Chat, I'm here to interview Noémie, the CFO. It's going to be 30 minutes in total. I'm going to ask about 20 minutes of questions, and I want to inspire you to have the last 10 minutes of questions. So Noémie, you're in the seat now about seven months. We probably sat down long format when you were really early in the seat. But now it's a nice period of time. And obviously, you have a big history at what we call Ceridian now?
Dayf orce.
Dayforce, sorry. I covered Ceridian in the mid-1990s, so it's a little hard for me. But what I wanted you to do is just tell us, what have you learned?
Yeah, no, so it's a pleasure to be here. It's been an incredibly busy year so far and very exciting times. As you would expect, I've spent some time with Mike and Steve and their business leaders. I traveled to a lot of our offices. I was in London a couple of weeks ago. I'm going to India, where we have 2,000 more employees. And it's been a great learning to see the different parts of our businesses. Obviously, it's been a strong year for our ratings business. We would have rated at the end of the year over 6 trillion of debt. Our rating action is going out every 20 minutes. So it's been a great year for me to join and really spend some time with our ratings colleagues.
And then we just had our conference two days ago, our leadership conference in the MetLife Stadium, where we talked about not only the great achievements we've accomplished in 2024, but also what's to come for 2025 and beyond. And the theme was bending the curve. So a lot of excitement in the room around the new brand and the change, the opportunity ahead for both businesses, ratings, and analytics. And so yeah, it's been a great year, exciting time to join, and a lot of great prospects for both sides of our businesses.
Okay, great. Obviously, you come from a very successful SaaS subscription company. And when we talk about MA, we talk about it as heavily subscription for good reason. But there's still transformation going on in MA. And it's not a singular scaled SaaS company from where you came from. So now that you have your experience and you've come to MA and you've really diligenced it, how far along are we in that transformation? And what will be the results when we're sort of further?
Yeah, so as you pointed out, Moody's Analytics may be helpful to kind of unpack a little bit the different components of our businesses there. We have our largest fixed income research business that's about $800 million in AR. That's been growing at high single digits, mostly subscription based, and that's obviously not going to change. Then we have our data feed and data business that builds on that research, but also other third-party data components that's also under subscription. And that's another third roughly of our AR today. Those two components fuel our decision solution workflows, which is where we still have some components of customers and solution sets that are on-premise. So we're working to build a platform not only in our banking, but also insurance sectors to really drive customer adoption and more cross-selling opportunities.
So we still have, if you think about insurance business, when we acquired RMS, we had maybe 50 customers on the insurance platform. We now have over 250. So we've been really focused on building that platform that then enables us to cross-sell some of the catastrophic models of RMS to existing life insurance customers to provide other opportunities to leverage Gen AI capabilities and so on. And then in the banking sector, that's the same. We still have, as you said, some customers on-premise that are, and the goal is to migrate gradually those customers over to the platform so that they can benefit from the depth and breadth of our solution, including the innovative components around Gen AI.
So looking at MA, specifically the organic ARR, and I do like the definition of ARR, it dipped to 9% in the third quarter, but you're still guiding for a robust year on MA organic ARR. In other words, acceleration into the fourth quarter to get the year inside the guide. What needs to go right?
Yeah, as you said, we grew our ARR about 10% in the first half, even 10.4% in the second half. We've had a little bit of headwinds from the attrition in banks and overall financial institutions earlier in 2023 and 2024 that has a bit weighed in on our growth rate. This is the reason we've widened our guidance amongst a couple of other factors. Having said that, if you step back, we're still expecting to grow a $3 billion business at high single digit, which is pretty remarkable. We have a strong sales pipeline. We are in the midst of our busiest quarter. Q4 is obviously a selling season quarter. We have a strong pipeline coming into December. It's actually 50% higher than it was last year.
Part of it, a lot of it comes from activities that we've undertaken, took in the summer to really build additional pipeline, having in-person sales, meeting demos, et cetera, a lot more engagement with our customers. Obviously, we'll have to see how the year plays out, but we have a significant pipeline of renewals, large transaction businesses, but also volume businesses that we aim to close, and a lot of great opportunities in KYC and insurance, among others.
Can I just make sure I understand that 50% sales pipeline is growing? I mean, at first, it just sounds like an amazing figure, but my thought maybe is that things aren't closed, so they're just sort of staying in the pipeline longer. Is this 50% figure super duper encouraging like it sounds, or maybe it's really describing a slower-moving decision?
We, as you would imagine, expect from us. We have a pretty religious approach when it comes to pipeline monitoring, analytics, and we look at things like stalled opportunities, how long they stay in the pipeline without making any movement. We look at new pipeline generation from not only the volume business, but also large transactions, what are the probability of close, and a lot of different metrics that you would expect us to follow. That pipeline expansion that you're referring to and that we talked about in the earnings call is really stemming from increased focus.
That's something I really was really heavily focused on when I joined, is really working with our salespeople to not only build our pipeline maybe in the upcoming first or second quarter, but look also longer term because those certain sales cycles take a lot more time to materialize, and you need to anticipate those things. To answer your question, we feel really good about the quality of our pipeline. We've spent a lot of time over the summer, again, doing a lot of demo in-person meetings, and those metrics around meeting activity has really ticked up a lot.
So last year, Rob was in the seat here, and I asked him, how does he think about the medium-term MA guide of low to mid-teens? That's annual growth. And he used the word punchy, just so you know. I know you weren't hired yet, but that is the word he used. What word would you use for those ambitions and the achievability of them?
Yeah, I think.
Medium term.
Yeah, we've talked about, and we've been pretty open about the fact that those are aspirational targets to really help drive behavior, and we spent a lot of time over the past couple of days in our leadership conference to really articulate the different components that will get us there, not only in terms of top-line expansion, but also margin expansion and scale. So there's a lot of excitement at the same time, understanding that we're not there yet, and we have certain things that we need to continue to evolve, so our focus is really around a few things I would point out. One is really continuing to build our platforms such that we can move away from those on-premise or other less faster-growing components of our product portfolio, focusing on cloud-based insurance and banking workflows as well as KYC, so that's one thing.
By doing that, we also expand our ability, especially in KYC, leveraging our database and Orbis to cross-sell and even land customers outside of our traditional financial services customer segment. So we have evolved our go-to-market to be able to address the needs of customers in corporate and government sectors. Because if you think about catastrophic models that we sell in RMS, they're also very relevant to assess your supply chain risk if you're a customer in the corporate sector or in the government, as an example, or to assess the effect of those climate events in your real estate portfolio, in your footprint for factories and plants and things around those lines. So we're evolving our go-to-market to be able to serve the needs of those two customers and at the same time moving away and build more workflows capabilities in our SaaS platform.
Right. So you're holding these targets for your broader team.
I think what we've said is, when absent a major catalyst that would make us revise those, we're holding. We will talk more about this in February, as you said. But I would tell you, in the last couple of days, we spent a lot of time looking at how we're going to bend the curve. That was the theme of the two days. And that's something that people are very excited about.
Okay, so what should we know about bending the curve?
the end, there's two different components. I've talked about the initiatives that we're developing on the MA to fuel the top-line growth, but we also have, obviously, margin expansion target. We published our medium-term target of mid-30s. So there's a lot of actions and efficiency initiatives we're implementing around the use of Gen AI, but also through the platforming of our insurance and banking businesses to really leverage, build it once and sell it many times, which I think is a recipe for scale in the long term. In our ratings business.
Before we move on, that mid-30s margins, you would have called that aspirational. You would say, that's our target, right?
Yeah, we've published them some time ago. You've seen us making some pretty steady progress. We purposely invested this year, and we've talked about this earlier in February, to fuel our product development capabilities. We embedded Gen AI again in our workflows. So we've made some investments to really fuel the long-term growth. But yes, that's what we're committed to, expanding the MA margin. If you think about the business, 95% of it is recurring. We're building platform elements to be able to cross-sell more, and we're landing new customers in a complete white space for us. I think there's no reason we can't get there.
Okay, great. It's obvious that RMS has been a huge success, maybe as big of a success as BvD was when acquired or since acquired in 2017. RMS goes back to 2021. Is it time for a scaled acquisition for Moody's, and is it necessary?
So just want to thank you for acknowledging our track record with BvD and RMS. I think if you think about RMS when we acquired it, I wasn't there, but I heard there were some eyebrows.
I was nervous.
And it was probably growing at 1% and then margin in the high teens, and now it's.
The company was a challenger in that.
Yeah, it was just in the second attempt at building their cloud platform. Now we've leveraged that cloud platform in our insurance business. We now have over 250 customers. We had, what, like 50 when we acquired RMS, less lower than that. So that's been a really great success, and that's a proof point that we can really build a platform that allows us to cross-sell.
It was as envisioned. It really was.
For Orbis, I think we cover a lot of private companies that we continue to see the benefit of even seven years after. We continue to invest to extend the solutions that we deliver for the insurance sector and beyond. You've seen us making a recent acquisition with Praedicat, where we now have expanded our ability to serve the casualty market, which we think is as big as the property market. We've acquired earlier this year Aible AI, which gave us some pretty good talents to build workflows in the banking space, leveraging, again, Gen AI and more automated tools. So you would expect us to continue to do that and do acquisitions to enhance our offering and then see if an opportunity materializes and makes sense for us. We reserve the rights to look at it.
But as you would expect, I won't comment on whether there's something bigger that we're considering because we're really focused on, again, landing new customers, expanding in our existing footprint, and building the solution set and complementing it. And sometimes it comes by acquiring existing capabilities as opposed to spending the capital to build it yourself.
Okay, so I'm just going to mention D&B is up for sale.
You know I won't comment on anything like that.
I don't know. Others have commented on it, actually. But okay, no problem. No problem. Is commercial credit an area that you want to increase? To me, when you did BVD, all I could tell you is the big success of BVD was leveraging everything else but commercial credit.
If you think about landing customers in corporate and government sectors, we have a lot of use cases that are very compelling today for those customers in that segment. If you think about supply chain risk management, that's an area where we can already leverage the existing assets to build workflows and solution sets for supply chain risk management, partnering with some players also in that space to feed our data into their existing workflow. That's an example of an additional use case that we're building.
I don't know if you know it, but there was an election last week. I know it's like half of a conversation. We haven't even mentioned the election. My question is.
Refreshing, actually.
It is. It is. I'm just like, we have to get there. So really, I'm talking about the MIS side of the business. Is this a clear positive, or is it more mixed in terms of a Trump administration or Republican sweep?
So I'd start by saying we've been around for 115 years, and we've been through different election cycles. We've worked with both administrations. So I don't think election in itself has a significant bearing on the way we're looking at our business. If you step back, our growth algorithm is really predicated on GDP growth. And then you add a bit of pricing power, value selling, and then other expansion in other markets like private credit, domestic markets, sustainable finance. That gets you to high single-digit growth in the mid to high single-digit growth in the long term. And regardless of any election outcome, that's what we've delivered. Now, I would say we've talked a little bit about short-term, our 2025 insurance environment. And I'd say we're probably more constructive. The balance of tailwind and headwinds is probably more oriented towards tailwinds. We have spreads at historically low levels.
We have, obviously, M&A. We'll have to see when that starts to pick up again. The M&A activity has been muted for the past couple of years. We have a lot of dry powder at private equity funds. Companies are sitting on a lot of cash. We have our interesting leading indicator with our rating assessment services business that's performing quite well. Now, the timing between we do those rating assessments and the timing that transaction actually happened can be elongated, but that's a good indicator that M&A might probably come back at some point. So in balance, I think we're more constructive on 2025, but we'll have to see.
Post-election? Or this was an election question.
Yeah, it's just in general. If you look at the environment, again, the spreads have remained tight throughout the year. They're actually tight right now.
Yep. That's always possible.
You can see, again, the maturity wall. We just published our study. Maturity walls have gone up significantly, especially in spec grade. So those are all indicators of constructive issuance environment.
Right, but when I think about particularly refi and the refi walls, I think of two things. I don't just think about tight spreads, which is positive. I think about the level of rates as well, and it just seems like with the current vows of the Trump incoming administration is that it's very possible what they'll do is inflationary, and even though interest rates are dropping, they might drop more slowly now.
But you look at the overall.
Is that a factor?
You look at the overall cost of debt and with spreads remaining tight, I think there's still.
You think that's more important. Okay, great. Why don't we open it up for questions? So you said more positive after the election, right?
No, I said in general, if I look at the way, listen, I think election the only other thing I would say about the election that we've seen some pull forward of activity in 2024 because people actually were advised and rightly so to come out before potential volatility. But that's something we had anticipated. That's something that's in our guidance. This is nothing that we didn't know coming into the year.
I would agree with you, yeah.
And then, if you look at the long-term driver of our business, we have not only the existing maturity walls, but we also are working to enhance our franchise and private credit. We have sustainable finance. We have domestic market. You've seen us do an acquisition with the leading franchise in Africa this year. So I would look at it in a more macro level than just the impact of the election because, as I said, we've been through a lot of different cycles over the years.
Okay, great. Go ahead.
I was just hoping you could elaborate a little bit on the company's efforts and priorities with respect to private credit.
Private credit.
Yeah, sure. So I'm sure you know this, but we've established a dedicated private credit team earlier this year that's building on existing talents we had within the organization. And so we have now the co-head of the FIG franchise is now also leading our private credit effort throughout the firm. We've had very encouraging dialogue with the large players in the space. And you've heard, I'm sure, Apollo in their Investor Day calling out the significant role that credit agencies will have to play in that market to provide comparability, transparency amongst the different actors in that space. And so we're pretty encouraged about that. Rob spends a lot of time with the players in private credit too.
I think we have the direct lending, obviously, piece, but we also have a fund finance business that we like LBO funds, a lot of different products there to serve the needs. The only thing I would say, it's just there's ratings of specific companies and instruments, but there are also different flavors of risk assessments for those different companies. If you think about BDCs or portfolios within those BDCs, we can also provide different types of rating assessments for those portfolio companies. That's something that we were pretty excited about.
Could you say at this point that it's a net positive for Moody's?
I think we were probably more defensive 18 months ago than we are right now. We're pretty encouraged by all the dialogue and discussions with the big players. Again, the fact that Apollo is calling out the role that credit agencies will have to play is pretty encouraging.
I'll tell you the piece that I still find hard to research is just knowing the amount of debt that gets issued in private credit that, let's say, if it was in the capital markets, would have got rated, but now it didn't get rated. It's just hard to track that. You could obviously track everything that you've gotten rated.
That's true. But I think to your question earlier, I think we're probably viewing it as, at the end of the day, investors will need to get comparable assessment of the profile of the companies they invest in. And I think that's where we have a big role to play.
Sure. Okay. Other questions? Anyone else? Questions? Go ahead, Rob.
Ram from TD Asset Management. How are you thinking about what's happened over the last 10, 15 years? You have obviously seen a deleveraging cycle. Companies are more free cash flow positive where we are today. How do you think about how ratings are going to increase over the medium term?
So the thing that I would encourage you to look at if you haven't done so yet is our refi wall study. We publish that every October, and you look at the maturity walls over the upcoming four years, and you have the different breakdowns between U.S., EMEA, and different regions. The maturity walls over the next four years have increased significantly, and if you look at spec grade specifically, it's up 19% from the last study that we've published, and if you look at the U.S., it's even up to 27%. So that's one indicator of how we're looking at the long-term profile of our business. We also look at debt velocity, so how much the stock of debt has grown over time and how much issuance has been growing, and we are not yet to the historical debt velocity levels. We think there's still upside to that.
So those are indicators that we look at as we're building not only upcoming year guidance, but longer-term growth expectations for the business.
Good, and maybe can you comment on the partnership with MSCI and what sort of strategic fit you're seeing and what sort of upside is there?
Yeah, so we've announced the partnership. I believe it was in the second quarter. What we've done here is we're providing. The goal was to really look at customers' needs in terms of ESG scoring content. And we came to the conclusion that those needs were better served with leveraging MSCI data points than continuing to build on our existing assets. So we've actually partnered with MSCI to feed their ESG scoring and ESG content into our own products so that customers can consume that. And then on the flip side of it is we're working with MSCI to see how we leverage our Orbis database to serve the needs of the private market. They have the largest distribution network in private market with LPs and GP networks. So we're working on that. It's still early days, but we're pretty excited about the partnership.
So I'm going to be a little annoying. I hope that's okay. Sorry, I'm a research analyst. On the conference call, I asked about organic revenue growth. The company does not consistently disclose revenue growth when it's small acquisitions. And I find it helpful to ask on the call. Rob answered with the answer that the ARR is organic. And that's true. And I do like the definition of ARR here. But I'm going to give you another opportunity. And Rob's not here. Would you be willing to tell us how much GCR contributed to MIS revenues in the third quarter?
So I would say maybe just, and I get to your specific question around GCR, but just on Praedicat, we were very clear there was no revenue contribution in the third quarter. We primarily acquired a very solid customer base with a very good platform that we can cross-sell to our existing customers. It's not so much a revenue play. It's more like a customer acquisition, a technology asset that we're buying instead of creating our own solution sets for the casualty market. And so if you look at those two combined, there's probably less than 0.4% of our total revenue. So really, the reason we're not spending more time disclosing those is really in terms of actual dollar of contribution in revenue. Those are the reasons we're doing those deals.
I understand, but I would say that 0.4% revenue growth, if it was compounded, has a meaningful effect on shareholder value.
Yeah, well, here, I think it becomes then I think what we're looking to do with things like Praedicat is really enhance our ability to cross-sell our existing products to those customers and vice versa. So it then becomes very hard to kind of continuing to track separately. It's really one portfolio that we want to build to serve the needs of an expanded customer base. But we take your point, and I think always welcome to look at enhancements to our disclosures and take any feedback into consideration.
Which is similar to all the other companies in the space. Other questions? No, I mean, why don't I just turn it back to you? What am I not asking you? Obviously, I know I'm very diligent about asking certain questions, but I'm sure there's subjects that you want to talk about that I haven't.
Oh, I think we've touched on all the themes that were very prominent over the past couple of days. If I think about what we talked about with Rob and the management team and the extended management team like we did in the past couple of days, we talked about areas of growth for our great analytics business and how we're going to really continue to expand the TAM, continue to expand our margin on that business. So we touched on that. And then on the rating side is really how do we build not only to sustain the volume of this year or next year, but also be relevant in the agency of choice in the next 120 years.
So we're making investments in that business as well around our workflow, around making sure that our analysts are equipped with the best tools and capabilities to continue to provide the best-in-class ratings. And those are things that get me really excited and that we spend a lot of time talking about.
Right. How's morale and company culture?
I found the company culture and that's something I've said quite a bit in the different investors' discussions I've held over the past few months. I found that to be one of the most surprising, not that I was expecting anything different, but I'm very, very amazed by the culture at Moody's, the intellectual strengths in Rob's business, which is not surprising considering what we do, but everybody I've spoken to is really sharp, really smart, very generous with their time. It's just a pleasure to be working around the Moody's crew, and I'm really looking forward to continue to travel the different offices.
Yeah, and you moved to New York for this job.
I did.
It's a big deal. Last question. Obviously, we'll be sitting together a year from now. And what do you think will be important a year from now if you could try to look in the crystal ball that we're not really yet talking about here today as it pertains to Moody's book of business?
I think we've touched on the major components that we're really focused on. We really focus on execution, I think, focus on things we control, and I think we have great opportunities in both businesses to bend the curve, and we've talked about the components of that, so I think I would say I hope that we will be able to talk about how well executed we would have driven the business over the next year.
Sounds good. Thank you very much.
Yeah, thanks for your time.
All right. Good afternoon, everybody. My name is Michael Cho. I'm the J.P. Morgan equity analyst here covering Nasdaq. And welcome to the 2:30 P.M. session with Nasdaq's Chair and CEO, Adena Friedman. So Adena, welcome again.
It's great to be here.
Thank you for coming. Look, for format, we will do about 20 minutes of Q&A, and then we'll do the last 5-10 minutes opening up for audience Q&A and call it a wrap. Adena, again, I'll just kick off big picture. You've been with Nasdaq 30-plus, and I think you're entering your ninth year of CEO tenure. You've seen a lot. You've been through a lot, multiple cycles, multiple administrations. Clearly, Nasdaq's on this strategic journey over the last number of years and kind of a business mix shift and really changing the way you deliver value to clients. I think you've highlighted a few key pillars that kind of ground your strategic guidance or trajectory ahead. I think it's liquidity, transparency, and integrity.
So I guess if you think about those pillars and where the most opportunity lies for Nasdaq, again, been on a ship for a number of years, and you're guided by these pillars, can you kind of talk through the Nasdaq story in the eyes of these pillars and where you see the most opportunity ahead?
Sure. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, as you all know, we have been expanding the business to make sure that we can be a deeper partner to the financial industry. And we do use those pillars as a way to guide our strategy. So we've also used those pillars as a way to kind of structure our divisions. We have our market services business, which is really the liquidity pillar in terms of us operating our markets and driving liquidity into the markets that we own and operate here in the U.S. and Europe. And also, I would also point to Calypso, which is a risk management platform in our fintech division, where if we can encourage our clients to use that technology to manage risk more effectively, it unlocks liquidity back into the markets around the world.
We also provide technology to exchanges around the world that help them unlock liquidity within their own economies. So that liquidity pillar really crosses over between market services and part of our fintech division. Our fintech division, as I mentioned, is really geared towards that liquidity pillar and integrity. So we have our RegTech suite with AxiomSL, which is a regulatory reporting tool, as well as with surveillance and then anti-financial crime. I mean, all of those tools are there to really drive the integrity of the financial system. And then we have our transparency pillar, which is our Capital Access Platforms division, where we provide transparency between corporates and investors. We obviously have our listings business, our data business out of the markets. But we also provide services that really connect corporates more successfully with investors and IR and governance.
And then we have solutions that cater to eV estment management community in terms of making smarter asset allocation decisions with a transparency tool called eVestment and then driving transparent investable products with our index business. So it's been, I think, a really great way for us to demonstrate the way that we can use technology to bring markets forward, to make markets more higher integrity, and to drive transparency across the system to make people work better together. So that's how we look at it.
Wonderful. OK. And I promised to dig into each of the businesses and segments. But before we even go there, I mean, look, we had the election last week. We were just talking about this. And so there's a lot of conjecture around, and I'm not going to ask you how many IPOs or how much I made, but from a regulatory or policy perspective with the new administration, Republican-led Congress, and a number of kind of other factors at play, clearly there's a, I don't want to call it maybe an expectation or some perspective less or changes in regulation and policy ahead. And so I guess as you look at your businesses that you kind of just talked through now, I mean, are there any areas or potential areas that you're just kind of keeping an eye on that could have some development as it relates to Nasdaq?
And again, your business kind of touches a lot of different areas. So I'm just kind of curious if there are areas that you are just keeping an eye on as potential changes?
Yeah. I mean, I think the one area that people are most focused on just is, will this be more of a catalyst towards more capital raising in 2025? We've been saying for a few quarters now, frankly, but we've been expecting that 2025 will be a better environment for IPOs. We're continuing to expect that. I do think that the conversations with companies that are thinking about the public markets in 2025 have become a little bit more confident in their tone. But I would also say that we are not expecting the floodgates to open. I think that there are a lot of companies already looking to go out. I think they just have more confidence that they will have the opportunity. They might be a little bit more certain on their timing.
And we've talked about the first half of 2025 as being where we hope to start to see a real pickup. That will also. That's been an area that's been, like, if I look at the business, I think our business has performed remarkably well over multiple cycles over the last eight years. But that's an area where that's the one business inside of Nasdaq that's had a tougher beta over the last couple of years. So what that does is it makes it so our listings business just doesn't grow at the same rate. We have a great balance in that business with 5,000 listed companies across the U.S. and Europe. But so IPOs kind of, they create a little bit of a growth tailwind or headwind. But generally, it's a very stable business. But it has been a growth headwind over the last couple of years.
And then also it parlays into our corporate services, corporate solutions business, which is part of our workflow and insights subdivision in our cap division, and that also has seen growth come down as companies just are in more of a capital preservation mode, particularly kind of mid- to small-cap companies that have not had as much success in the markets the last couple of years have been more conservative in their buying behaviors on those products, and we haven't had what we call new inventory in terms of new companies coming out, so if that can lift up and we can see the market performance be more broad-based and uplifting, that I think could create also a positive trend for the corporate services business, but other than that, our business is a great business, so it performs well in a lot of different cycles.
The structural trends that we have really invested in across our fintech division, anti-financial crime, regulatory tech, capital markets tech, those are areas that are really long-term trends that we see as being good, consistent trends. And the demand and buying behaviors have been quite consistent over periods of time. So we're not expecting significant changes there.
Great. You talked about this maybe growth flywheel. I don't think you said that. But this kind of growth flywheel that may or that occurs as capital markets activity picks up, and so maybe you could kind of flesh that out a little bit more in terms of how that actually happens from an operational perspective, what you've seen over the number of years you've been at Nasdaq, and maybe talk about any lags in time or kind of timing of how and the magnitude of how much that flywheel kind of has an effect as this happens.
It's a great question. So it is a flywheel. We have described it that way in the past. So I'll call it that now. So if you have companies come into the capital markets, they suddenly need to mature. They need to get to know all of you as investors. And they need to know how to target the right investors for their programs. They want to make sure they're maturing in terms of their relationships to this new constituent. And we provide a great deal of services, the largest and I would say most successful investor relations intelligence business in the world. And we have thousands of clients where we help them understand who are the underlying buyers and sellers of their stock, how is that changing and shifting, who should they target, what is the perception that investors have of them.
As that flywheel is a positive flywheel, you have capital raising going on, the markets are performing well, potentially their companies are growing, the stock's growing. That is a positive flywheel against the trends there because they want to understand how they can attract themselves to new investors and they get engaged. When the capital markets are not as robust, and certainly it's been kind of a tale of two cities in the markets over the last few years between large cap and small cap and the performance there, that has made it so that they're more in. I might keep the service, but I might come down in terms of the number of users or I might not take some of the discretionary services there. We have seen that as being a little bit of a growth drag, but not necessarily.
We, again, have thousands of customers. So it's a very good balance. In terms of then the second flywheel is in trading. If you have newer companies going public, you've got more stocks coming into the market. It's obviously that drives some trading. And being the listing exchange gives us an opportunity to be their provider of the opening closing cross, which of course is a good event for us in our markets. And it also drives our indexes and kind of participation in our indexes in terms of how we can structure indexes and have exciting companies in our indexes. And that's obviously a growth business for us as well.
OK. Wonderful. Before I move on, just on capital access, I mean, as you said, over the last maybe year or two in a depressed capital markets activity environment, I mean, Nasdaq has cited some elongated sales cycles in some of its products, as you just mentioned now. I mean, do you think, again, this is kind of the moment where everything kind of comes back into.
It's hard to know. I mean, I think it's too early to know that. But I would say there is one thing you brought up is how immediate is the impact. And I would say that there is a lag in a couple of ways. First, the initial listing fees that we collect from companies as they go public are amortized over multiple years. So you have both a delay in kind of it kind of creates a little bit of a slow-moving train, is how I say it, both on the upside and the downside. And so we've kind of hit, we've talked about the fact that we've had more of a downside view of that over the last 18 months. And so we're starting to see the delisting slow down. We're starting to see listings pick up.
But they still will have, there'll be a tail effect of that. It's not instantaneous. And then the second thing is on the corporate services and particularly in IR, that's where you talk to the company. And there's a sales cycle associated with IR. There's getting to, we give them an introductory package as part of their listing for free for a period of time. So it's really when they roll off or we add additional services. So again, there's a lagged effect to that as well.
OK. Great. Let's go to everybody's other favorite topic, Axiom and Calypso. So you've owned or closed the transaction, I guess, a little over a year now. A year into integration, ARR continues at solid double-digit levels. As you progress through this integration period, I mean, even over the last year and prospectively ahead, I mean, what are you hearing from clients in terms of what they like, what they don't like, and areas maybe where you think there's more opportunity across that set of clients?
Yeah. So I'll level set a little bit. So we have now a fintech division that has three subdivisions. We have our Capital Markets Technology suite, which is the exchange business, so how we provide technology to other exchanges, as well as the Calypso platform, which is a scaled risk management platform for the trading firms. And then we also have our Trade Management Services business that supports all the connectivity services we have. And that's one subdivision. Then we have our reg tech, which is Axiom SL and our surveillance business. And that's all regulatory reporting and trade surveillance. And then we have our anti-financial crime suite with our Verafin platform. And all of them have kind of, they've all, it's really been fantastic to see, frankly, number one, the team come together really successfully. Tal Cohen is the leader of that team with our markets team as well.
And he's just, he's a tremendous leader. But he's also been bringing the team together, getting them to gel work together. We have a divisional structure in terms of divisional level leaders of sales, our Chief Revenue Officer, CTO, Head of Client Success, Client Delivery, CFO, et cetera, within that division. And they've worked really well together. And what's resulted from that is great engagement with clients. And both Tal and I are, we love meeting with clients. And we do, it's been amazing to hear from them what they're looking for. And I do feel like they understand now that we can be a very complete provider of capabilities across their key risk vectors, whether that's managing the regulators, managing risk, and managing criminals out of their networks. And therefore, they see us as a provider that, number one, understands their challenge because we're highly regulated too.
We obviously have an incredible focus on cybersecurity as a company. And that, I think, gives them confidence. And then we also can structure an MSA, a master services agreement that allows us to come in with a solution, land and expand, and work with them more holistically. And the dialogue with the clients has been really strong along that. One thing that's of note in terms of where do we see opportunities to continue to expand, number one, the TAM is giant. And so is the SAM. So the serviceable addressable market is in the, I'm looking at, Matt, it's in the $30 billion range across that division. And it's growing because there's just a general growth trend. And it's probably growing closer to like 6%-8%, around 8%. That allows us to just have a lift in terms of just being in that space.
But then if we can actually win share or if we can grow our presence as the clients are growing across the world, or if there's a new risk that comes and we can be their provider, it just allows us to grow even faster. Market modernization has been one major trend. And that's driving demand across our services. And regulatory reporting is another major trend. And that's a global business. It's the largest global business, our global technology platform with AxiomSL. And then, of course, anti-financial crime is a major trend. And there, we're really in North America today. So we have an opportunity to globalize that business over time as well. So those are the major trends that we're really focused on.
Wonderful. I'll touch on Verafin and financial crime in a second. But you kind of talked about bringing a number of teams together, particularly within fintech, to ultimately drive kind of greater value, greater products into clients. And so One Nasdaq is something you've frequently talked about. And this is kind of part of, and you gave some examples here. But I mean, can you kind of flesh out, in day-to-day practice, what does One Nasdaq look like as you execute go-to-market with some of these newer initiatives to ultimately increase market share in different markets?
Yeah. We talk about One Nasdaq because we have three divisions. We have two co-presidents that oversee those three divisions. And while the divisions themselves have organized now in a divisional structure, there's a lot of work at the enterprise level to drive everyone together. And honestly, we all work really, really well together. So I think that as a result, in addition to making sure that divisions are working, we're driving cross-sells within the divisions. We're making capital allocation decisions across those, within those divisions. We're also driving enterprise programs throughout the whole company across those divisions. And those programs will be, one is client data management and kind of creating an infrastructure that allows us to look at our clients holistically. And we're well underway with that. That's really helped develop our cross-sell capabilities. And then the other, of course, is the application of AI.
We talk about AI both in the product and on the business. We have a kind of a holistic enterprise approach to AI adoption and implementation, both in our products and making sure the teams are well supported and they have the expertise they need and they have very specific use cases that they're deploying for our clients, but also on the business as to how we bring this and integrate it across the organization to drive productivity, efficiency, and all those things. Those are the One Nasdaq kind of initiatives that we've been most focused on.
Okay. Great. I was going to go to Verafin. You mentioned AI. Let me just do that while we're on topic. So you mentioned GenAI. You have a number of products out there and I assume plenty more behind it. Like you said, Nasdaq operates in kind of three key segments, but a lot of businesses even within those segments. And so when you think about Nasdaq's approach to GenAI and product development and areas of focus, I mean, is there a guiding principle or strategy behind how you approach and allocate resources across these different businesses for the potential behind this?
Yeah. Well, the first thing is we have an ROI approach to all of our investments, including AI investments. But AI has been a pretty, I mean, it's not a heavy investment against, because we've been making investments for a decade to kind of position ourselves to be able to play offense on AI. The most important thing a product company can do, a technology product company can do, is position them with modern architecture, modern platform, and modern data management. And we have been on a journey for eight years of just drumbeating that through the company so that we have our capabilities. They're developed in cloud, cloud native. They're available through cloud. And we're taking advantage of the modern data management that's available. We also have very scaled data sets that are proprietary to Nasdaq.
Of course, our market data is proprietary to us coming off our trading engines. But within the investment, which is our investment management platform, we have 25 years of history across thousands of asset managers and asset owners in terms of asset allocation decisions and strategies and success that then we can mine that for intelligence. We now have all the Mercer data incorporated into that platform. So all the research is in there. And that then allows us to provide efficiencies to you guys. So if you're an asset manager and you want to understand what strategies pensions are deploying, we now summarize all the pension meeting minutes using GenAI to make it much more accessible to you. And then you look at a product like our governance platform, which is our portal platform or our IR platform. There's an enormous amount of information across those.
How do we make meeting minutes more efficient, but also meeting materials? We can summarize meeting materials in our governance platform and make it easier for board directors. We can make it so that we have better data, sustainability data for IR and understanding and comparing your sustainability practices versus your peers. We kind of look at how we enhance our products using GenAI because we're able to play offense very quickly. I think the one that's been noticed the most and one that we're really, really excited about is in our anti-financial crime tool because it's such a huge efficiency generator for the clients. But Verafin has always been AI first. And we use Bayesian models. We're actually even fine-tuning those Bayesian models even more, using a lot more algorithmic AI to drive alerting. But we also have automated the entity research process for banks.
As you can imagine, you have a lot of analysts who are looking at the alerts and trying to figure out what's a false positive and what's not. They go out and they look at known sources. They pull data in and they write up a report. We can automate all of that and give them the report. Here's all the sites, so they can be much more efficient. That obviously is a major value driver to that platform. Those are the types of things that we're already in market in production with.
Wonderful. And you said you kind of approach from a financial perspective. There's an ROI attached to the investments that you make. I mean, do you think there's a real kind of monetization opportunity for AI products?
I do. But I also would say this. So everything we've mentioned has all been within the construct of our budgets. And this is a very efficient implementation of these technologies. So we have the teams. We are already agile. We're already on cloud. We already have our data in good state. So it's really just deploying the tech. And we can either show, number one, we want to prove value. So I think one thing that we've been hearing, and I really ascribe to this, is you want to prove value so that you then can demonstrate to your clients and say, we know you're getting a lot of value because we can see you're using it. We can see the fact that we've saved you hours of time on certain activities.
And therefore, as we talk about the next contract, or we talk about the next module, or we go in and look at also client retention, all of those KPIs should be a net result of having delivered this value to you. And that's, I think, we're so early in the use cases of AI that it's important at this point to prove value. And then if you prove value, you're going to get returns from that. And we will make sure that we do drive those returns. But that's the approach we're taking. There are a couple of modules where we are actually just going out and saying, this is a new module. It's an upsell. But most of it's being embedded into the platforms at this point.
Okay. If I just take a step back just on this topic, I mean, and it's really not Nasdaq specific, but just kind of your Nasdaq's place in the world and Nasdaq's place in serving large financial institutions and financial services companies around the world. When you think about GenAI and adoption of AI, what are you kind of hearing from clients? Or what do you think in terms of the kind of the largest hurdles for more adoption of this from other financial services companies?
Yeah. I mean, I think first, you have to have really good governance that you establish right up front in how you're evaluating the models, testing the models, implementing them in your company, making sure you have a secure enclave to be able to bring the models in for use in your products and on the business. And we've done all of that. I think it's really important, particularly if you're serving a financial institution because they do a lot of work on you. They audit you. They really want to understand exactly how you've deployed the technology. But then the second thing is the discoverability of the models and the auditability of the models. So our Bayesian models in anti-fin crime, we have to prove complete discoverability of the inputs resulting in the output, which is actually difficult to do sometimes.
So it does hold, I would say, service providers back or technology providers back sometimes from bringing certain models in if you can't prove complete auditability to a financial institution. And so that work has got to be done upfront using advisory teams or client groups that allow you to kind of prove things out. And then you go. But I have to say, what we do is we have clients that we go to early. We work with them to make sure they can accept the technology. Then we then beta test it out to the clients. And then we roll it out. And so it's a little bit more of a concentrated process. And algorithmic AI is kind of we already have all those muscles from the work that we've already done. So this next wave is not that different.
OK. Wonderful. We have a little bit more than five minutes left. I want to make sure there's question time. So please just wait for Mike.
Adena, what are the incremental costs of going from being a private company to a public company in terms of regulatory, incremental D&O costs, compliance? Is that $20 million for a company annually?
I mean, it definitely depends on the size. I would not put it at that level for most companies. It depends on the size of the company and the complexity of the company. I can give you the major drivers. You've got Sarbanes-Oxley. That's a control infrastructure you really have to put in place. And that includes both audit costs, people, process, systems. You've got incremental costs associated with that. Probably need to modernize your financial consolidation system. And that can be a big project for some firms. You also have to pay for the audit firms. And that's completely dependent on how many controls you're putting in place. If you've got 80 controls, it's not going to be nearly as expensive as if you have hundreds of controls. That's one.
I think that's the biggest ongoing incremental cost plus the IR team. Usually, IR teams are really small, like two to three people. Sorry, Matt and Heather. They're small. The tools are actually quite affordable. That's not a huge cost driver. Then the last thing is the proxy process. The proxies, we're talking sub-million. I think on average, I think we came up with somewhere in the range of like $500,000 to manage through a proxy process for a mid-sized company. A small company would be less than that.
My supposition is that as we've seen over the last 30 years, we've seen public company count go from 8,000 to 4,000, and I'm wondering, what are the biggest reasons why we have seen yes, we've had an IPO downturn the last couple of years, but if you look over the past 30 years, we've seen negative growth in listed companies.
Yeah. I think there are a few things. I don't think it's just about the cost. I mean, I think that's a component, but I think it's more to do with two things. Certainly, there's cycles, so let's just recognize there are always going to be cycles, but if you look broadly, I do think that the burden of being a public company today versus 20 years ago is definitely higher. So Sarbanes-Oxley came on about 20 years ago. You also have Reg FD and other regulations that came on. You also have, in my opinion, the plaintiff's bar. You go public and you suddenly position yourself for other liabilities and risks, so you get D&O insurance and other things, and then you've got the proxy process. And I think the proxy process should be more streamlined than it is.
And that's an area that we've been really, really advocating for over a decade with the SEC to drive a more streamlined proxy process. So it's not... I mean, the cost is one thing. The time and attention and the sense of, wow, this is a big decision instead of this is a natural progression is another. And then, of course, you have a lot more private capital available to keep the companies private longer, as you've seen kind of a shift in pensions and other investment vehicles towards private capital. So those are all things that we care a lot about. And we've been actually advocating for a long time with the government to try to make some of those burdens more rational to make it so that being public is actually a great experience. And it often is.
I mean, it's a huge growth driver for the company. I can give you all the right reasons to go public, but those are the burdens that they do face.
Final question. Do you think that this administration is more open to reducing that burden for those private companies coming public?
I don't think we'll know until we know who's in the key roles. And we don't know who's going to be in the key roles. So we'll have to see where that comes out.
Thank you. Verafin.
OK.
Verafin adds something around 50-100 new clients every single quarter, and it's been doing that for a while now. So the natural question we get a lot, at least from our sell-side, and I assume you get it too, is if you think about the SMB market, there's probably a saturation point at some point. And it doesn't seem that we're anywhere near that yet. I'm just curious on your take in terms of the penetration left ahead in the SMB market. And even if we get there, will that even matter for Verafin at that point? And maybe the answer is, no, we have tier ones and international. But I'm just kind of curious from your seat, if you think about the SMB market that Verafin is penetrating, how do you think about saturation?
Yeah. So I think, first of all, I'll do a big broad strokes. And then we'll talk a little bit more in detail. But the number one thing to remember is if we look at the SAM, which is, I want to say, $8 billion. I'm looking at my notes, yeah, it's around, between $6 billion and $8 billion. That's half the SAM, which means we have a product that's fit for purpose that is a vended product that banks take. Half the SAM comes from the tier one and tier two banks. And half the SAM comes from the SMBs. $6 billion. Thank you. $6 billion on the SAM. And so if you think about that just in and of itself, we have only really addressed half the SAM available up until two years ago when we signed our first tier one client.
We have a huge runway of opportunity as we go up market. The second thing to realize is there are about 5,000 banks and credit unions just in the United States that would qualify as SMB. That means that we have about 2,500 total clients in the US and in Canada. We have a lot of opportunity to continue to sell to the SMB space as we continue to demonstrate the value of the product. What's really cool about it, and to get a little bit more in the weeds, is as we bring on the tier one and tier two banks, they're excited about being able to get the insights from the Consortium Data Lake that we've created with Verafin. We have a Consortium Data Lake that brings all the transactions across those 2,500 banks together.
As you bring in tier one and tier twos, they add significant value to that consortium data lake, which then makes the product better for everyone. That, of course, then makes it so that as we go to the next SMB, we're saying, look, we can offer you even more value. It makes it so that products are more valuable to our existing clients that allow us to offer them more things, but also to continue to upsell them over time. Our view is that there's this beautiful virtuous cycle that's created as we move up market and penetrate into half the SAM we weren't in, and at the same time continue to create more value for the SMBs that we have and new ones that we could bring on. That's how we look at it.
Wonderful. Back to the audience. Any final Q&A before we wrap up here? OK.
OK. Great. Thank you.
Thank you so much.
Thank you very much.