.

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]

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]

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

So how has that, the data consortium fit in?

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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]

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]

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]

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?

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.

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.

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]

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.

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.

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.

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.

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]

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]

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

We can go to Mike Cyprys in the middle.

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?

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

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.

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.

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

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?

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

Yes. Brad, any comments you have?

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

I'm going to go to Ben.

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?

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.

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

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?

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...

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

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.

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.

We can go to Mike Cho.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

One more question?

Yes.

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