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Investor Day 2018

Mar 28, 2018

Speaker 1

Thank you everyone for joining us today at MarketSite here in Times Square and those joining remotely through our webcast for the 2018 NASDAQ Investor Day. First of all, I just want to note I'm kind of getting over a little bit of a cold and I apologize if I'm a little bit difficult to hear. I'm about fifty-fifty today, a big improvement from yesterday. We have a very busy day at MarketSite today. And so if you hear any cheering or noise, it's probably the Bilibili IPO, which is a video gaming and content company in China that's IPO ing today at the market site.

I want to start off by reviewing some logistics for the day. First of all to use the restrooms, I'd encourage you to use the door on the back left hand side there, make a left at the corridor and you'll at the corridor and you'll find the bathrooms. 2nd, for Wi Fi, the Wi Fi network is username nasdaq, password marketsite, all lowercase letters, that's Wi Fi network guest market site. And let me review the agenda today. We'll be hearing about our strategy and direction from our CEO, Adena Friedman then from Lars Ottersgaard and our technology team, we'll review our market technology business.

After that, we'll have a 10 minute break and return to hear about our Corporate Services business, our Info Services business and the Market Services business Then our finance and capital review with Michael Ptasznik and then we'll get all the executives back on stage for a group Q and A. Each of the business leaders will also have a Q and A at the end of their segment. And then around 12:30, we'll break for lunch and we'll give you an opportunity to talk more to the leadership team and take advantage of 4 product demos that we've set up for you to talk not only see the products, but talk to some of the people that work on work with the clients on those products as well. Let me take a moment to read our standard disclosure. This investor presentation is on our website.

We intend to use the website as a means of disclosing material non public information and complying with disclosure obligations under SEC Regulation FD. I'd like to remind you that certain statements in this presentation and during Q and A may relate to future events and expectations and as such constitute 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 is contained in our press release and periodic reports filed with the SEC. Now we're going to play a quick video about NASDAQ and where we're going and then I'm going to turn it over to our CEO and President, Adena Friedman.

Speaker 2

Tomorrow. For most of the world, it's simply the day after today. But for us, tomorrow is an idea, a way to think, to innovate, to move the world forward. Because when we look at the world of tomorrow, we don't see one made up of individual markets. We see a connected ecosystem that creates a market of possibilities.

1 driven by untapped data and analytics, cutting edge technology and forward thinking, daring leaders, and fearless dreamers. At NASDAQ, we're relentlessly reimagining the markets of today, not by chasing the possibilities of tomorrow, but by creating them. NASDAQ, rewrite tomorrow.

Speaker 3

You're likely to hear a lot of cheering as they do their first trade. And there are obviously a lot of people dress up in costumes. It is an anime oriented company. So it's been really fun to watch them kind of create a real performance around their IPO. So today I'm going to start by talking about our strategy and how we're moving the company forward.

And then I really look forward to having you listen to each of our business leaders, because they're the ones who are going to be executing on that. They're the ones who frankly are driving the strategy and making sure that we can deliver on it. So I will try to be as brief as possible. So the first thing is that we want to make sure that you understand that our business and our strategy is going to be driving accelerated growth. We embarked on our strategic review in 2017.

Starting at the beginning of the year, we went through a pretty detailed process of determining how we want to carry our business forward to make sure that we're building on our strong foundation, but also leveraging the unique opportunities that we have to strengthen our role in the global capital markets with our technology and analytics expertise. The goal is to accelerate growth in our business, to accelerate our partnerships with our clients, but also ultimately to deliver great value to our shareholders. And on the back of that, we are providing you updated outlook on our revenue to be able to look at our for our non trading businesses, our outlook is now to deliver 5% to 7% growth across those businesses. You'll see that we provide you a segment level view of that. We also want to make sure that we maintain our expense discipline, so that we can continue to deliver great profitability and growth in that profitability over time.

We are also increasing our return on invested capital targets for new investments that we make with organic and inorganic to be able to deliver at least 10% ROIC across those investments with the ultimate goal of course of overall increasing the ROIC of NASDAQ. And then also delivering on the ultimate objective to drive total share double digit total shareholder return to all of you. So how are we going to do that? Well, we're first going to build on the strong foundation that NASDAQ has today and then we'll talk about that strategic pivot and the process we went through to be able to deliver a great new strategy for NASDAQ. And then what that means in terms of our vision and our outlook.

So what is our foundation? Well, today we are as you all know a very resilient company with $2,400,000,000 of revenue against 4 key segments. 76% of our revenue is driven by recurring and subscription businesses And we deliver a 47% operating margin on that revenue, a very strong and stable operating margin. That means we deliver a lot of cash. A lot of cash flow comes out of NASDAQ.

Over the last several years, we've been increasing our distribution of that cash in the form of our dividend. And today again, we've announced that we are increasing our dividend to $0.44 per share, which represents a 42% payout ratio and a 2.2% yield on our dividends. So we're very pleased that we can continue to deliver those returns to our shareholders as we continue to grow our cash flow. So how did we get there? So if we look over the last 4 years and I've been back at NASDAQ for a little just around 4 years, I think we wanted to say, well, how have we been able to deliver on that to get to the foundation we're in today?

So over the last 4 years, we've delivered 4% to 6 percent growth in our non trading businesses. And that also on the back of very strong execution and expense management, we've been able to grow our margin by 300 basis points over that period and deliver 9% EPS growth. So I think that we have a very strong growing franchise across the businesses we're in today. And with the growth in EPS, our distribution through our dividend and the market appreciation for the performance that we've delivered, we've been able to deliver to you a 20% annual total shareholder return. Well, we do that by leveraging our 4 key business segments.

We've categorized these business segments into 2 areas, our growth segments and our foundational segments. And that's going to be relevant as we continue to talk about our strategic pivot. Our market technology business is in one of our growth segments. We deliver a full market infrastructure technology firms around the world. We're very, very proud of what we've been able to build in terms of being a trusted partner, a trusted expert to our clients around the world in terms of bringing market structure expertise on top of great technology, data management capabilities and other analytical capabilities that we can deliver to them as they drive the operating of their capital markets and as the broker dealers navigate those capital markets.

We also have our information services business where we deliver market data to millions of investors around the world and that's a growing number. It's really been interesting to see that globalization of our data and Bjorn will talk about that later. And we also have a diversified and unique index franchise. Moving over to the foundational side, our Corporate Services business is a combination of our Listings business and our Corporate Solutions business. Now obviously our listings business is core to our brand as you can see here today in terms of this center and all the activity that we have here.

We are a global brand for innovators. And we are very, very proud of the innovative companies that choose to come to NASDAQ. We also provide a suite of solutions that really help the C suite within our corporate clients navigate the public markets and we'll talk a lot more about that as well. And then lastly, our market services business. That's really what we're all built upon.

We are a trading business. We understand that trading at a very detailed level. Today, we are diversified multi asset class trading firm and exchange company, really focused on U. S. Equities, options, treasuries and futures and European equities options and futures.

One of the things that we think distinguishes us as a company is our client orientation. Today, institutional investors, broker dealers, corporate clients and other marketplaces really rely on us to help them navigate the public markets or to be a public market. And we provide our technology, our analytical insights in our market structure expertise across everything we do for them. We are really fortunate because we've taken a partnership approach to our clients and that means that they are dedicated to us just as we're dedicated to them. And I think that's really accrued to the benefit of our all of our businesses.

So that's our foundation. But what can we do to build upon this strong foundation to drive more growth and success to our clients and our shareholders? Well, that's what the strategic review is meant to define for us. And so we started with what are the key trends that are going to define this industry over the next decade. Then we look at it and said, well, what does NASDAQ have?

What are our strengths that we can bring to those trends? What can we do to help drive those trends or shape those trends over the next 10 years? What are we really good at? What do our clients expect of us? What do they expect us to be the unique partner for?

And then therefore, where should we be allocating our capital and our investment over the coming years to be able to deliver on that? So we started with 4 key trends. The first one is the data explosion trend, which I know it really is impacting every industry. But if you really think about the financial industry, data is the lifeblood of our industry. It has been for many, many decades.

And so if we look at how more and more data is coming in to the industry, alternative data sets, the ability for us to look much deeper and create more intelligence and insights off of the data that we have, that really is going to make it so they're making smarter investment decisions, smarter trading decisions, better compliance decisions and we can be a big part of that. The second is the evolution of the investment management industry. So everyone talks about the move to passive. We also are really looking at the move to alternatives, the move to quantitative strategies. But the fact of the matter is, it is still a big growing high of investable assets.

So the overall number of investable assets will continue to grow. It's estimated that it will reach $102,000,000,000,000 by 2020. But that varies, so if you have more of a move to passive and a move to alternatives, the traditional asset managers are facing more competition, but they still do get the benefit of a growing number of assets coming into the market. So we look at that and say, well, if you're facing new competition and you're kind of coming into a new competitive landscape, what generally happens in that case? And generally speaking, companies look to technology, they look to analytics, they look to become more sophisticated and they look to become more efficient.

And that is where we believe that that plays to our strengths in terms of the role that we can provide and serve to the asset management industry. The banks are also evolving. Coming out of the credit crisis, if you look before most of their technology really was self created and they very much held that within their operations and their organizations. And they looked at market infrastructure, trading infrastructure, capital markets infrastructure as kind of core to their differentiation. But today speed, resiliency and high capacity are kind of table stakes for every worker to be able to compete and to be able to participate in the market.

So where do they differentiate themselves today? They differentiate themselves on their ability to manage their data and insights and algorithms to drive to better trading decisions. So that infrastructure today is seen as more foundational. And that's where we can play a big role in becoming a partner to them going forward. And then lastly, the market economy.

We've written some couple of pieces about this. But over the last few years, we're seeing more non financial markets coming in and saying non financial industries I should say coming in and saying there's maybe a better way to do price discovery in our space. Maybe the idea of 2 sided markets or complex auctions, ways for us to have the participation of our clients in price discovery is the way forward. And they've been actually inbounding to us to ask us for our help in bringing our market structure expertise and our technology to help them drive disruption in their own industries. We want to take that and carry that forward in a more proactive way.

So as we embrace those trends, we're very certain that we're making the right decision to continue to evolve our company to leverage our technology and our analytics expertise coupled with our market structure expertise to become a more important and critical player in the industry. And so this really opens the door to new clients, whether it's traditional asset managers or non financial markets or private companies, we think that we have more and more of a role to play in the industry. And that then made it so that we started to think through, okay, so you got the trends. We understand where we want to play. What does that mean for capital allocation within NASDAQ?

I would say that in the past NASDAQ has been more opportunistic in how they look at allocating capital internally. If an idea comes up, we put capital towards it. But what we're now doing is making sure that with an idea comes up, we're framing it out in the context of what we're good at and where we're going as a company to make sure that we're driving our investment dollars into those things that are consistent with our strategy and that can help drive growth. So one of the exercises we did as a team last year was to bucket all of our businesses, our sub businesses into 3 categories. We put them into this lower slower growth business category that's really not in our foundation, our foundational technology or I'm sorry our foundational businesses and then our high growth businesses.

And in terms of the lower growth businesses, we really wanted to make sure that we optimize the efficiency of those organizations or in some cases make the hard decision to divest the businesses where our clients don't see us as a strategic partner. The businesses themselves are not strategic to other parts of our business and where we may not be the best provider. And so as a result of that decision, we did we have chosen to divest of our PR and our digital media assets. We've been very fortunate to find a partner in Westcorp where this is actually core and foundational to what they do. So we have a great opportunity to develop a partnership with them as they come in and buy those businesses later in Q2.

Then in terms of our foundation, we want to make sure that those are the businesses that are core to our brand that provide strategic value to our clients and that provide tremendous scalability to our shareholders. And that is really our marketplace businesses, our corporate service our listings business and our trading businesses. We want to make sure that we maintain our investment in those businesses by bringing the NASDAQ Financial Framework, which you'll hear more about later into those into our core markets and by continuing to invest in this market site and the bigger building behind us to increase and improve our client experience here for our corporate clients. And then moving to the high growth businesses, that's those are the areas where we can make a meaningful impact on the future of the capital markets. We can drive that technology forward.

We can bring all of these emerging technologies into the marketplaces. That's where the NASDAQ Financial Framework is critical to the future of our franchise. And we're really, really excited to be able to give you a better view into that technology and the architecture we're building there. We also want to make sure that we are increasing our value and our strategic relationships with our core clients in the asset management space with the investment acquisition and continue to build on our analytics capabilities. So one of the things we also did in the strategic pivot is to make sure that all of our we looked at all of our R and D efforts to say where do they fit in to the industry trends, making sure we're investing those dollars appropriately.

We're putting as much money into those things that we think will really drive to the future of the industry. And so this is a depiction of our core R and D efforts. You can see the bubbles do represent the size the relative size of investment in terms of how we're using our R and D dollars. So the Nasdaq Financial Framework really does cut across in my opinion actually 3 of the trends, because certainly the marketplace economy, building a platform that can allow us to scale and deliver services in a more nimble way to new markets. The banks evolving and providing being becoming the market infrastructure partner to the banks over time, but also the data explosion.

The way that we're framed and we're building out the Nasdaq Financial Framework, the data management and the way that we're being able to pass data throughout that infrastructure is really

Speaker 4

critical to being able to take advantage of all the data that's

Speaker 3

coming into the infrastructure is really critical to being able to take advantage of all the data that's coming into the marketplace. Then you've got Project Ocean, which is a little bit of a code name for has a little inside baseball, but it's really are the trading and basically that we but it's really are the trading and basically that we use it as our dark pool strategy to be a technology partner on dark pools, but really is actually building out to say we're going to be a trading system partner to the banks and brokers. The smarts buy side is clearly an area where we believe that the asset management industry and the data explosion are the key trends driving that. The NASDAQ futures exchange is really us becoming an even more a bigger and better partner to our banking clients. And then the Analytics Hub being a data explosion strategy to make sure that we can serve our asset managers and our trading clients with better insights and analytics.

And then finally, the NASDAQ Private Market. The NASDAQ Private Market really has been making sure we take advantage of this trend where asset managers are investing more and more in private companies. Asset and alternative asset managers are looking for ways to deliver more liquidity to their investors. And the Nasdaq private market is there to capture both of those key trends. So as we think about NASDAQ going forward, we've talked I just talked about the strategic pivot and how that's driving to an accelerated growth opportunity.

We also then are making sure we're putting our money where our mouth is by allocating our resources to those opportunities. We're also then focused on building an employee culture that allows our employees to be a part of this change. We want to make sure that we are building an innovative and inclusive culture, but one that's still very focused on execution, very focused on efficiency. And one, I'm very proud of the fact that in 2017, we do an employee engagement survey every year. And in 2017, our employee engagement increased by 7 100 basis points just on the back of the fact that they were so they're so excited about where we're taking the company.

And then lastly, our clients. Our clients are really everything. If we do the right job for our clients, we will do the right job for our shareholders. And that is something that we're very focused on deepening our relationships. We want to be a technology leader serving the capital markets and beyond.

We want to maintain that client orientation as opposed to really being a competitively oriented company. Let's make sure that we're really focused on the clients and the future of their businesses. We want to make sure we deliver meaningful growth, organic growth to our shareholders using a scalable platform as a service and through delivering transparent and disciplined capital management. So before I kind of finish up, we do want to I want to make sure I'm going to go through a little bit of a technical thing. We're changing some of the segment orientation to deliver to kind of be aligned with the strategy I just talked about.

So the first thing is that within Information Services, we've always discussed Information Services in 2 sub segments, the data products division and index licensing division. We're now going to break that into 3 sub segments. We're going to have the market data division, which is really all the data that comes off of all of the exchange and marketplace engines. We're going to have our index business, which will now include our index data in that business that sub business. And we're going to have our investment data and analytics business, which incorporates eVestment, the NASDAQ Fund Network, the Dorsey Wright Data Business and other smaller things that we're doing including Analytics Hub.

So that's going to be a 3rd sub segment within Information Services. And Bjorn will go through those the strategy across those three. In terms of market technology, we there is a business within market technology called BWise. BWise is a governance risk and compliance service offered to over 2 50 corporate clients around the world. The reason why you think, well, why wouldn't they sit inside of Corporate Solutions?

But the reason is that it is has been a deployed solution kind of a perpetual license business and a deployed solution to our clients. And Lars and his team has been very well equipped to be able to support that business and drive that business because that is what we have done for our clients for many, many years on the market infrastructure side. But we are migrating that to a software as a service model. We're in the middle of that transition. We've been moving our clients more towards a subscription model from a revenue perspective.

And so it's time now with the reorientation of corporate services and the focus that we have on that business to move BWise into corporate services. So and then lastly, we are also going to be reflecting today and in the future, the fact that we on a pro form a basis, we are removing the PR and DMS businesses from Corporate Solutions. So all of the presentations today will incorporate these changes. And so we will be showing you this to you on a pro form a basis along these lines on the right hand side. So just to finish up the introduction.

So what does this mean? As you go through a strategic review, of course, you have to come up with a new vision, a new mission. It's amazing how much you wordsmith those words that come out. It is amazing how many times you want to try to refine it and change it. But our vision today is to reimagine markets to realize the potential of tomorrow.

I actually really think that frankly all of those words really matter other than maybe the prepositions. But the reimagining markets, we are here to help our clients march into the future, to future proof their businesses, to bring emerging technologies, new ways of thinking about technology, new ways of thinking about market structure and markets and allow them to succeed as they go into the future. We're also applying that to our own markets to make sure we continue to have great success in delivering our capital markets to our clients. We also want to make sure that we are helping our corporate clients use technology in the markets that exist today and tomorrow to realize their own potential. So we really do feel that this really encapsulates what we are doing here and what our vision is for NASDAQ.

So just to sum it up, we are uniquely positioned to be able to provide technology, analytics and as well as market structure expertise to our clients worldwide. We are definitely making sure that we are capturing the evolving landscape both in terms of the technology landscape and how it evolves and the industry landscape and how it's also evolving. With a clear strategy that you can understand that was going to orient our thinking, our cap allocation, our decisions, the way that our employees interact with us. And then finally, we want to make sure that we deliver on this. We execute on it well.

So that's a great segue to me introducing the first business unit to make sure you hear how we are executing on our strategy. So thank you very much. And now on to Lars.

Speaker 1

Thanks, Adena.

Speaker 5

What we're

Speaker 1

going to do is Lars is going to present on the market technology business, then we're going to bring our technologists onto the stage to a discussion about some of the work they've been doing to put the strategy into action. And finally, we're going to open up the Q and A to the entire team.

Speaker 6

Thank you, Ed. So my name is Lars Otesgaard. I'm running the Market Technology Division of NASDAQ. I have done that since 2,008, and I joined actually in 2006. Before that, I have 20 years in the IT industry.

So I would like to talk a little bit about what market technology is today, how we're advancing our strategy in line with what Adena has told, and how we look at the growth opportunities in an outlook moving forward. So market technology today is a $247,000,000 business. We have been experienced a decent growth both from a revenue side, but more so on the margin side in the last 3 years. We are a leader in the industries in the niches that we have chosen to serve. So we have a strong position in those markets that were established.

And who are those markets? So if you look at this slide, you can see that our history is actually from left to right. The 3 market segments we serve starts with the market infrastructure operators. That's the new term that we established for exchanges, clearing houses, central depositories as well as regulators. This is the bread and butter from where we come, and we have served clients more than a quarter of a century in this space.

It's very much driven by on premises enterprise software solutions and very, very sticky into our client set. From that side, we then expand into the sell side and buy side segment, starting with the surveillance space, where we do today, as Adena mentioned, have around 140 5 of the largest Bruker dealers in the world and buy side firms using this technology for the surveillance. But we also moved into execution services. Adena mentioned Ocean, and we have the Goldman Sachs, but we also have other clients. And we had one client going live just a few weeks back using this solution for running the global FX in 3 data centers out of New York, London and Tokyo.

I cannot mention the name, unfortunately. Going from there, we're now moving into what we call non financial markets. We have clients there today. We're using complex auction technology and to serve those clients, but we're also moving in there to help them establish market places, new markets that is not traditional financial markets. So a part of our DNA and our history is that we have very loyal clients, as I mentioned.

We have been the proven R and D partners through waves of disruptions. NASDAQ was the 1st Electrified Exchange more than 40 years ago, and we have then been in the forefront of technological leadership ever since then. We have then helped our clients and established a position with them. So we are actually, to a large extent, the R and D divisions of those clients, working close with them. We've taken them through the high frequency trading era down to the after the crisis, the regulatory demands that come upon them, and now we see a new era, an era where new business models are being established and a lot of new technologies, exciting technologies are going to change the marketplace we operate in.

So how will we earn the right to continue to be this R and D partner to our clients? Well, we are uniquely positioned. We are not only the most comprehensive provider of technological solutions to this marketplace, but we are, as Adrienne has said, we are a complete operator in this space. So we live what we sell. We develop internally.

We have our own R and D to be part of this industry, but we also have our clients that we work very, very closely with. This position will help us not only to deliver software or technology or managed solutions, but it also means they have know how, they have capabilities to do more to our clients than just providing a software solution. If I look at how we are advancing our strategy, starting with the industry trends that we are capitalizing on. If I simplify the word, I see 2 areas: The environment within our clients operates in, us, we and our clients, very complex, unpredictable, changing regulatory, globalizations, it's harder and harder competition, increased margin pressures, and the existing business models are challenged. From a technical point of view, I see I simplify it again, 2 waves.

1, a lot of outdated legacy technology out there. We have clients that have sold technology that it's actually hard to find skill in the market that can continue to support and develop those technologies, inflexible solutions that cannot keep up with the pace of change that we're now realizing. The other part of the technology trend is, as I mentioned, all the new innovative technology solutions that are coming out there. They're starting to mature, cloud, artificial intelligence, blockchain, DLT, etcetera. We see that these are now becoming realities to be used in real business solutions and not only buzzwords.

The client needs. All these three segments that I showed, the MIOs, the sell side, buy side as well as the non financial markets have very common needs. There is some very positive sense that I see, a switch from cost pressure and only living after regulatory requirements, and that is a need to see growth, an optimist, but also a need to find ways of growing your revenue top line. They need to be differentiating ourselves from each other in a more stronger way than before. The data focus is absolutely through all of those.

It's not only you have to be mastering the data, you have to be able to leverage data, you have to be able to use it for your own decisions, but also to create new services and solutions to your clients. The pace in the industry is improving, faster time to market, flexibility and being quick and adapt to changes. And at the same time, excellent operation. You cannot fail. You have uptime of 100% requirements from your clients, and it's no way that you can be so fast and so agile that you start to lose your resiliency of your solutions.

And again, regulatory proficiency, you need to understand the market in which you operate and live up to all the regulatory requirements that is coming over you all the time. You also see clear trend of renting instead of buying. So how are we going to reposition ourselves to meet these opportunities and capture this wave? Well, we are moving away from an enterprise software on premises implementation model. We are moving to be a managed solution model.

This is in this way, we can much better help our clients be faster and agile, but also to leverage all our know how and how we operate markets in this industry. We're going to expand our solution portfolio, both in current clients, but also to address new market opportunities. The data centricity, absolutely a cornerstone on the whole development of the Nasdaq Financial Framework, and we're going to help our clients to master the data and to their own use, but also in their creative solutions. And we're going to be the fintech company that actually deploy fintech outside of the fintech and financial industry. With this, we think we can accelerate our growth in a profitable manner, and we can maintain our leadership in our industry.

This will also open up an absolutely different addressable market for us. Historically, with our niche solutions and the way we have deployed them, we have addressed a market opportunity of approximately US3 $1,000,000,000 capturing in the range of 5% to 10%. In the future, conservatively calculated, we feel comfortable that we will address more than $20,000,000,000 size of markets. And the non financial markets where we are still evaluating how big this opportunity will be, I personally believe it will be bigger than the MIO segment that we have been historically addressing. So how will we do this?

We will do this through our new managed solution model architecture. You will hear it over and over again because it is our future, NASDAQ Financial Framework. That is the base of this complete change of how we're going to operate. And very important to say, when I say this complete change, it is an evolution. We will not disrupt our clients in a way that are dangerous for their business.

This is an evolution where we will bring them on this journey in an evolutionary fashion. So the NASDAQ Financial Framework platform was first announced at one of our industry events called TOF in 2016. At that time, it was more announced as a technology stack, a new Nasdaq Financial Framework platform to a solution platform to be managed by us as a service. This means we are building it completely native for cloud. We have containerized it, and we do all the things that's necessary to both run it as a complete service model to our clients, but also allow our clients to run it still on prem because again, this is a journey where we will bring our clients with us as we move forward.

So what are the expected benefits for our clients in this world? First of all, we all look for cost, and we will be able to reduce the clients' costs by bringing a broader set of services and solutions to them. So today, when you sell an enterprise software that is installed on premises, then the client have to operate it, run it and take care of it all the day, and that's a costly and cumbersome effort. When we move over to managed solutions offering for clients, we will take a lot of that burden off them, lower their costs, but increasing our share of the wallet spend. It will give them an operational simplifications and higher resilience and higher quality of the operations.

They will reduce the number of vendors. Today for a client, they have a lot of vendors. And it's only a commercial complex situation, but it's also a complex situation when you have to integrate all the solutions and operate them themselves. It's going to help with more rapid implementations, but also more rapid changes as time pass to meet the new changes in the markets, and it will reduce the risk of risking buying something that's going to be outdated or not good enough over time. But it's not only our clients that will win on this.

It's a win win situation. The managed solution model is going to deliver both a reduced cost for our clients, and we aim to reduce their cost by about 10% to 20%. By and the way we do it is taking a larger share of their efforts. But for us, it's going to give a lower cost, so higher revenue by taking a bigger part of their wallet share spend by providing more complete services as a managed solution, but also lower cost because by doing it in a centralized fashion, we can minimize the number of different software versions, the adaptations and complexities that is out there in the markets today. So we will lower the cost and increase our income from our clients.

So this is a lot of promises. So how we can read it in the literature about how this is good, but we actually have an in house case study that showed that we both understand what a software as a service or a managed solution model means. We have operated our smart solutions since 2010. At that point, smart, which is the surveillance solution in our portfolio, was primarily an on premises solution, and there is still an on premise solution in many parts of our businesses. But we invested to create this SmartTrade, which is a software as a service solution, managed solution that we bring to primarily the buy side and sell side firms.

That has accelerated our growth and improved our margins. We have today increased the number of subscriptions for users with 10 fold since the acquisition in 2010. And we can compare with the on premises solution with our managed solution services, and it's 1.5 times higher margin on the services that we provide rather than the on premises implementations. We are now in a transition where we're investing to go from the traditional enterprise software provider with good margins, with stable growth, but not the growth or the margins we want to have. We are now investing to transition from this software vendor to a managed solution partner to our clients.

There will be a time when that will impact our margins, but we do it because when we start to deliver services, full service solutions to our clients, we will both grow our revenue faster and we will improve our margins as we move forward. So what are those growth opportunities that we think that we will be able to capture with these new solutions? For start with the market infrastructure operators, I mentioned it again because it's so important for me that we bring our existing clients with us. So we're going to do this in a stepped fashion. We are already upgrading a number of our key clients to use the NASDAQ Financial Framework more in a traditional manner as a tech refresh.

We can then start to migrate this installed base of on premises operated solutions into managed solution services from us. This will be done stepwise. It's not a big bang that suddenly a big exchange is outsourcing the entire infrastructure to NASDAQ, but we can help them taking solution by solution and provide it as a service. That will increase our share of wallet spend, and we will also help them because it's a very important part of this NASDAQ Financial Framework. It is an open architecture.

So we're going to put our capabilities, our applications and microservices on this platform, but it's also going to be open for our clients to put their own microservices and application on it, to put their clients' applications and managed services on them, which means that they will start to build their entire ecosystem using this managed platform. When they do that, they will then be a hub of their ecosystems. And that will allow us to, together with our clients, create new solutions and services to be provided in respective markets. We see a mid- to high single digit CAGR looking forward into this market infrastructure operator segment. The next segment, the buy side, sell side, we aim to have a double digit CAGR growth as we look forward.

We are going to achieve that through 3 different approaches. One is based on the very strong position we have in the surveillance space, we're going to expand into the regtech space. Similar as we expanded from the MIO into buy side, sell side and then to non financial market, we will do it from our core of surveillance and then we gradually move into this space. We are going to become a market leader in front office services in the sell side business with trading, with risk handling and with surveillance to continue to provide a surveillance solution, but doing more and more of the managed operations for them. And we're going to broaden our buy side offerings.

The 3rd group, the non financial market, very small segment for us today. We have 5 clients signed and several of them in operation, but it's still only a business of $4,000,000 We will see a strong growth in this segment. It's very difficult to put any numbers on it, but it will be significant. And we were going to do that by helping those non financial markets to establish new markets with our capabilities in this space. We look at how we're going to do this, what are the market, are the industries that will be most relevant for us.

We have a very strong inflow of interest from the markets, but we want to make sure that we build a very carefully plan on what are the industries where our technology will be most sufficient and help most. And then we will proactively go after those markets with very strong value propositions. We're also going to work on our marketing to make sure that the inbound interest for our technology will be as accurate as possible to what we actually can provide with our knowledge with our technology. So what we look moving forward, what we look on is starting to grow our business faster. We look at the CAGR growth to come in 3 to 5 year in the range of 8% to 11%.

Market infrastructure operates stable mid to high senior digit, buy sell sell sell sell double digit growth and in non financial markets, a very high growth. So there's nothing else that you remember from my pitch here. There's 3 things I would like you to remember. We are a leader in the key niche markets where we are serving today with our differentiated offerings. We're going to leverage that position in a transition away from enterprise software solutions to a new managed solutions model where we have a bigger opportunity to capture more addressable market space, new markets, but also higher share of the wallet spent on the existing clients we're serving.

And we're going to see higher returns on our business as our clients start to move over into the managed solution model. Thank you. Ed?

Speaker 1

Thank you, Lars. We're going to do a quick video to explain a little bit more about the NASDAQ Financial Framework. And then we're going to welcome the technologists that really power this strategy. And Lars is going to lead a panel discussion. So we'll just start this off real quick.

Speaker 2

NASDAQ, built on innovation and an eye toward rewriting tomorrow, providing mission critical technology solutions to the capital markets industry for 20 years, end to end and across all asset classes, powering over 100 organizations in 50 countries. As we pioneer the future of financial technology, we're always reinvesting, innovating and evolving. Regulatory complexity and constant changes in the market structure have created the need for a A robust and dynamic architecture capable of scaling to fit your unique needs. With the NASDAQ core at the heart of the framework. Connected to the core is our spectrum of interoperable business applications engineered to help customers accomplish any operation in the trade lifecycle, providing the widest degree of application choice, including custom developed software integration.

It's an evolutionary approach to rewrite marketplace technology, bringing customers' products to market faster, more cost effectively and more efficiently. Future proof your organization with the NASDAQ Financial Framework. One company, one platform for all your needs. NASDAQ, rewrite tomorrow.

Speaker 1

Okay, thank you. Now I'm going to welcome our technologists. I'm going to set up some chairs first. First is Brad Peterson, our CIO. Next is Tom Fay, Senior Vice President of Systems and Performance and lastly, Patrick Fahrenloff came from our Stockholm office to join us today.

He's a Vice President of Software Engineering. And I'll turn it over to you, Lars, to lead the discussion.

Speaker 6

Thank you, Ed. So this is my friends. It's good to make all this happen. So we have this background in the Nasdaq Financial Framework as we have some questions for you. So Brad, you are a CIO and you and I are in this together as a team.

What's your in your own word, what is NASDAQ Financial Framework? Good. Well, thanks

Speaker 7

for the opportunity to share this. So as you heard, it's built on the foundation that we had that started with Inet, which was really a distributed architecture, message based architecture that allowed us to deliver the performance low latency that we've seen for many years. It's allowed us to have the resiliency that's required in Capital Markets. And as evidenced by the last couple of months or the whole almost now the whole Q1, the scale. So the ability to scale up and when markets come alive to really handle that volume.

So that was at the core and NASDAQ Financial Framework builds on that foundation. So we've perfected it. It's our technology. We've perfected it over the years. And the reason why it's architected this way, so we've moved the core to a microservices based architecture.

And today the core and Tom will talk a little bit more about this, there's 18 of them today. And the 18 are architected, so there's well constructed boundaries. And this is really key because the underlying technology is changing so fast. So you want to be able to change out components and incorporate new technology without having to change the entire application. So this is absolutely at the core level, it allows us to have that agility, it allows us to have the ability to incorporate new technologies as they become available.

The next piece is what we talked about is the common applications. And when you have just about 100 markets live and you've seen that patterns emerge, so you see that over and over again, the same thing, the same core components, applications are involved in just about every type of market. So our first investment for the common apps was a set of 9 that we know are going to be heavily reused. They show up in almost every market. So there are things like order entry protocols and gateways.

And how many gateways have people built over and over again? So we're taking the best. We're looking across all of our implementations, taking the best and being able to allow those to accommodate all the different variants we have seen in the world. Then you look at matching buyers and sellers. So we call it a matching engine fondly, but really as we talked about markets everywhere, what happens in every market is price discovery and matching of buyers and sellers.

So we also have seen all the different opportunities to build one that can accommodate the financial markets as well as what we envision, what we talked about in Adena's vision of non financial markets as well. So then you see market data, you see also almost every NASDAQ Financial Framework environment will connect to another one. So routing is a key common application. And then we have running these markets, you have market operations, you have technical operations. So we see a whole set of common applications that are around just the good operations support systems that are there.

And I guess the last one, I'll just touch on and I know Patrick is going to go a little deeper on this. And that's a common application called our reference data manager. And this is where we turn and it's kind of the magic of it as we saw it. We turn an equity market into an options market, into a fixed income market, into a salmon market. And it really is we realized that the only difference is the reference data in the system and then the system can be turned into selling and doing those common functions across anything internally.

So we think that's a really key piece that as I said Patrick will talk a little bit more about. And then we come to the 3rd piece of the NASDAQ Financial Framework that's around data. So Lars talked about us being a leader in surveillance, trade surveillance and it's an optimized application around a core set of trading data. We also have applications around risk management that really are calculating very quickly what are changes in positions and ultimate risk. And then at the end of it, we all take in trade data and we have to decide how to price, what's going on in the market and how to bill.

And if you think about it in an activity based billing system, it's all about those same exact data elements. So we've seen very naturally these separate applications we've built, the common thing is they're all acting on the same data. So these applications don't have to have the low latency characteristics of matching and trading. They very naturally end up in the cloud. And that's what we've done internally.

We've built these applications to be cloud resident. So from that, we think that the next generation of those applications have between the business logic and the actual data and they ultimately will be delivered to our customers in the cloud. So why don't I stop there and hopefully you

Speaker 6

Tom, you have led the development of the NFF core. Can you talk a little bit what it will mean for us and what it will mean for our clients?

Speaker 8

Sure. And thank you, Larsen. It's great to be here. We're very passionate about this. So I welcome the opportunity to talk about it.

Brad mentioned the NASDAQ Financial Framework as an evolution of our INET technology. And that's technology that powers the markets that NASDAQ runs as well as those that we provide to our market technology customers. And over the years a number of different implementations of that technology stack have evolved to service different segments of that user community and each providing dispermitting value and each innovating. And found was as an innovation occurred in one of those implementations, it became more difficult, more time and effort was required to make that innovation available and others. That in the context of the ever increasing rate of change of technology and the pace of innovation, we wanted to do something to refactor or re imagine our architecture that we could take advantage of those emerging technologies much quicker than we could before.

And that's really fundamentally what the Nasdaq Financial Framework core platform about. As Brad mentioned, we chose a microservices architecture. We did that deliberately to decompose our platform into a set of services that could evolve independent of each other. Because what we see is many times innovation is specific or material to a dimension or a slice of a market system. In a monolithic delivery as we were doing before it became difficult to introduce that in a timely fashion by using microservices we can target that innovation to specific microservice and make it available to our customers much faster than we were able to do before.

And we're going to talk a little bit more about some of the interesting microservices that we have decomposed. But I would say that if I had to sum it up or define what core platform was in a single sentence, I would say it's a foundation for innovation.

Speaker 6

Patrick, in the same way as Tom, you have been leading the development of common apps. So can you talk a little bit what that means?

Speaker 9

Absolutely. So if you look at all the systems we have, we have a lot of different solutions, be it a clearing system or a trading system or something that survives market data. And what we're doing now is that we're looking across all those systems, and we see these patterns, as Brad said, coming to life actually. And we're looking at seeing what's the common business components each and every system needs. And one of them is actually reference data.

So all our systems needs to be configured. They need to be set up, regardless if it's equity market or a derivative market or if actually it's an index calculation system. We all need data. So what we've done is that we've taken a component and created a new one that can actually replace, I think, if I calculate around 7 to 10 of the existing configuration components we have and provide one that we can use across all the different solutions that we're deploying right now. And it can be configured to run financial markets as well as non financial markets that Lars mentioned.

And this, I think, is instrumental in the having a fast moving platform where we can easily add new functionality onto it and not just stay with what we use today. We can actually prepare it for growth for the future. And that's what we're doing with reference data or master data. And now we're looking as well at other patterns, gateways. We have how we actually provide information out to other systems, surrounding systems, there are patterns there as well, and how we can build common components to support that.

This is really fundamental in what we're doing right now.

Speaker 6

Back to you, Tom. Core, we started with the core. So when we did restart and what have you accomplished so far with the Nasdaq Financial Framework?

Speaker 8

Thanks. Yes, we've accomplished quite a bit. We had the initial thoughts around what we wanted this architecture to look like in late 2014, spent the first half of 2015 building a reference architecture and then the second half starting to build some of the initial services. In fact, one of the first things we did, which was done out of necessity was a blockchain service that allowed us to deliver blockchain solutions to proxy voting application. And since then obviously we've grown that service suite up to the 18 that Brad mentioned.

And data is fundamental or the architecture itself is data centric. And what I mean by that is all these microservices communicate with each other through a well defined set of APIs and we expose those APIs up to business applications that Brad mentioned as well in a very structured fashion. This allows us to maintain interoperability introduce new services as Patrick mentioned in a controlled fashion. We've been on a quarterly release cadence ever since the beginning of 2016. We made our first release in advance of the formal announcement at TAF or Technology of the Future Conference in May of 20 16 and we're about to do our 8th release this Friday, which will be our version 3.0 release.

Of those micro services that we mentioned, there are those that support our core messaging platform. There are those that support a set of data services. So common ways to redid into these services, transform that data and produce results and pass those results on to another service is another example. We also have a hardware abstraction layer that allows us to take advantage of technologies like FPGA and GPUs. We also have services that kind of homogenize how we log, how we surveil our markets and provide common data interfaces to 3rd party systems to do those types of things.

So we expect the service set obviously to grow over time. We restructured such that things that we identify as we see patterns emerge, we can promote those into the platform and make them available more pervasively. And we expect obviously all of these services to mature over time as technology drives us that way.

Speaker 7

About support for the

Speaker 8

cloud? Yes. And all of these services were built such that they could be deployed on our on prem data centers. We standardized on Docker on bare metal. Since we use that as a container technology, we can also deploy that in the cloud, the public cloud.

That is a pervasive technology supported by all the major cloud providers. Additionally, we're using Kubernetes to do our orchestration. So that also is a portable technology and is available across all cloud providers. We can use those same constructs in our data centers that we run. So the application logic never need change.

It's really just a deployment decision as to where we want to deploy those microservices.

Speaker 6

So a lot has already been accomplished. But Brad, what's coming in the coming 2 years, what's up for development?

Speaker 7

Perfect. So I think it's I start with it's all about growth and supporting growth. And I'll break it into 3 areas. 1 is for our new customers coming in. A lot of our new customers are starting with this as a managed service and a lot of our new customers also that are non financial are comfortable going straight to the cloud.

So we think the new customers often will go right to this, the new NASDAQ Financial Framework with a set of applications that are available as we build them out. The second one is really about migration. And we have markets internally that we have to migrate and it's going to be a multiyear effort to migrate our internal markets to this platform as well as our customers. So we see ourselves being very busy the next couple of years with the migrations. Brenda Hoffman in the back is running one of the key internal ones for NASDAQ's fixed income platform.

So that's the first internal one we're doing. We have a number of our customers engaged. I don't know if we're naming them, but a number of them have already taken the core platform with a few of the common applications. And then the last piece is we talked about this being a multiyear investment. So we will take we've done the 9 investments in the common applications this year.

We'll look at the new products and the new common applications that we want to invest in next year. So we can dial that down, we can dial it up, we can tailor that to where we think the opportunity and the demand is. And that will probably occur for also the next couple of years. And then it will settle down into probably more applications that are related to growth and expansion in new areas.

Speaker 6

We'll be

Speaker 10

busy though. Yes, that's

Speaker 6

good. And you talked about migrations and clients and Patrick as responsible for the common apps, you've been quite engaged in the migration of our clients. So what is the status with the clients today?

Speaker 9

First of all, I would say that the since the launch of the Nasdaq Financial Framework, there's been so much engaging and interesting customer discussions that have been having the opportunity to take a part of. And I thought I would mention 2 of them. 1 is for a big derivatives clearing and trading house. We're delivering the NASDAQ Financial Framework to them. And what we've been able to give them and new opportunities they can get is for growth, is for scale.

So to give a few examples there is that we can now where before there might have been 2 matching NN in one instance, we can now add an additional 2 as an example without affecting any of the other surrounding market infrastructure that might have. So here is really the scalability of the platform, how we can add new components in there. And in the future, there could be a clearing engine that needs to grow. We can add another clearing end on top of it. And it's really setting them up to be able to take leverage of everything that we're putting into the NASDAQ Financial Framework and they can grow on that.

The second one that I thought I would mention and Lars you mentioned it as well is this big exchange that's trading FX 24 hours a day. That's a new area for us in terms of trading that FX market in 3 different locations around the world. This platform itself enable us to do it and to break into a new area where we're going to banks and brokers segment with this type of platform. We can operate it centrally across the different locations and see exactly what's happening in the 3 locations. We can move assets between the different locations on the platform.

So really a different way of how to operate it all in one common platform.

Speaker 6

Great. And one more question to all of you. We always talk about all these new technologies, machine intelligence, blockchain, etcetera. So we talk about how Nasdaq Financial Framework is going to enable that and integrate those technologies. So the question to all of you is, what are the most exciting new technologies that you see and how will it be integrated in the Asset Financial Framework?

And I'll

Speaker 9

start with Patrick this time. Okay. So I will talk about 2 things, I think. The first one is data. We talked about data, how central that is to what we're doing.

So with the platform, we're enabling data discovery, which means that we can unlock the data across all the different applications that we put on the top of the platform. And you can discover the data models of those applications and be able to consume all the data. And we can do this in a secure fashion as well. We know that security is very, very important when we deal with data and governance. So it's encryption at rest, encryption in motion and really taking that data to where it's needed.

And where it's needed is where the compute is. And we believe that the cloud is absolutely fundamental in allowing a good growth and a good scalability of compute on top of your data assets. So that's really, really an important part of the framework itself, cloud and data and the data centricity of

Speaker 6

it. Thanks, Patrick. And what would you put forward Brad in this segment?

Speaker 7

All right. So I'll give you one trend in 2 technologies. How's that?

Speaker 6

That's a good

Speaker 7

So the trend that I'll mention has and it's key to the sec the one of the technologies I'll talk about. The trend is really this notion of markets everywhere. And the fact that you can use markets for a better outcome for optimizing the distribution of resources. And of course, it's well written about the lines that get redrawn between companies and what can happen in a distributed fashion outside of companies. So I'm not going to proclaim that companies are going away because I don't think that's the outcome, but I think redrawing of the boundaries.

And things like Uber are a great example where the people that are engaged don't have to be employees. They can actually use market pricing models matching buyers and sellers on a platform. So I think that has a profound effect and that's at the core of us understanding where those boundaries are being redrawn and where our solution can play a role in that price discovery of matching buyers and sellers. So the second piece is how that transfer once that is consummated. So in financial markets, you have to keep track of who owns what and who sold what.

So we think the innovation with blockchain, while the timing is probably later than my second technology I'm talking about, It still has a profound impact that you have this distributed record keeping system with high integrity that I think ultimately ends up for a lot of hard assets in cloud. So the cloud providers will naturally offer Blockchain services. That's why as Tom mentioned, we integrated blockchain in an independent way, so that as we see different services available, whether they're different winners or there's just different alternatives for very quick record keeping change of ownership or more long standing ones like housing and security assets. We think there's different services and different flavors that will evolve. So we need to be able to talk to both of those.

So blockchain would be my technology. And then the second one is really machine learning and that one is here and now. What we've observed in our labs and what we've learned from the machine learning that has given computers vision through all the data you have with photos and videos, we've taken that analogy and said how would we look at seeing the patterns in trade surveillance. And we can now start to see using the same techniques, we can start to see layer and spoofing emerge as very distinct patterns using machine learning. So I think that's a very practical here and now application and improvement to what we are already doing trade surveillance.

Speaker 6

I think we're really rewriting tomorrow. Yes. And if you talk about tomorrow, Tom, I know you would like to talk about something. Yes, really cool.

Speaker 8

Yes. One of the really interesting things that we're looking at very, very closely now and certainly a little bit further out is quantum computing. And as Brad mentioned, if you think of it, quantum computers are very, very good at solving optimization problems. They're very, very good at detecting patterns or problems around patterns. So we think certainly that technology in terms of market surveillance and ensuring market integrity, this is something that's very interesting to us.

Additionally, because of its applicability to solving optimization problems, running Monte Carlo simulations and or things like Black Scholes or those types of methods on a quantum computer can do we can do that much, much faster than can be done in a classical computer. And that could have profound implications upon how surveillance is done, how market integrity, how price discovery is actually done. So we're really interested in that. We're working with a number of leading companies that are in the quantum space and we're working with them to identify and build algorithms right now using the programming paradigm, which is real, the languages and the compilers, which are real, the SDKs, which exist and simulators that run-in the cloud to have these algorithms ready to bring to bear to this market and make a bell to our customers as soon as the hardware is ready. So we're kind of getting ahead of this and we want to have a portfolio of these services kind of waiting on the hardware and we're working very diligently to do just that.

Speaker 6

Thank you. So I think that means we end this panel and we're open for questions.

Speaker 1

Actually, I want to leave the panelists up here and we'll open it up to Q and A to the audience. And that way if someone has a question on these things, we can ask anybody. Can we bring a microphone over here to Alex? I'm going to ask everyone to please wait for the microphone to get to you, announce your name, introduce yourself and then ask the question.

Speaker 5

Sure. Thank you. Alex Gram, UBS. Can you just elaborate a little bit on the non financial opportunity on the market technology side? I mean, you said it's 4,000,000, 5 clients.

So, A, is this all like little $1,000,000 clients that you see out there? Or how big could these some of these opportunities be on an individual basis? And then how is the pipeline in general? I mean, you said you've got a lot of incoming calls right now. But are you actually out there trying to promote this?

Do you need to have a better or different sales force to do this? Like, I mean, how are we going to think about this for the next couple of years in terms of spending and then also the pipeline going forward?

Speaker 6

So first of all, we are lucky enough to have extremely scalable technology. So the smallest client I have is actually the exchange in Papua New Guinea in very small, running on a laptop. And then we're running exchanges like our own here. So the first many of those new markets has been start ups, but we also have very interesting incoming requests from very big and established firms. And I expect to see us a range, very big range of very small deals to very, very large deals.

So we definitely have those opportunity in there too. Maybe talk about Scott too, the fact that we do have Yes. When it comes to I mean one good example is with the complex algorithm technology, we have Hong Kong Jockey Club as the largest client in this segment, and there's a growth of dedicated

Speaker 10

business

Speaker 6

development group looking at how to a dedicated business development group looking at how to develop these market segments. We are going to use both the established sales force that we have all over the world. We have offices in many countries to look into this because the underlying offering is not so different from what we're selling to the financial marketplaces. So we think that we can leverage the existing sales force, but we are strengthening it with business development capabilities and we have that in place. And what that is why we do that is to develop a plan for what are the industries that we proactively should go after.

We have a view, we have done a work, we're not yet final with the outcome of that. And we're going to use also external help in identifying where these best opportunities are. And then we will go after this with established people, but we're also going to staff up as we go forward.

Speaker 1

Great. Next question?

Speaker 11

I want to expand a little bit on the non financial markets. I guess, the Hong Kong Jockey Club sounds great. But what I've heard, one of the biggest markets is online advertising that they use hyper currency trading techniques. There's companies right here in New York that housing have developed platform. So is that have you looked at that area?

Look, I'm trying to think of the broad categories that really use that's one that just jumps out to me that I have you looked at that or no?

Speaker 6

Absolutely. And we have the NYX exchange, which is a futures exchange for advertisement already as a client. That's one of the 5. But I think I don't want to nail into which exact market we think are the biggest opportunity. But for instance, we signed X3, a reinsurance company recently, so where you can get in and out of risk in a more efficient manner.

We look at the healthcare industry, where we have incoming opportunities. We have in the supply chain management areas opportunities that are very large. So I think it's a little bit too early for us to say that's the market because I think we will see a list of 3, 4, maybe 5 markets where we really want to go after with tailor made value propositions for them. Advertisement industry could be one of those and we're already in that space.

Speaker 1

We have time for one last question in this segment and then later Lars will be back with the entire management team for more questions. Can I take the question from Mike Carrier?

Speaker 12

Yes. Mike Carrier, BBA Merrill Lynch. Lars, two questions. Just first on the buy and the sell side. So it seems like the market opportunity there is the biggest kind of potential for you guys.

I think on the one slide, you showed I think it was 15,000,000,000 dollars If you look at the double digit growth that you're aspiring to, is that future or are you actually seeing that now? And what's driving that? Meaning, I think you mentioned some outdated systems like from a cycle, are the systems just have a lot of firms not been able to invest because of a lot of other kind of issues that they've been navigating through. And so are the legacy systems just a lot more outdated versus like history and is that driving it? And then just one other question on the margins.

I think you said you have some investments in 2017 through say 2019, which we'd be expecting for the margins versus 2019 and beyond when you start to scale up?

Speaker 6

We're tied to answer. I didn't hear every nuance of your question. But on the banks and brokers space, the sell side space, it is a lot about making sure that the resources they have is focused on what is bringing them differentiating value. So we can help them with doing the, should I call it, the plumbing. So why should they build a matching system?

Why should it be surveillance system or risk systems that we could provide for them in a managed operation manner? We also see clear interest from that segment of the market to actually not buy software and operate it themselves, but really buy a managed solution from a partner. So it's about lowering cost. It's about refreshing old technology to more modern technology and it's about freeing up their internal resources to focus on where they can make a difference for their competitiveness in the market. So there's a huge space there of, shall I call it, inefficiency that we could help with.

RegTech being 1 big space, huge cost for our clients, where a partner could really help lower them the costs. On the margin, I will pass over to Adena to have a comment on that. But if I start with the Market Tech perspective, yes, we're going to see some pressure on the margin short term, but we do this because we know that a software as a service model will have higher margin than on premises technology solutions in the future. And we will see uptick and you will not see a bump, you will see a gradual improvement because we will have to bring on new clients using the managed solution model, and you will see existing clients gradually moving over. So it will not be that one day everything is over into Managed Solutions.

So you will definitely see an improved margin over time. And Adena, you want to say something about the overall? No? Okay, fine.

Speaker 1

Okay, great. Listen, I want to thank you, Lars. I want to thank Brad, Tom and Patrick for joining us today. What we're going to do now is we're going to take a 10 minute break and then we're going to restart promptly at 10:30. Thank you everyone.

Everyone, we're going to start in just a few seconds. Okay. We're going to start in just 15 seconds. Okay. Welcome back everyone.

We're going to kick off the next session with a quick video and then Stacy Swanstrom, EVP of Corporate Solutions and Nelson Griggs, EVP of Listing Services are going to discuss our Corporate Services business.

Speaker 13

Okay. We are so proud to partner with those amazing companies who are up there. I think the theme of a lot of our companies, they look towards the future not the past and they're all about innovation. So that's the NASDAQ brand. And my name is Nelson Griggs.

I'm the Executive Vice President of the Listing Services Business. I've been with NASDAQ for 17 years and for the last three and a half years I've been running this business.

Speaker 14

And I'm Stacy Swanstrom, Executive Vice President of Global Corporate Solutions. I've been with NASDAQ for 25 years. In the last 3 years I've headed Corporate Solutions.

Speaker 13

Great. So in the next 20 minutes we're going to cover the new look of the corporate services business, how we are positioned for growth and also we see over the next 3 to 5 years. So looking at the business as it exists today, the balance between the Listing Services and the Corporate Solutions business is about a fifty-fifty mix. The Listing Services piece has not changed in terms of the construct of it. But as we've talked a bit today already, the Corporate Solutions business is now made up of the Investor Relations, Board and Leadership, which is the fastest growing product we have, as well as Stacy and I are very excited to welcome in the BWise business that governs risk and compliance because there's such an overlap in terms of the clients that we talk to.

So from a high level just some of the numbers on the right hand side, the way this business would look today, it's about a $501,000,000 revenue business, a 32% margin profile. We've highlighted some client statistics. I'll just touch on 2. We now have over 3,900 clients across the U. S.

As well as the Nordics from a listing perspective. And that Board of leadership, it's really fascinating today has grown to having 130,000 users on that platform. So we're very excited about some of those numbers on the clients that we touch. I'll talk more about that as we progress through the discussion

Speaker 14

here. Great. So we thought it would be helpful just to rewind 2 years back to Investor Day. And since then Corporate Solutions has been going through a bit of a transformation. So the strategic review of the NASDAQ portfolio resulted in a pivot and essentially more focused on our strategic growth segments.

The previous integration strategy actually was very helpful because it did help us lever content. It also allowed us to package up our communications products for divestiture and to partner with West Corporation, who as Adena mentioned is a global leader in technology enabled communication services. So we're also repositioning our GRC products alongside of our award winning IR and B and L products. And we think that that will greatly help us reposition and create a better competitive position in both our established and new marketplaces that we want to serve.

Speaker 1

Great. And one

Speaker 13

of the reasons why Stacy and I are up here today together is because of this lifecycle story that NASDAQ has that really no other exchange has in the world to position the breadth of what we do with our clients. So it obviously starts with the listing business. And today we service quite a few companies in the private sector on their liquidity needs. We take them through the IPO process. There is as mentioned thousands of companies that we list all the way up to the 5 largest companies market cap wide in the entire world that are listed on our marketplace.

So it's a breadth of services from listing perspective. It's very in-depth and broad, but what no one else can really talk about is our ability to service them through these technology applications as well. So the Board and Leadership product extend not just to public companies, but privates as well as some of that ecosystem like some of the sponsor companies will use that platform as well. The GRC is a great asset for us to have now thinking about what companies do when they're public, but also preparing to go public from audit, risk, governance, compliance. Those are all really critical discussions for us to be able to have with our clients, have a very engaged discussion with them.

And then the Investor Relations and Intelligence allows them to effectively navigate the public markets. We're also starting to support some companies before they go public. So again, that whole life cycle story is very unique to NASDAQ. Most other exchanges we're talking about various partners, providers that they have to refer to. We go in there as NASDAQ as a team to service the clients.

So thinking about that business today on a pro form a basis, the listing services and the IR piece is overall this is a very healthy reoccurring revenue consistent business with higher margins and that Listing Services and the IR piece is a steady business, very consistent for us and the higher growth greenfield businesses of the Board and Leadership and corporate governance represent about 23% or so of that mix. So this business as we reported in 2017 had a 28% margin when you included the multimedia IR website webcasting business. Today that margin profile is 32%. So now we're going to move on to how we're positioned to growth the whole business for growth.

Speaker 14

Sure. All right. So let's why let's talk about why we think that Corporate Solutions is positioned for growth. This slide demonstrates the sheer size and scale of the business with over 6,000 clients globally. We also have about 28% of our revenue in corporate solutions that are from NASDAQ listed clients.

That means a very large 72% are from clients that are not listed on NASDAQ. So this represents a huge opportunity for us beyond our listings business that people don't realize that we have. So with over 6,000 clients, we have an immense amount of data and scale. We feel that we can provide more strategic value to our clients across product mix. So who are our buyers and then what is the value we provide?

So we're focused on the highest level strategic buyer at a company. Our goal is to give the C suite advanced tools to help them navigate the capital markets and also to basically operate efficiently and effectively. The convergence in terms of what the Board wants to know and our Investor Relations and our GRC and our BWise products continues to move together. And so the content is typically curated by the C suite and then it's also handed over to the corporate secretary to publish and share with the Board and the subcommittees. And so some examples of where we see a convergence to the Board with Investor Relations and GRC are things like an activist study or a capital allocation study.

Those are projects that we do with our clients more and more that the Board is very interested in. On the DRC side, it might be something like SOX or internal reporting. Again, very interesting to the Board. So serving the C suite and the Board and creating interconnectivity with our products really helps us walk the halls and continue on our land and expand strategy. And of course, these people also make the listings decisions.

All right. So I'm really excited about this slide because I think in the green it does show our unmatched and unparalleled position that Corporate Solutions has in the market. Not only do we have like we mentioned 130,000 board and leadership users and 6,000 clients globally, we have penetration of 90% of the NASDAQ 100 Index and 88% of the Fortune 100 Index. So this just again demonstrates incredible size and scale of the business. So these global clients can also feed our listings business, which is why Nelson and I are here speaking together.

So we recently welcomed a long time large corporate solutions client PepsiCo as the latest mega cap listing switch. So that was very exciting for us. But it definitely demonstrates how these businesses can feed each other.

Speaker 13

Yes. That was incredibly exciting for my group particularly. You think about a company that's been listed on our competitor for well over 100 years making the decision off that value proposition story that I had mentioned. So when I was up here just 2 years ago talking to the group, since then we've had over $150,000,000,000 more in market cap transfer from our key competitor. I'll talk about that more in a moment.

And the IPO win rate today over the last 3 years has been 70%. We're pretty excited about our efforts on some of the larger cap IPOs. Last week you saw Dropbox list raising over 750,000,000 dollars Today Bilibili is going to raise last night about $480,000,000,000 Tomorrow we have a company that's scheduled to raise over $2,000,000,000 with a $13,000,000,000 market cap. So our progress in IPO win rates is truly exciting to us. And one area that doesn't get quite as much attention, our Nordic markets over the last 3 years had 287 listings.

In Europe, that's by far the largest number of listings on a European exchange. And the efforts in private market, although it's taking longer to scale than we had initially thought, we processed over 15,000,000,000 dollars in transactions over the last 3 years. We're going to some of the largest growth companies that are out there pre IPO and that business is now positioned pretty well for some further growth and have a more meaningful impact on the listing revenue. So we often get asked what drives these listing decisions. And clearly as you walked in today, you saw some of the visibility aspects we do for an IPO company is truly a transformative day for the company.

It's magical. It's very exciting. That also extends beyond the IPO. We have one of the most advanced digital and social teams, some of the largest companies in the world rely on us for their social platforms and how we promote their brand. You've seen if you watch Squawk Box in the morning, they now report downstairs.

As Dina mentioned, we're thrilled to have a more expansive footprint here at NASDAQ. We focus relentlessly on the execution of the trading component of this, not just on the ongoing basis, but we've been down this process to have a much more efficient resilient opening process and which net result in more listing clients choosing NASDAQ. We spent a lot of time talking about the corporate solutions. I can't underestimate the importance of having these deep meaningful conversation with the C Suite about their stock. That's truly why they list on a marketplace and having ownership over those services is very valuable.

As you move through the story here, no other exchange has the index components that NASDAQ has. We have world being indices that's very important to the clients. And lastly, we have a rational fee structure that's appreciated by the clients. And although we had a 70% win rate overall, you look at the sectors that drive the most listen activity, the healthcare, finance and technology that represents 75% of the listing IPOs in the U. S, we have almost an 80% win rate there.

So we spent a lot of time protecting these sectors. I will touch very briefly on the Switch story, because this slide gets a lot of mileage for NASDAQ as a whole and surprises a lot of people. So last 10 years, we've had over $1,100,000,000,000 in market cap transfer. And obviously, we're excited to bring over technology leaders such as Workday or Text Instruments. The breadth of these companies, whether it's CSX, American, Xcel Energy, the 10th largest utility company in the U.

S. Switched last year, Principal Financial. This opens up a lot of eyes about who NASDAQ is today and these companies wanted to be part of the home of the future. So this is a story that continues to pay dividends for us and we'll also do that in the future.

Speaker 14

Great. So let's

Speaker 3

take a few minutes to walk through

Speaker 14

our primary growth drivers. First is to increase our Board and leadership market penetration. This is our biggest growth driver in corporate services. It's estimated that only 25% of Boards today actually use a Board portal. So this creates a lot of green space for us.

We also need to execute on our segmentation strategy and this will help us sort of get deeper penetration into the markets we serve, but also create new verticals for us. We'll continue to expand BWise's global penetration. That's our next biggest opportunity. Historically, we've sold perpetual licenses for BWise. And so we've had a 4 year program actually to move from the perpetual licenses to more of a subscription model as Adena mentioned earlier.

In 2018, we expect the subscription fees actually to surpass the perpetual license fees that we get or revenue I should say. So in the short term, it's been a little bit of a drag on the top line revenue. But moving away from the perpetual license to the subscription model, obviously, will create a more stable revenue base for us and also future growth. The next one is leveraging automation. And we've done a lot of that in our Investor Relations business.

We spent a lot of time on machine learning and natural language processing. Essentially what that's allowed us to do is have our analysts move away from the more mundane and sort of elevate their insights and their services to our clients. So that's been an exciting shift for us. We also have future opportunities to further segment this market. So today giving our clients actually in the future options to move away from an all white glove service that's all we do today to further options down to a low touch or maybe a no touch for maybe micro caps.

So that would be more of a robo advisor type of service. And then lastly on the automation side, we'll continue to introduce our new innovative products. We have Insight 360, which is our benchmarking product. And we also have PacifyQ, which is essentially helping our clients understand who are their index who owns their index and why they own their index. And so these are exciting new value props for us, but also we will demonstrate those for you in the back once we're finished.

So we're excited to sort of show you what we're doing and where we've come, the IR insight platforms back there too as well as

Speaker 3

board and leadership. So I do too much of a plug. I love it. It's awesome.

Speaker 13

It's an amazing tool. So in the listing business, we talked about we play the long game at NASDAQ. So I'll take you back 45 years when we had 0 revenue from listings to where we think we are today taking on this entrenched competitor and winning this tremendous market share over the last 5, 10 years. And our opportunity here is really to continue that focusing on some of the larger IPOs continuing on the switch business and maintain our market share where we're exceptionally strong today. So the listing business has room to run there.

And when we look at how that's going to evolve over the next 3 to 5 years, where we are today, we're extremely confident in our business today. So the ability to execute the divestiture exceptionally well, we're working hand in hand with Stacy on that and we're confident in where that sits today. This relationship with the C suite is super powerful for us and the ability to go out and talk about these complex things that they're faced today is going to really power Stacy and my ability, our teams to capitalize on this and sell more products, position more services and gain more market share. So we're excited to share that we are moving our revenue outlook up to a 3% to 5% growth rate over the next handful of years. And again, we're able to do that in our mind because of the foundation we have.

And that's really where I'll summarize here is the foundation is critical to us. So this repositioning the businesses and focusing on things that truly matter to our clients day in and day out gives a great foundation. We think this life cycle story is truly unique to the exchange space unless it's talked about the value proposition to a company's whole entire cycle as a private company, a public company with the tools they need. And this refocus effort has our whole teams energized to go out and position this story. So that's where we are today.

Speaker 1

Questions. And then later, Nelson and Stacy will join us for the group Q and A as well. Yes. Microphone to Rich here.

Speaker 11

Could you you have a 3% to 5%, which is improved like you said. Could you walk through the steps of maybe breaking out between corporate listings and corporate services and how the impact of PR, the sale of the business, because I would expect that improved growth rates once you separate that.

Speaker 1

I'm just going to repeat the question, asking for a little more detail about your raised revenue growth rate and how the two segments as well as

Speaker 13

the changes you've made impact that growth rate? Yes. Well, the game moving out the webcasting, web hosting, PR increased that margin profile by 4 percent. That's part of it then which left. Yes.

No, I'd say on the margin profile. The growth profile we don't think we'll have doesn't really impact the business. We're keeping what we feel are the most of the higher growth businesses for us. So you break down that group, the pie chart and the Board and Leadership and the BWise will be the higher growth and they're probably at that upper end of the range or further. And then you have the listing business is somewhat of a beta business.

So it all depends on how the markets are moving, but we do have some power to increase the revenue there in the lower single digits. And then I'd say the IR is right in that same range. So that the growth drivers are on those, the Board leadership and the BWIs.

Speaker 1

We have another question over here.

Speaker 15

Thank you. Could you just talk about the IPO win rate did tick down a little bit in 2017 over 2016, but you highlighted a good growth in financials, technology and healthcare. Was that a strategic decision to not focus on certain areas or just maybe some color around what drove the year over year decline?

Speaker 13

Yes. I mean, I'll take you back. Sorry.

Speaker 1

I'll just repeat the question. Make sure everyone on the webcast can hear. The question was about some of the year on year changes in win rates and whether or not NASDAQ is changing its focus on which sectors it's chasing the hardest?

Speaker 13

Yes. If you look back 3, 4 years ago, our win rate was 50%. So the blended rate over 3 years of 70% we think is really strong even last year was a very strong year for us. Sometimes year over year depending on what sectors are more active than others can impact the win rate to some degree. But if we're going to be in that 65 plus 30% win rate, we're pretty excited about that, but we are focused on this large cap area.

Speaker 15

Can I maybe just ask a follow-up, any update on the total addressable market for GRC?

Speaker 13

Lars, you want to sorry, go ahead.

Speaker 6

So I'm handing it over, I can answer that question. Yes. Yes, absolutely. So the addressable market with the existing solution is about USD 1,300,000,000 But we are developing also the BY solution into a service where we're adding content. We see that the opportunity that we're going to be able to address is around US5 $1,000,000,000

Speaker 1

Okay, great. Well, I'd like to thank Nelson and Stacy for their presentation today. We'll see them again later on. But now I'll turn it over to Bjorn Sibbern, EVP and Head of Information Services. Thank you, Bjorn.

Speaker 10

Thank you, Ed. Can you hear me in the back? Great. I really look forward for today. I look forward to spend the next 20, 30 minutes to give you an update on our Global Information Services business.

My name is Bjorn Siper. I'm responsible for Global Information Services, and I've been with NASDAQ for 10 years. Early in my career, I was running our European Equity business and our Commodity business. Some of you are seeing me for the first time today, but I can assure you that more or less all of you have been seeing the Global Information Products services in action at least a couple of times. When you have been looking at the stock ticker from CNBC, if you've been looking at your iPhone, your Bloomberg terminal or if you have been looking at your financial websites, you have everything equal been looking at data or index products from NASDAQ.

As you can hear, I'm from Europe. I came in as a part of the OMEX acquisition, and it has been great 10 years with NASDAQ and OMEX. But I look forward, even more look forward to the next 10 years. As you heard from Adena, we launched our strategy last year. Global Information Services have a fantastic potential, which was highlighted at our strategy launch last year.

We kicked it off with the acquisition of eVestment, which is a great new start for our new 3rd growth pillar, and I will talk about eVestment a little bit later today. But before looking at the future journey, let me spend a couple of minutes on where we are today. We have, through many years, built a very strong growth engine for Global Information Services, and it represents now 27% of NASDAQ revenue. We have strong index brands like NASDAQ 100 or NASDAQ Biotech. We are the industry leader in the market data space, and we have more than 3 20 exchange rate products, tracking the NASDAQ indices in 19 countries.

At year end, we had US160 $1,000,000,000 in AUM that are tracking our indices, which is, by the way, up with 35% from end of previous year. We have seen strong historical growth, but we see even stronger growth going forward. It will be based on many factors, but let me just mention a couple of them. We provide financial data and analytics to billions of people around the globe. One example is our NASDAQ Basic, our cost efficient U.

S. Equity product that provides great value to more than 400,000 subscribers across the globe. We are the leader in smart beta and multifactor indices. We have products like Dorsey Wright Focus 5 or Dividend Achievers families of products. And lastly, we are expanding our data analytics with the franchise with our franchise with the acquisitions of eVestment.

I really like this slide, and this is because it shows some of the strong growth potential we have and also how resilient and diversified our business is. We have gold sourced data from 29 marketplaces, mainly in North America and Europe, data from our exchanges on equities, fixed income, commodities. But what I also want to highlight with this slide is that the revenue we have is not only from U. S. Equities.

The revenue we have from the U. S. Shared tape accounts for less than 20% of the total Global Information Service revenue. We do not only see a strong growing business and a diversified business, but we also have a unique position with leading index brands for both retail and institutional investors. Let me give you a couple of example.

We have NASDAQ 100, NASDAQ Biotech, Dorsey Wright Associates and the leading index in the Nordics, OMX, is 13. More than 40% of our AUM is tracking indices in the smart beach area. Through eVestment, we are the leading source of analytics for institutional investors and asset managers. We are truly global, and we have a strong presence in more than 70 countries around the globe. I'm actually proud about our performance last year, and these slides highlight that.

So during the last 3 years, we've been able to grow organically with our on average 5%. Last year, we accelerated our growth and delivered 7% in revenue growth last year, and we outperformed most of our peers, and we have high growth expectations going forward. And let me talk about how we will deliver going forward. I will now talk about 3 growth pillars. So when you look at the Global Information Services business, you should think about looking at it from 3 different growth pillars, each with different great growth opportunities.

The first one is our market data business, mainly data coming from our exchanges. The second one is our index business and the third one, investment data and analytics. Let me turn to the first one. 1st growth pillar, market data, mainly data from our exchanges. We will now grow our market data business through many different drivers, but let me just mention a couple of them.

We have in the past and will going forward do targeted and strategically considered fee adjustments. We do not, we do not just increase fees across the board. When we change fees, it's because we have added value to the products. And when we do fee changes, we actually reach out to the customers to explain them why and the impact. It's not only good customer service, but it also limit attrition.

Another way we want to grow our business is by onboarding new customers. We onboard quite many new customers, either by selling our existing products, launch new product or services or by globalizing our franchise. We see strong growth opportunity outside U. S. And especially in the Asian Pacific region.

And that leads me to the 1st customer case, the 1st case study how we work with a customer. This case study is from China. It's around SINA. SINA is one of the largest media companies in China. They operate the Internet portal called sina.com and a Twitter like social media called Baidu.

SINA is, by the way, a great listed company here with NASDAQ. SENA now offer large sale information for all U. S. Listed stocks and ETFs. So the SINA customers now get financial data, last year data from Nasdaq to more than 3 75 active users.

So a great value proposition for SINA and, of course, a revenue opportunity for NASDAQ as well. Should I also mention that SINA customers do not only look at the last sales data product, they also look at our index data. So a great example of how we grow with our customer, serve their customers' needs and how we'll grow with new customers going forward. The Asian Pacific region is a great opportunity for us from a growth point of view and it also an important growth opportunity for the 2nd growth pillar I will talk about, our index business. We see strong growth potential by continuing to expand our index business with innovative solutions, which is in line with the move from active to passive.

We are very well positioned as the leader in the index licensing space, and the leadership is across the 4 major product areas you see on the slide behind me. We work with most of the leading exchange product issues globally, and we expect to see more than 25 exchange traded products launched this year based on our indices. And we, of course, do that in close cooperation with the different ETF issuers. We see an increasing demand for global ETFs, and we see great opportunities by spreading the NASDAQ 100 across the world. NASDAQ 100 is a fantastic brand, not only here in U.

S, but also outside U. S. And we move into new countries, new geographies, NASDAQ 100 ETF is in demand. We also see great ETF demand, especially in the APIC region, but we also launched our 1st Nasdaq 100 ETF in Africa in Q2 this year. We also see a great potential by partnering with existing ETF issuers to assist them, help them opening up new markets.

We always try to form new alliances with sponsors firms, which leads me to the second case study. The case study is with Principal, which is a great example how we work with ETF partners. Principal did, by the way, switch their listing to NASDAQ last year, their equity listing. Principal partnered with NASDAQ to create a new line of smart beta ETFs. By partnering with NASDAQ, Principal tapped into some of our core strengths, translating complex strategy into rule based and transparent indices.

We have together launched 9 funds, and it's now and it has now more than US200 $1,000,000,000 in AUM increased during a little bit more than 2 years. It's a great partnership, and that's the way we want to work with partners going forward. Let me turn to the 3rd growth pillar, Investment Data Analytics. I'm really excited about this one because this is the area where we see have the highest growth expectation. We have a growing list of products that appeal to different communities of investors.

Dorsey Wright associates our technical analysis platform that is targeting thousands of investors, financial investors. We have the Nasdaq Fund Network that distribute end of state pricing for more than 35,000 funds and investment vehicles. We see great opportunity by expanding Nasdaq Fund Network globally and actually also include more investable assets. Today, Nasdaq, front network is basically only a product here in U. S.

Globalizing that is a great opportunity. And finally, through eVestment acquisition, our eVestment acquisition, it's a great growth opportunity, and we see great growth from eVestment's global institutional investing network. And let me spend a couple of minutes on a very important milestone for Global Information Service and for NASDAQ, our acquisition of eVestment. The acquisition closed in October last year, and we are very happy with eVestment, both from a growth point of view and from a performance point of view. EVestment is also has also tailwind from the global growth in AUM and the Institutions Communities' need for transparencies is also a tailwind for eVestment.

Last week, I participated in eVestment's Annual Conference with more than 300 buy side customers, and I've got formation on following. EVestment is the industry standard for institutional investment data. EVestner has a great reputation and strong relations throughout the entire buyside ecosystem. Many of you are customers today or else some of your customers are customers. EVestment has a strong track record on double digit growth, high customer satisfaction and is very well positioned to continue its leadership within this industry.

We expect eVestment to able to upsell to their customers, grow internationally and to aggressively pursue certain unserved markets like private equity. And by the way, it will be possible, like Stacy also mentioned, to see a demo on eVestment after today's presentations. Let me turn to the 3rd case study, which is a good example of how eVestment and eVestment customers work together. The case study is around GQ G Partners, a boutique investment firm that focus on global and emerging markets. It's a relatively young firm, and when they started in 2016, one of the first things they did was reach out to eVestment.

Some of the employees have worked with eVestment for and knew the value from eVestment from a distribution point of view, competitive landscape insight, understanding how you position versus your competitors. They signed up for a handful of eVest product, which gave them the insight to the clients' needs their own position in the market. GQG used eVestment Analytics to support their amazing growth and they have also increased their spend with eVestment with 33% within 1 year. This is a great example of how we want to work with small and big customers in this space and illustrate how well positioned we are. On top of this, eVestment has seen fantastic growth opportunities outside U.

S. We have already proven successes in different countries in Europe and the Asia Pacific region. So let me spend a couple of minutes on the outlook. So what can you expect from Global Information Services going forward? You'll see a strong organic growth from 3 different growth pillars.

We will deliver 5% to 7% organic growth over the next 3 to 5 years. And let me just round up. Global Informations remain a key growth engine for NASDAQ for following reasons. It's a differentiated business in terms of growth, resiliency and consistency. We are heavily client focused, and you should expect us to show more partnerships or case study as I just showed you.

We have a great platform for future growth. Our brand, our reputation and our employees are great assets. Our technology platform, which you heard from Lars and Brad, is second to none. With benefits from Tailwind, the move from active to passive, the need for transparency in the institutional space and the need for alternative data is a tailwind that will help us grow going forward. Global Information Services, an important part of the NASDAQ story, and we serve more or less all part of the financial industry, back to my example about more or less already using NASDAQ data a couple of times during today.

With those words, I will open up for questions.

Speaker 16

Thanks a lot. I wonder if you can expand a little bit on the opportunity to grow through adding new clients, new customers, where the customer is coming from and how penetrated do you think you are with respect to the total customer market?

Speaker 1

I'm just going to repeat the question. The question is on where NASDAQ in Information Services finds new customers, how penetrated is this market for NASDAQ today?

Speaker 10

Yes. Let me try to give you a couple of examples. If we start with our data business, we our revenue from outside U. S. And Europe, so basically the Asia Pacific region, is less than 4%, around 4%.

So to onboard new customers like I showed with the SINA case and you should expect to see more cases like SINA mainly out of Asia within the next couple of quarters where we will onboard new customers. We have great dialogue, we've tried many customers in the Asia Pacific region that needs to tap into the U. S. Market. They need financial data about the biggest liquidity pool in the world.

To get started to trade those markets, they need data. That's why they go to us. So that's one example. Another example I want to highlight is eVestment. EVest is a fantastic story.

17 years, they have been able to grow their business year by year, double digit growth. But they still have a fantastic upside opportunity in Europe and in Asia. They have just started that journey. By being a part of NASDAQ, and that gives me two example of sales cross sales we have done already. We had links to a couple of customers in southern part of Europe.

That was customers that eVestment has never touched on before. NASDAQ opened the door, we landed a deal in Italy. Another example is eBESTMENT have not had opened offices or have sales people in Japan by having the NASDAQ office in Japan and using the NASDAQ infrastructure. EVS has the 1st sales guide in Japan and we start to land the 1st deals also in Japan. By the way, EVS may already have a strong presence in Japan from a sales point of view, but suddenly have a salesperson on the ground will help.

So this is just a couple of few small examples, but we see fantastic opportunities for eVestment, but also for our data business. And my example around what we do on the index area, launched ETFs, NASDAQ 100 in quite many countries. I said more than 25 ETFs launched outside U. S. Based on NASDAQ indices.

So great growth potential there as well.

Speaker 17

Great. Brian? Brian Bedell, Deutsche Bank. Just 2 part question. First, maybe can you talk a little bit about the headwind from the market data potential pressures a regulatory perspective in the U.

S. Whether you think that's a real risk? And then do you think you can gain market share within that segment, maybe just bifurcating between the proprietary and non proprietary market data portions? And then the second part of the question is if you can expand a little bit on Data Analytics Hub, the medium to long term revenue growth outlook for that effort and how that interfaces with the rest of the business?

Speaker 1

Great. The first question was on the regulatory environment in U. S. Equity data. 2nd, whether NASDAQ feels like it is an opportunity to gain share.

And then 3rd, the outlook for the analytics hub.

Speaker 10

Yes. So the discussion around U. S. Equity Data has been ongoing for many, many years, 10 years, and it will probably also continue. It has been actually tested in court a couple of times, and we have won.

It is a competitive market. The conclusion is relatively clear. It's a competitive market. There are competitive prices, and we launched our alternative to the SIP, the U. S.

Tape with NASDAQ Basic. So it's a competitive market. There will be discussion around that, but we feel relatively comfortable. I should also mention that we work with our customers. The launch of NASDAQ Basic is a way to help customers have a lower cost base.

We launched a product that we have a great revenue from and actually lowering the cost of market data for customers. And we have had great success with Nasdaq Basic, selling that in U. S. And by the way also outside U. S.

So this is a way where we work with customers actually to lower the cost on market data and upside for NASDAQ. And back to Analytic Hub. Analytic Hub should be seen as a relative long journey. We launched in May last year. We are very happy with where we are.

We launched with 8 data sets, but it's a long journey to gather the data sets, to put out new data sets. We spent a lot of time looking at data sets to validate the data set, normalize the data set to make sure there's value in the data set, to make sure that we can trust the partner. It's a relatively long journey. When we then have the data sets, then we need to approach sell side, buy side customers that want to buy the data sets, of course, because they will help them make smarter and better investment decision. But one thing I would like to mention, that is one of the benefits from eVestment.

EVestment sit on very, very interesting data. If there's a move from large cap to small cap, that is some of the searches you will be able to see, get data from the eVestment platform. That is the type of data set that we're working on right now, and we hope to launch and put on the Analytic Hub platform. So we have a data set that will show if that move from, let's say, large cap to small cap or from China to India. So we expect to launch more data sets on our Analytic Hub, but you should see this as a relative long term growth strategy.

Speaker 1

Great. Any more questions for Bjorn? All right. Bjorn will be back later if you have additional questions. With that, we're going to bring up Tom Whitman.

Tom is going to talk about market services and then he's going to bring up some of his lieutenants that leave the different parts of market services and we're going to ask some of the top of mind questions we get on the market services business and then open it up to the audience for additional questions.

Speaker 18

How is your voice holding up? Good. Well, it's good to see everybody again. I think this is the 3rd time that I've had the chance to talk to the group. We got to talk to some of you some familiar faces down in Boca.

My name is Tom Whitman, Executive Vice President of Global Market Services. So I came to NASDAQ through acquisition from the Philadelphia Stock Exchange and my background is really technology where I wrote software and then ran software development for a number of years. So I'm really happy to have part of the team. So we had Brad, Tom and Patrick here. It's really fun to run these businesses with that kind of horsepower behind.

So you know the smart guys, you could tell that they don't wear ties if you notice that. So those are the smart individuals in the company. So I'm glad to have them as part of the team. So we're going to talk about the current businesses and the growth initiatives and we'll start with what I call the money machine. So let's take a look at our businesses right now from GTMS perspective.

It's a well diversified business producing $881,000,000 My personal goal in life is to make sure we can get a number up there that looks like $1,000,000,000 for my own personal goal. But 55% operating margin, I think what is the most interesting about this is a well diversified business and it's anchored by a couple of very strong businesses. Equity options were most known for I think through the acquisition of the Philadelphia Stock Exchange, 40% market share, number 1 in equity options. Of course, our cornerstone is our equities business. And we talked about the listings business.

It all starts with listings. We get great listed companies. We trade them on our platform and we enjoy 30% market share in the products that we list on the NASDAQ stock market. And of course, across the ocean with Nordics, we have a Nordic equities business that has 67% market share, a great listings business there too. But these are the pillars of which we build our businesses on.

So let's take a look at how the revenues are driven here. You can see that on the top and I really like this slide to show the asset class diversification and also the geography diversification here. Equities in the U. S, equities in the Nordics, options in both places, futures in the Nordics and commodities in the Nordic markets as well as fixed income in the U. S.

And fixed income products in the Nordic markets. We also have at one point we list we currently list the crypto markets over in the Nordics and we were actually the first. There's talks about other exchanges list crypto markets. We have crypto markets that trade on the platforms in the Nordics. So these well diversified businesses drive recurring revenue businesses here on the bottom.

As I said before, it starts with listings both in the Nordics and in the U. S. Markets. When we build very strong business here in the transaction area, it helps us drive our prop data, data and data analytics business if we can bring strong markets to Bjorn's and the GIS businesses. We also have a very strong, which we call trading management services business, which for each one of these platforms is membership, colo, ports, applications.

And that's a recurring business which you saw on one of the original slides that Adena had. So these markets drive these revenues, recurring revenues and these transaction businesses sit here. There are some businesses which we have not tapped these services for yet and that would be in our NFX Futures platform. So as we grow and succeed in that platform, we'll be able to have additional revenues on this bottom line. So let's take a look at how these businesses performed.

And I think what's interesting about this and satisfying to us is these businesses have performed well in low volatility times. And of course as the volatility picks up, we'll realize more revenues. We should point out that we've had some success in the growth of these revenues through the ISE acquisition and the CHIEX Canada, the 2 ATSs which are on exchanges in Canada have helped us drive revenues here. But the story here is we've been able to do this, bring new companies in, bring revenues in, meet synergy targets in the face of a waning VIX environment. Of course, that's not the case in the past couple of months.

So turning back to the TMS business. So the transaction business you see growth there, but in the trading management services we also see the benefits of the acquisitions and the recurring revenues both from these two acquisitions and also with our data services businesses where we've got a data center in Carteret, we've got one in Basbee and we also have a data center that we connect to in Chicago for our futures business. So we've got some new services here, 3rd party connectivity and other services that we use to expand our revenues here. And once again, as we grow other asset classes, we should see more revenue move to these to the bottom line here. So let's talk about some growth initiatives now that we set up the base of the core.

I want to turn to 3 areas which we'd like to take a look at positioning the core and let's start with market share. I don't think that these businesses are very competitive and we're very happy that we've been able to grow market share in both equities and options in our Nordic equity markets. And of course the Canadian markets are small, but we've grown our market share there. It's important for us as Adena said earlier to make sure that we keep these core strong with market share. When you look at these businesses, you look at ADV market share and capture for all these.

But we like the balance, we like to keep the market share growing in the right direction here. And we'll talk about some ways that we can maintain the market share in these areas and hopefully grow in other areas. So just a couple high level points here. We always want to stay client focused in whatever we do. We stayed that way.

We've been that way with all the business we've run. We want to position and look at what I'll call OTC buy side institutional trading both in the U. S. And in the Nordics. One thing that we've just recently got approval for is the midpoint extended life order abbreviated called Milo.

This is an order type that we implemented just recently on our equity platform and the buy side institutions really are enjoying the behavior of this order type. It's an order type that disabuses speed. It's one that sits at the midpoint in our primary market, sits for half a second and will trade with liquidity that's willing to trade with that like liquidity resting for half a second. So every day we see increased volume in this. I think it's a utility and order type that we can use to leverage for our buy side customers in more than just this platform.

A lot of great feedback on this piece of functionality. Also in the buy side institutional space auction on demand with MiFID II and we'll talk more about MiFID II is auction on demand and our equity platforms. And this was a way to attract large and scale and order flow to an auction mechanism coming out of MiFID II. And we've seen about 84% growth in this functionality and we'll have to watch since the CASA been put in place to see if we get more growth in those functionalities. And of course in Canada, like I said, it's a small platform, but we just recently got approval to be an exchange that allows us to put market maker programs in place, list different products.

And we also started originally what I wanted to do with the Dina mentioned ocean in the U. S, we pivoted and turned it to a market technology offering. But in Canada, we were allowed to implement what I really wanted to implement in the U. S. And run our own dark pool.

So we're just under 1% market share there. I think we can grow this platform in Canada as well. So 3 nice offerings in Canada. A lot of talk about the NASDAQ Financial Framework. And when I look at all these businesses and you heard the group talk about what NASDAQ Financial Framework can bring to our institution and what it can bring to the businesses that I run, I'm really excited about using this technology because at my heart I'm a geek technologist and I know that we can leverage this technology to compete in the marketplace.

So I would say last summer, Dina asked me to run the fixed income businesses that we have. So I looked at first started in the U. S. In our treasury platforms, looked at the Nordic businesses and fixed income, short term, long term interest rates, etcetera. What I found and it really came out of, if you look at how we executed the ISE acquisition, took synergies out, replatformed, used our teams, used our leverage and technology.

I looked at this treasury platform and at the root of it, we did not have an integrated technology team. We had an outdated technology platform. I had customers tell me, Tom, why are you not using the protocols that I'm used to in the NASDAQ stock market, in your options markets, in your Nordic equity markets. So what NFF will bring us here, so get to be the 1st user of the NFF platform in the U. S.

On this platform, which Brendan and her team are building, is to bring functionality, speed, determinism, reliability, resiliency to our fixed income platform, which we've never had. So this will be our first instance for that. It will help us not just solely in the NFI platform, but using this technology across our platforms to deliver functionality and agility new applications to our platforms and our customers. So we're looking forward to doing that and that will be in September, October timeframe for our NFI platform. We've got to talk a little bit about new products.

We've got core, we've got some small expansion, some good ideas and we've got some product ideas, which I think are could be significant. One is in the commodity derivatives area in our NFX platform. So you know that we've got a pretty decent position in the oil products. But as we looked at the freight business over in the Nordics, our customers weren't sure they were going to be able to with MiFID II stay in that business. We're moving that product to the U.

S. On NFX cleared OCC. When we announced that we had 3 or 4 new FCMs say, hey, our customers want to be there, we want to sign up for NFX and we're going to deliver these contracts on that platform. So that's one. But there's also steel contracts, which we just listed and they're trading about every other day.

So that's good. And then we can list precious metal products on that platform. From the fixed income and derivatives area in the U. S, there is a we call it a DV01 future and we've got some people in the room that are more experts at this than I, but we will list this. It's a dollar value, one basis point move of the interest rate on the run treasury.

So we'll use our treasury prices to create a future on NFX cleared OCC to do basis trading between our cash and the future. So this will launch in June, July of this year. We think it will be of great interest to our customers. We've talked to market makers in the institutional side of the business. So we'll look to deliver that at the end of the year.

And then corporate bond listing, so we don't we've got a lot of great companies listed on NASDAQ. We don't list corporate bonds and we've had some of our big listed companies ask us to list corporate bonds. So we'll initiate we've initiated a project and we'll deliver by the end of the year a corporate bond listing and trading platform. So in closing, I think you could see that we've got a great foundation foundational business, great revenue producing. We've got plans to maintain the great margins that we have here.

And with that, I'll turn it back to Ed Dittmeier.

Speaker 1

Thanks. Now we're going to bring in a panel of Tom's team, some of the people that lead some of his biggest businesses, important topics. Let's try to get these guys some chairs. So on format, here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to ask 3 or 4 questions on some of the biggest questions that we get all the time on the Market Services business that I want to make sure that we address today.

And then we're going to open it up to the group for additional Q and A. Okay, great.

Speaker 18

Want to introduce?

Speaker 1

First thing I'm going to introduce him. I

Speaker 18

can do it. So Tal Cohen runs North American Equities for Tal comes from the Chaiac acquisition. So he's been with us for 2 years. It'll be next month. Walt Smith runs TMS Trade Management Services for us and BizDev been with us for a lot of years.

And then Kevin Kennedy who runs our equity options business for us.

Speaker 1

All right. Let's talk about equity trading first. The competitive dynamics are always front of mind when it comes to how investors look at our equity businesses. Today, the foremost example of this is potential new competition in the important closing cross trades in the U. S.

Equity markets. How are you addressing this?

Speaker 19

In late January, the SEC through delegated authority approved the BATS proposal. And in February, we saw fit to ensure that the full commission weighed in on this. So what we did is we filed for a petition review of the approval decision and the SEC granted us that opportunity. So now we have until April 12 to submit additional comments. We and everybody else have the opportunity to weigh in.

And we did this principally for two reasons when it comes to the closing auction. One is, we wanted to continue to advocate on behalf of our issuers and investors who throughout the common period raised their concerns noted how they felt primarily around fragmentation and complexity. And I'll just say as a side note, the closing auction is a really important part of the trading day. 1,000,000,000 of dollars trade in our close, 1,000,000,000,000 of dollars of assets are tied to our closing price. So it's a meaningful issue for our issuers and investors.

And second on the policy side, we felt very strongly around the impact to price discovery, the stability of our auction and also in terms of manipulation, could this lead to additional cases of manipulation? So we put in this petition for review, the SEC is looking at it. But to answer your question in terms of the impact, if the proposal ends up being approved, we don't feel like it will have a material impact on our business. And the reasons for that are twofold. One is we've continued to invest in our closing auction for those that are participants or know our closing auction.

We just released new functionality that provides investors more flexibility in how they participate in our closing auction. We also invested in the resiliency, hardening the resiliency of our auction to ensure that this really important mechanism doesn't fail. And then to the extent that there are use cases related to the Bats proposal that our customers find the value, We're in constant dialogue with our customers. We're constantly talking to them about our offering, what they'd like to see, what they want from us. So we'll be quick to respond.

We'll take action if necessary. We feel good about what we're doing. We think the closing option is very well received. People think it functions really well, but there's always room for improvement and we continue to focus on that.

Speaker 1

Great. Let's go to equity options. This is the biggest trading revenue category for market services. How can NASDAQ maintain and hope to expand revenues in the face of a super competitive market and an industry volume pie that has struggled to grow over the past decade or so?

Speaker 20

Thanks, Ed. And it's great to be here today. So I love answering questions about options. And as we talk internally a lot about options, when we made the ISC acquisition, we liked options. And now that we have some tailwinds, we love options.

So it's really nice to see. I know that for 3 or 4 years we struggled in that 14,000,000 to 15,000,000 options a day in multi listed equity options. And all of a sudden started like really late Q4, we start to see some bubbling up. And I think some of that was driven by the volatility trade starting to sort of boil just a bit. And then early January, we saw significant volumes even before the sort of the Fed meltdown.

We're doing 19,500,000 options a day and it really is a great industry. And what we're seeing and this is where my team and our approach at NASDAQ, the partnership, so we take a partnership approach with our clients and Adena referred to that earlier. We're closely engaged with them and because we do that, I think we can pay really particular attention to meeting their needs, managing that balance of share and capture, go after constructive order flow, add value to the market, use our 6 venues now that we have with the ISC acquisition, the fact that it's also integrated and I think we can meet our clients' needs and take full advantage of the growing volume.

Speaker 1

Trade Management Services has some of the most consistent organic growth within Market Services. Is this growth sustainable in the context of a consolidating landscape of market participants, in particular market makers, liquidity providers in the U. S. Market?

Speaker 18

So I

Speaker 9

think thanks Ed

Speaker 4

for that. I think you're were referring some of the consolidation we've had in the industry, Virtu bought KCG and HRT purchased Sun and the appearance of some shrinkage. So I look at the business and I have 20 years staying back to the Philadelphia Stock Exchange days when you had members on the floor, members would come and go, But

Speaker 10

we've always seen kind of consistent new entrants come

Speaker 4

in the marketplace. So I look at the numbers we made over the last few months especially around our data center services and we lost 4 or 5 clients. We've gained about 11 to 15 new ones. And I expect to have some more new entrants around our connectivity services coming in the next 2 months both in the U. S.

And our Nordic data center in BaaS. Also it's kind of a very diversified business. We used to be very kind of U. S. Equity centric.

It's not the case anymore. We have multiple asset classes. We have a significant options business. So I look at our top customers, I think that a lot of folks believe it's going to be the HFT equity guys. It's actually it's your options market makers tend to be our largest clients as they provide liquidity to investors to trade against.

And then also you see the big banks who provide a variety of execution services to the buy side. And lastly to mention again it's like you constantly see growth, see new services I think as we expand our pops and grow our products, like give the strength in our futures business, I think we'll continue to see growth.

Speaker 1

Okay, great. Thank you. And one last question for me. I'm going to ask Tom to answer this on behalf of Laurie, our Head of European Equities. Are you ready for MiFID II?

What are you seeing? Are institutional brokerage customers going to consolidate in the face of a research revenue challenge? And how fluid is the off exchange trading dynamic with the new MiFID II rules? A lot of questions, Zach. It's a

Speaker 18

lot of questions, a mouthful, yes. So MiFID II, the rule set on the bundling side really has not had an effect on us. On the transparency side is one that first of all, it was a tremendous amount of work by Brad and his development group to get our systems ready and work with the banks and brokers in Europe. There is a lot of pre trade risk data on inbound consumption of data and then production of outbound data that tied up a tremendous amount of our resources that at the end of the day does not net revenue, but was something was done in the industry. I think the banks and brokers would tell you the same.

They had to spend a lot of money to work on this. So yes, we're ready. It's working. There were no big events and no negative events for us. On the more of the commercial business side when it comes to the bundling unbundling, it really doesn't affect our business per se.

The one that Larry and I were looking at with the closest eye were these double volume caps. The intention was really to move some volume where there was a lot of volume off exchange to move that back to the lit venues. And they were in broker crossing networks in dark and literally so it was only 2 weeks ago where the caps went in place, it came in later than anticipated. It literally looks like there's been a shift from the BCNs to SI, the SI internalizers left hand, right hand. Now there is a little bit of difficulty in looking at the data that's produced to pinpoint it, but our conversations with our customers, it looks like it's been a shift from the broken crossing networks into SIs.

Speaker 1

Okay, great. Let's open it up to audience questions. Let's go first to Chris Allen.

Speaker 21

Thanks. Excuse me. Two questions actually, 2 separate questions. 1, Tom, you talked about launching corporate bond listing and trading venue this later this year. Wondering where you see the long term opportunity there?

Is it more on the listing side? Or is it more on trading where only 20% corporate bonds trade electronically? And then 2, you talked about launching treasury future related product, obviously CMEs in discussions with Next Group right now. So wondering how you guys think about putting those 2 markets together, whether that creates opportunities or challenges for you guys moving forward?

Speaker 18

Okay. On the first part, it's a great question. It's 95% of listing opportunity. Like you said, when it comes to us, we will have a trading platform, but our first drive will be to get our listed company corporate bonds listed on our platform. Trading, I don't expect a lot of revenue and opportunity from the trading side of that equation.

On the I did see a short blurb on that as we were leaving Boca last week on CME next, I think there may have been a blurb again this morning. So I don't know a lot of detail about it. I mean, we're really focused on the plans that I spoke about when it comes to our U. S. Treasury platform.

I think we've got tremendous opportunity there. I know we only sit at 19% market share, but I think in out talking to our customers and our re platforming efforts that we can see growth there in this the future product that we've been it's been under development between Ted Bragg who runs our NASDAQ fixed income business and Walt who's doing product development. There's been some super positive advancements in their interest to provide liquidity and order flow in this product. So we're focused there. It's hard for me to speculate on what CME next combo would look like right now.

Speaker 1

Get that microphone to Vincent Hunt.

Speaker 5

Hi. So you touched upon the growth drivers in Trade Management Services. What kind of organic revenue growth rates

Speaker 11

should we be thinking about going forward?

Speaker 1

Question on organic growth expectations in Trade Management Services. And just to remind everyone, we don't have an organic growth target for market services because it's largely trading related, which creates a lot of variability in the trading environment. And we don't give organic growth expectations precisely to our segments. But perhaps you can give some more color on what you expect.

Speaker 18

So I don't have color on an exact number. I think what I pointed to in my presentation where there is opportunity is when you build strong trading platforms, it gives you the opportunity to have colocation membership ports, applications and those type of services which are in that TMS area. The obvious first part there is we charge none of those services for our futures platform in the U. S. Right now.

So that's an obvious one for growth.

Speaker 4

Yes, that too we're also looking at different regions for our connectivity business and we're also looking at ways of leveraging sort of new technologies to kind of expand our client base. We'll have more to come on that in the coming months.

Speaker 1

Okay, great. Let me get the microphone up here.

Speaker 5

This is Sherry from Goldman Sachs. Can you update us on your pricing philosophy market share or grow your market share from here?

Speaker 1

I'll just repeat the question. Any thoughts on pricing in your major equities options or NFX platform?

Speaker 20

I can address options. You want to start with options? And then I know you and Walt, the 3 of us working together in NFX, you might be better off. So in the option space, I would say largely due to some consolidation over the last year and now increased volumes. I anticipate sort of a leveling off of how many changes we'll make and going after certain segments of flow.

I think things have largely settled down and we're focused largely even within the industry on resiliency and risk mitigation. And we're again, like I said, we partner with our clients on this. And what we're hearing from our clients isn't about an extra penny here, an extra penny there, but rather where's my risk in the market? What can you do for me? And we are keenly focused on that.

Speaker 19

And just from an equity perspective, so we're looking to constantly try to grow the pie even though it's a very mature competitive marketplace. Tom mentioned MELO, which is our midpoint extended life order. And that really gets us in the game competing for order flow that otherwise would execute off exchange. And so we're actually able to charge a bit more than what we earn on NASDAQ and other exchanges today from a capture perspective because OTC's price points are higher than ours, but still pass on a cost savings to customers. So for us, it's a premium product and it's a way to grow the pie, but we're still able to offer it at rates and fees that are lower than you otherwise would see if you executed off exchange on ATS.

So that for us is part of our plan and not only compete for what we have and continuous in the close today, but think about things that we don't get today.

Speaker 18

Great. Yes. Nordic equities that pricing has been fairly steady. Nordic driven has been fairly steady there. No big plans.

But we are always as a team, we've got when I say our own internal quant to look at pricing for all segments of all these businesses almost on a weekly basis. Yes.

Speaker 1

Let's get a microphone here, Alex.

Speaker 5

Yes. Thank you. Talk a little bit more about Canada. I mean, Tom, you had Canada on your slide as one of the core businesses. And I know we don't hear about it a lot, so core business seems a little bit something I probably wouldn't call it.

But anyway, say, is there any other bigger opportunity down the line other than what you outlined in terms of like making little market structure changes, dark pool things like that? Like I had this conversation with somebody in Toronto the other day. He said like nobody knows NASDAQ up here. Maybe that was a one off comment, but it's like you don't really seem to have a real brand up there and recognition. So could there be like a bigger play here at some point because it's a big market, right?

Speaker 1

Yes, Tom. So let's talk about let's make sure everyone's clear on what NASDAQ does in Canada today and then what your ambitions are moving forward?

Speaker 18

Okay. So we had the 2 ATSs that have been just recently converted to full fledged exchanges up in Canada and then we launched the dark pool. Do you want to talk a little bit about what we're doing Monday, is that public on?

Speaker 19

Yes, we can talk about that. Sure.

Speaker 10

Did you want

Speaker 18

to hit that real quick then on the list of trading of the

Speaker 19

Yes, so on Monday, we'll be trading CSC names. So for those that aren't familiar with Canada, you have the TMX and TMX has 2 listing markets, a senior market and its venture market. And there's a 3rd exchange called the Canadian Stock Exchange that has about 3.50 listings that really nobody else trades, but it's gained prominence. It's about 100,000,000 to 150,000,000 shares a day. Its growth profile is probably more significant than anything on the venture market and senior market.

So we're going to start trading that on Monday. So that will be accretive to our business that will increase the denominator if you will for us in terms of what we can capture and what we can tap into in Canada. And so for people that don't know our market share from a trades perspective, we're about 1 out of every 4 trades. So when I go in Canada and Toronto, I could be at a Tim Hortons, their version of Starbucks. And somebody will say to me, because I'll see that I'm part of Chalk's one reason and another and say, I actually traded on Chalk's.

So we do get a lot of recognition from the trading community. I think people know who we are within the industry, but your point is well taken and maybe you want to take that as a jumping off point?

Speaker 18

Yes. So that's I mean, I would agree that it's not when you have it beside a big equities business and options business and Nordic business up on that slide, I agree with that. But so it's a launching point. We also will trade fixed income in Canada. So we'll use that as a launching off point because our fixed income platform is licensed will be licensed under our Canadian exchange.

Speaker 1

Can we get a microphone to Rich over here?

Speaker 11

I guess one quick follow-up on the Canadian market. So you just got exchange approval. Is the listing business update impenetrable? I mean, because I guess your competitor won't, if you listed it, if you're not listed on the TMX, then you won't be included in the TMX index. So is that a barrier to entry?

2nd question is just and I know go on forever, but just quick comments on the access fee pilot, how that could impact you and your clients, I guess?

Speaker 18

Okay. I mean on the listing side, I think it gets down to could it be and we've got a great platform, it's a NASDAQ brand. Could we list in Canada? Absolutely. The question for us is where do we deploy these resources?

Where is the best opportunity for us to get cash to earn more money? I think ETFs would be an easy place. We've had requests to do that. So it's a matter of priorities for us internally. So we just have to get through that.

On the access fee pilot, I have to say that I was really surprised with the way the SEC came out with the construct of that pilot with a 1,000 names in each one of these buckets, like that doesn't feel like a controlled pilot to me. We spent a lot of time at the SEC talking about revitalize, which we started last year and the need for liquidity in small and midsize companies. I think that with this pilot has been completely ignored, which is of concern of us. So we want to make sure that we comment on that, make sure that we reemphasize that. When you take a look at a pilot this size along with the TIC pilot,

Speaker 8

I think it's going to take

Speaker 18

a long time for this to get down the road and to be implemented. But it probably calls into question, everyone knows you've got certain rebate structures, you've got tiers that you have to hit. It's going to really turn that entire tier structure and rebate structure upside down. So where we have rebates that are in excess of 30, 30, 31, 32, 33, do they become 15, 16, 17 Or can you even do that with the dispersion of trading in these 3 different buckets? So I actually think it could create some good opportunity for us.

We have to balance that with our listed companies and liquefying small, midsize companies and everything else that we've talked about in revitalize. Anything else you want to add?

Speaker 19

Yes, just four quick observations. So they released the 2 60 7 page paper, small paper on Monday for all of us doing so clearly you've read it. And there's 4 observations I'll leave you with. One is, it's early days, as Tom said, and I think there's going to be an active and healthy common period. And I think everybody in the industry is going to be engaged because this has been a long standing discussion in the industry and this is our opportunity to make progress.

1, 2 is having looked through it based on the construct that we went through, we don't necessarily see this as material to our business like revenue capture and market share. We're still going through the details, but we think we'll be able to manage it as Tom said, because of the different buckets and the latitude provided. 3rd is, it's actually an opportunity for us. It's an opportunity to work with the SEC on things that are important to us with regards to small cap issuances, helping them trade better. So it's a real tie in for us to revitalize.

And then 4th is the issuer voice hasn't yet been fully reflected in the initial proposal. So we'd like to see that. And then kind of the overarching theme for us is rebates are a good thing for small cap illiquid names. Let's make sure the debate is focused on what we're trying to yield and find out because there are there's the ETF community in terms of new issuances and illiquid names that need support for execution quality. There are a lot of small cap companies that will benefit from rebates.

So this doesn't have to turn into an anti rebate conversation. This should be about what can we glean from the incentives provided in the market? How does it help us in terms of execution quality and liquidity?

Speaker 1

Great. I think we have time for one more question. Alex?

Speaker 11

All right. You're up.

Speaker 18

So shot.

Speaker 5

So Tom, you had this little bullet on the slide about the NASDAQ Financial Framework and how that could help reduce expense. And you gave the example on the fixed side. But when you look at your business today, are you do you actually think there's opportunities for efficiencies? And is that an opportunity to reduce the overall cost base in your business or is it more like, hey, let's allocate costs somewhere else and invest in other areas?

Speaker 18

I think at the end of the day it can go either way. But one thing that I wanted to mention, there are probably 100 different things that I could tell you that we do in all our markets from when market makers they don't want to trade with themselves, different market models. So you don't want to build that separately for NFI and one for options and one for equity. It's going to give us the opportunity to have a set of these services and functionality that we can reuse anywhere in any one of our platforms. So yes, I think we're going to that we can gain efficiencies and then take a look at those resources become available.

Do we want to utilize them in other areas?

Speaker 1

All right, great. I want to thank Tom, Kevin, Walt and Tao for joining us today. Thanks everyone. Now we're going to move to Michael Ptasnik, our CFO for the Finance and Capital section.

Speaker 22

Thanks, Ed. Hello, everyone. For those of you who don't know me, my name is Michael Ptasznik. I'm the CFO of NASDAQ. I'm the most recent addition to the NASDAQ management team.

I've been with NASDAQ now for coming up on 7 quarters, which as you know, which is how CFOs count time we do in quarters. But I've been in the industry for about 87 quarters altogether by spending about 20 years in the TMX or the Toronto Stock Exchange. And I don't know where Tal is, but so that he knows Starbucks is the Starbucks of Canada. Tim Hortons is the Dunkin' Donuts of Canada, so for the record. So my job here today is really to talk about bring together everything that you've heard throughout the day, recap some of those key items, review the financial implications of the strategic pivot that we've been talking about, talk about how we both invest our capital and how we'll return that capital to shareholders and then look at how we're going to measure our success over the coming years.

So as Adena said this morning, just a quick recap, we are building off of a very strong financial base. Revenue has grown at 6 percent CAGR over the last 4 years. We have continued with our disciplined expense management and that has resulted in a 300 basis point increase in our non GAAP operating margin. And ultimately, we've resulted in non GAAP diluted EPS growth of 9%. From a strategic standpoint, one of the key elements is the reallocation of our resources.

So we've identified the strategy and as Adena said again earlier, it is really important that we put our money where our mouth is. And as you can see, we've been talking about reallocating those resources and capital towards those highest growth opportunities, sustaining the core business, those core foundational businesses and market services and corporate solutions and then deemphasizing some of those slower growth businesses. And the actions that we've taken already, the investment in eVestment, the ultimate divestiture that is coming hopefully in this quarter, which will be coming this quarter of our the market multimedia solutions and our PR business, those have already resulted in if you look at the business on a pro form a basis for 2,007 excluding those businesses and adding investment results in about a 200% basis point margin increase. So further evidence that we are actively executing on the strategy can be seen by the reallocation of our discretionary investment dollars. And you can see by this picture here, we have a much more balanced approach with respect to how we are going to be spending our dollars.

And that's important. So it allows us to increase substantially the investments that we're making towards those higher growth businesses, but also we continue to be able to reinvest in those foundational platforms and maintain the total investment dollars that we spend as an organization fairly stable with where it was last year. So now what does this mean from a capital deployment standpoint? How are we going to invest our capital? And then how we look to return it to shareholders?

So again, starting from a very strong base that earnings growth and earnings has resulted in strong cash flow conversion. You can see 102% conversion over that period of time. And with that, we have a very healthy 6.4% free cash flow yield. However, there's still a gap or an opportunity to close that and between us and where the S and P 500 is trading at 5.3%. So turning to the question of how we're going to invest our capital.

We are 1st and foremost applying a very disciplined approach whether it's to organic or inorganic initiatives. And as Adena mentioned, we now have a new target of a 10% or greater ROIC for those investments over a 3 to 5 year timeframe. And again, that applies to inorganic and inorganic investments. And how we plan on investing, 1st priority for us is to fund organic growth. That is where the majority of our effort is spent is on how we're going to look for organic growth opportunities in the business.

And the what we've done now is we've talked in the past about our R and D budget and we have about 3% of our revenue is applied towards our new growth initiatives. And that's what we call NASDAQ NEXT and Adena highlighted some of those. Plus it's also over half of our CapEx, which is roughly in the $130,000,000 to $140,000,000 range has been towards those growth initiatives. Secondly, we will still continue to look for acquisitions and consider those if they are able to accelerate or catalyze and grow our and further our strategy going forward. And we've broken them into 2 categories.

We have our tactical acquisitions and what we think about that is something more like an ISE, much more synergy focused and we'll be looking to achieve the ROC and those types of acquisitions on a shorter time on the shorter end of the timeframe. Then we also have what we identify as our strategic acquisitions. And when we think about that is more like an investment, something that really fits in with the trends with the growth opportunities that we've identified as an organization. And so that ROIC objective will be hit more towards the medium to longer term end of the timeframe. And then lastly, we also have our venture investing program, NASDAQ Ventures that we launched last year, although we have had some other investments over a period of time.

And the NASDAQ Venture Investing Program is really intended for us to make minority investments, small minority investments in new technology based companies. While we have the you heard about all the great technology efforts that we have internally, we can't obviously cover the entire landscape. And this gives us the ability to reach out to some of these smaller companies that are on some of the leading edge capabilities and bring those internally. So that's the key to this is that we have to have a business connection in order to make these investments. Are not doing this on a purely financial basis.

And we looked at this total amount of investment would be in sort of the say $40,000,000 to $50,000,000 range over a say a 3 year period. So not a very significant amount of our capital, but we do think it's very important, very strategic. So now how will we look at the capital and how we're going to return the capital that's not being used in the business. So we think it's really important that we have a much more clear and transparent way in which we're talking about our capital. So first, we intend on maintaining our investment grade status.

We've also said that we're looking to pay down our debt to achieve a debt to EBITDA leverage ratio of mid-twos by mid-twenty 19 and we're on track to achieve that. Secondly, we're looking last year in 2017 for the first time we implemented a dividend policy. And the policy says that we will look to grow our dividends as earnings and cash flow grow. And as Adena mentioned, we have a new dividend increase today, 16% increase versus last versus our previous dividend. And then 3rd, our share repurchases.

So the from a share repurchase standpoint, it's primarily to offset the dilution that we have from any of our equity programs. Now if at the end of the day we have additional capital that we don't have uses for the foreseeable future, we will look to use our buyback program in order to buy back additional shares, return that to shareholders. So recapping everything that you've heard today with respect to the individual businesses, how we look to measure our success. And so from a revenue perspective, what you heard today was increased growth outlook for each of our individual business areas on the non trading side. And we also put numerical ranges around these numbers as opposed to just the words that we had in the past.

This has resulted in an overall increase in the outlook for our non trading segments from the mid single digits to the 5% to 7% range over the next 3 to 5 year period. Continuing on from the in addition to the organic revenue growth, we will continue to focus on our cost management as an organization. And what we're suggesting is a proximate 3% organic increase in our cost base. Now this remains our target going forward. It's been where we've been roughly over the last number of years from a historical standpoint, it's been our organic cost growth.

But this may fluctuate in any individual period of time. So if we are more towards the higher end of the growth target, closer to the 7% or above, then we may need to invest in additional and so we could go above that 3%. But we're in a period where there's an economic pullback and things are tighter, then we would look to be below that 3%. So this is a general number, but it could fluctuate plus or minus. We've talked about the return on capital greater than or equal to 10%.

And I should note from when we are analyzing our investments, we will be using the return on capital, but we will continue to use DCF as well as EPS accretion, etcetera, when we're looking at our investments. So we will continue to look at the other measures. This is one of the other key measures that we're adding to the suite that we already use. And then lastly, if we bring all these things together and everything that you've heard today, we do believe that we can enhance our ability to deliver on that double digit total shareholder return objective. So to summarize, we're building on a very strong resilient foundation that we have as an organization.

The strategic pivot should allow us to increase our revenue growth and increase our ability to generate strong earnings and cash flow, which we can then invest in the business or return to shareholders. And with that, I'm going to turn it back to Ed for the Q and

Speaker 1

A. Great. Why don't we do this? Why don't we bring Adena and Michael up to the stage? We have our other managers here and give the audience a chance to ask you 2 guys questions.

But also if you have questions for any of the business presenters, the business leaders, we can get those answered by passing the microphone around as well. Sound good? Okay, great. Let's start over here. Thank you.

Kyle?

Speaker 16

Hi, Kyle Voigt, KBW. I think your payout your dividend payout ratio was below 30% just a few years ago. So I'm just wondering, how do you weigh a continued increase in the payout ratio over the coming years versus the flexibility that a lower payout ratio gives you in terms of M and A? And then the second part of that question is really around the types of acquisitions. I think you laid out tactical versus strategic.

Just given the strategic pivot and what you spoke about regarding capital allocation, Is it fair to think that over the coming years, investors should expect more in the way of strategic acquisitions such as eVestment versus tactical such as ISE?

Speaker 1

I'm just going to reiterate the question.

Speaker 8

Yes.

Speaker 1

First question is, how you think about the dividend payout ratio and balancing between dividend payments and investments you want to make? And then second, is there more of a taste for tactical or strategic acquisitions in light of the fact that there's a heightened focus on the strategic direction.

Speaker 3

Do you want to cover the dividend first? Yes.

Speaker 22

So from a dividend standpoint, I would say we're in the range of where we think the dividend payout ratio should be. And so it's not we're not pegging a specific number. But like you said, we've been in the 30s to high 30s and now depending on how you calculated 42% that we showed earlier. And so we're in that range. And really what the new policy suggests is that we're going to look to increase that dividend as earnings and cash flow grow.

And so you'll see that. I don't see you won't see a major shift in the overall dividend policy. We'll continue to analyze it over time as we look at our different opportunities. But for the next period of time, we're looking in we're going to keep it in that range.

Speaker 3

Yes. I think that we have a nice balance right now in terms of the dividend payout and the retained cash. I think also recognize that with the tax change, we wanted to make sure, I mean, the increase in the dividend really reflected our increase in our earnings and then the impact of the tax change. And so it kind of gave us an ability to give a little bit more back in this with this change the $0.44 In terms of strategic and tactical acquisitions, I would say that we are going to continue to remain flexible to look at what's going to drive growth for our clients, what's going to drive growth for our shareholders. And there will be always kind of strategic and tactical acquisitions that are out there on the horizon.

We are what I have had the team do is be more proactive and really evaluating the space that they're in, the strategy we're undertaking and think more holistically around where are there possibly over the next several years opportunities for us to grow and expand our business or maybe kind of catalyze growth in certain areas. But we're not going to I'm not going to give you an answer of we're only going to do these, we're not going to do these. We're just going to be looking more holistically around what's going to drive the best value for our customers and our shareholders. We are telling you that we have more of a structured approach to that today than we've had in the past.

Speaker 1

Great. Let's go to Brian.

Speaker 17

Great. Thanks. Maybe just if you can talk a bit to Adena about the yes, and Mike also on the financial side.

Speaker 22

It's okay. I'm

Speaker 17

not afraid. No, I was just thinking of the bifurcating the question. Sort of the timing of the organic revenue growth outlook between segments. So first of all, your guidance implies about 300 basis points of operating leverage per annum on average. I know that's going to change obviously depending on conditions.

But if you can talk about where you think it is over the say the next 1 to 3 years versus the 3 to 5 years? Again, I appreciate these are long term targets, but we're trying to get a sense of the investment that we've been that all your leaders have been talking about in the different segments, especially in the technology segment near term, whether there is a longer tail to that revenue growth outlook or do you see that you move?

Speaker 14

Sure. Can we put the

Speaker 3

slide up that shows the past performance versus the former guidance versus the current?

Speaker 22

Yes. Okay.

Speaker 3

There we go. So as you can see, what we've been able to perform today is not outside of the range of what we're necessarily suggesting as the long term outlook the business other than in corporate services where we've had a material change because of the divestiture, right? But the question is, how do we get them to continue to go up to the top end of that scale? And I think that we're going to what we're probably trying to say here is that this isn't going to take 3 to 5 years before we can get here. It has to do with over the coming 3 to 5 years, how do we try to achieve the range that is available here?

And hopefully, over time, we continue to catalyze it, so it continues to move up in the range. But I just want to say in any given year there's going to be slightly different dynamics. There might be a year where we have a pricing move in a certain part of our business that allows us to catalyze some growth and that kind of drives us up to the top. It could be that within Marketech, for instance, it takes a little while for us to build on the momentum that Nasdaq Financial framework builds for us, but we already have been delivering 9%, right? So I do want to make sure that people understand this is an evolution.

This is a way for us to continue to grow. We're not saying it's going to take time before we get to these. We're saying that within any given year, there's probably going to be a range of outcomes and we want to give you the right expectations.

Speaker 22

What she said.

Speaker 17

Just on the operating leverage side, so just thinking about next for example, so pro form a operating margin of 49.6%, should we be thinking about expanding that into 2018 based on the 300 basis points or the investment in some of these areas particularly in Market Tech going to restrain that near term?

Speaker 22

Yes. Well, let me just be clear. So the 49 foot the operating leverage on that slide was a pro form a on 2017 and also using eVestments, you have to look at some of the footnotes there, but it's using the historical numbers of investment. As we talked about, as you know, in 2018, investment is impacted by the amortization or the write off of some of the deferred revenue. So that has an impact in there.

So that was really more for illustrative purposes. And then on a go forward basis, you'll start to see the impact of that. So you have an impact of that in 2018. We also we talked about there is some initial investment in there and so there will be a mix. So we're not saying that there's going to be an automatic increase in that.

And we aren't targeting a specific margin that we're providing. It's not one of the items that we've had off the page that will shift and get affected by a number of things, the growth rates of these different opportunities we have. And also obviously what happens in the transactional services business has a major impact on that. So that's part of the reason why we're not providing that.

Speaker 3

Yes. We don't want to try to I would say a lot of people ask us, can you give us a specific margin target? Okay? I know that makes life really easy. But the fact of the matter is, we want to have the flexibility to be able to invest in our biggest opportunities and to manage ourselves appropriately against any sort of economic or other changes that might be happening in the industry.

And as Michael said, our Market Services business does not give us the level of predictability for us to be able to target specific margin. But I can tell you internally, we are very, very, very tight in how we manage our expenses. We have been very focused on making sure we're allocating our resources to the things that we think we can grow and becoming more efficient in the areas that we think are lower growth. And I think that we also we're trying to give you a framework for you to be able to look at the operating leverage that we can deliver on our business if we achieve these growth targets against the overall estimated expense growth that we have put on the slide. I think also 2018 is a specific year because we've got 2 things going on.

We've got the kind of the burn in of eVestment and the revenue impact of that this year. We also have the divestiture and our ability to make sure that we're managing through the stranded costs. And we've talked specifically about that in terms of getting through the stranded costs against that divestiture. Both of those things will have some impact on this year, but it positions us really well as we exit the year and going into 2019.

Speaker 5

Thank you.

Speaker 1

Great. Next question, Rich.

Speaker 11

Actually, that was just my question to you. So if you look at good higher growth rate, but if you look at 2018, like you said, you got a dilution, slight dilution from investment, the sale of slight dilution from the sale of the business and you got market technology that at least you guide to maybe a little drop in margin. So is this really I apologize for the short term outlook, but it's really a 2019 and beyond, but you have strong markets here in 2018, I guess.

Speaker 3

Yes. Do you want to repeat? I wasn't we haven't been repeating the question.

Speaker 1

Yes. Let me repeat the question. Rich, in 2018, we could have some initial dilution from eVestment, maybe a little bit of an EPS drag from the partial year impact and the removal of costs from the divestiture. And even in Marketech, you guys are investing a little bit more, low, lower margins. Is this story about performing starting in 2019 and beyond?

Or do you think you can put together a good year in 2018 as well?

Speaker 3

So I think the first thing is we have provided expense guidance for this year and we are obviously focused on operating within it. As we complete the divestiture of the DMS and mid PR businesses, we'll continue to upgrade that or update that. I think that in terms of this year, there are some elements to that, that you've talked about in terms of the burning in of the divestiture, but also against the very strong backdrop on the market side. And so I think that there's going to be a lot of blending there in terms of what we can do. In terms of this 3 to 5 year outlook though, we wouldn't have put it out there if we don't think that we have the opportunity to work within it in the businesses that we're operating in, in the short and long term.

So it's just a matter of us making sure that we're optimizing every opportunity we have, continue to drive our business forward. But Investor Day is about the future. Investor Day is about how do you drive this business going forward. And so a lot of what we've been talking about is how do we make sure we're using all of our levers to kind of build to a stronger and more successful financial future.

Speaker 12

Thanks. So two quick questions, Michael. Just on the expenses, when you look at by segment, is there any color or granularity on what we should be expecting, where you're investing versus maybe where we'll see more operating leverage? And then just on the revenue side, given that the high end is pretty attractive, where do you expect to see more competition? I mean versus where do you feel like you have some pricing power across the businesses?

Speaker 1

Do you

Speaker 3

want to repeat?

Speaker 1

Great. So the first question, Michael, any color on where the investment dollars are going by segments and any color on kind of those profitability levels? And then a question, we talk about getting to higher organic growth. What areas do you think you might see higher competition that could make it tougher to get there?

Speaker 22

Yes. So just to go over some of the things we talked about, clearly there's a big focus on investment in the market technology area. And so that's one of the areas where you'll see from their standpoint there'll be there is going to be some additional spending in that part of the business because of the great growth opportunities that we see going forward. When you look at the Information Services business, you have to take into account the full year impact of the investment. And so that's going to have to flow through that.

We had roughly 2.5 months or 2.3rd months of sorry, 2.5 yes, 2.5 months in the last quarter for investment in that business. On when we look at the corporate solutions or the corporate services area, clearly that's one that we talked about, where and as Adena just mentioned, the removal of those businesses is going to take some time to get all the costs at all the overhead that are charged to that. So that will take we said it will take 12 months for the date of the acquisition. So that will have an impact on that business. And then really on the market services side, we've been optimizing that business.

And so when you look at the overall R and D spend and that's we're trying to make here is that we have been trying to manage within the total spend that we had last year. And so you're not going to see a major increase in that part of the business. And so we have been looking to reduce some of the spending that we had there. We did a lot of expenditures on MiFID II last year and getting prepared the last couple of years. And so we've been able to take those resources and apply it to the Marketech business and others.

And so that's hopefully helpful to how the cost breakdown will flow through.

Speaker 3

Yes. And I just want to say, we purposely don't give you kind of a cost per segment or profitability per segment because we are NASDAQ. And the whole point of having everything within an organization that is synergistic across the organization, shared experiences, shared investment, shared opportunity is to make sure that overall we're allocating our capital towards the biggest opportunities and we're managing our capital spend and those that have a lower short term opportunity and kind of coming up with an overall approach. So I think that you heard that there's some kind of trends within the businesses, but we're not going to sit there and try to break it up. We're looking at it holistically to how it all grows together create operating leverage, to create greater profitability opportunity and to continue to grow the business.

In terms of what was your second question, sorry?

Speaker 12

The revenue opportunity is potentially in that 5% to 7% range. And if it's on the higher end, you would expect that attracts more competition.

Speaker 1

So where are

Speaker 12

the areas that you have power versus

Speaker 3

Yes, the competition. So I think that 90% of our revenues, we are either 1% or 2% in the market. So I think that the good news is that we do we've been operating in a competitive environment forever. And I think that we do an extraordinarily good job of being a very strong competitor in the businesses that we run. As we continue to drive more growth in those businesses, the question is do we pull away from our competitors with the investments we're making to make it so that really we are the number 1 and the clear number 1 and a sustainable leader in our space and that's certainly our goal.

I think in Marketech, we have a real opportunity to continue to really differentiate ourselves completely from every other competitor in that space. It's taken us 20 years to build up

Speaker 14

to where we are. It's going

Speaker 3

to take us I think it's going to take anyone else a long time to be able to drive to the level of scale and success that we have in our Marketech business. A lot of our clients are long term clients, long term contracts, high retention. And I think we have the opportunity to continue to grow that in a pretty greenfield way, as Lars has described. I think in our Corporate Services business, it's a highly competitive business. It's highly competitive in our Listings business.

It's highly competitive in our Corporate Solutions business. I think we continue to differentiate ourselves, but first of all by bringing them together. And second of all by having that full suite in terms of what we offer our clients, there's kind of no other just can we drive pricing power on that? I would say it's more likely that we're going to just be able to drive more success and being able to get more client acquisition in a very efficient way. In the Information Services business, there's a lot of different dynamics to it.

I think that our Market Tech I mean, our Market Data business is definitely competitive. I think that we do a very good job of managing that business and making sure that we are listening to our customers in terms of pricing moves and not doing things that will make it so that they look for our competitors look to our competitors. In eVestment, it's a very it's a wonderful contained ecosystem. I think they've done a great job of managing that. And they'll again are very client focused in how they manage that pricing, but it does give them the opportunities to look at adding more value and therefore, charging new things to their customers.

And then in Market Services, I think that you heard pretty specifically that there's a lot of different dynamics there, but it's a competitive business. We have, as Tom mentioned, we look at every single week, we look at how we can use pricing to to gain advantages in our marketplaces. But that's much more of a hand to hand combat type of model.

Speaker 1

Great. Thank you. Let's go to Brian.

Speaker 17

Okay. If I can focus on NFX and just the broad futures initiative generally, I mean, that over many years you spent almost I think $100,000,000 on NLX legacy and shut that down. And now if we calculate right around $50,000,000 from an operating earnings drag, pre tax drag on NFX, What's the long term game plan for that business? It's obviously a very difficult business to penetrate given the dynamics of how the futures market works, pricing really doesn't do much to it. If you could think about or if you can articulate what you first of all, is it going to turn profitable in the near to intermediate term?

And second of all, what is the longer term game plan for where you want to be in business?

Speaker 3

Sure. So you want to go ahead?

Speaker 1

I'm just going to repeat the question. The question was on NFX. What are the expectations, opportunities and plan as you move forward with that platform?

Speaker 3

Yes. So NFX has been a good growth opportunity for us. And you're right about Enel X. I think that you've we spent a fair amount of time trying to make that thing work. There's a key distinction between Enel X and NFX.

I think the first thing is that we learned a lot from the NLX experience. We waited to launch until we had a critical mass of clients. We continue to listen to our clients. We created kind of this market advisory committee, where we have trusted and very loyal customers working with us to make sure we're driving to the growth and introducing new products. We gained we have 40 participants in our market in any given day and we have over 100 clients connected.

So it's a much bigger ecosystem. I would say the market makers and the markets, the market participants were more motivated to work with us in NFX and the model that we've created. And they have some of the core market participants who launched with us and some that have come in also have the benefit of being able to participate in the upside as we continue to develop the platform. We've also been able to achieve open interest, significant open interest. We have a very strong partner in OCC, whereas with NLX, we were really highly reliant on LCH and they just weren't motivated to work with us honestly.

So think we have a lot of distinguishing elements to it, but it is still an investment area and we'd love to see it continue to grow. It is an important strategy for us. If I think about the U. S. Markets and I think our position in how strong we are in equities, how strong we are in options, our position in fixed income, we should be a great futures franchise in the United States.

We have a great partner in OCC where you've got margin offsets, you've got capabilities to be able to leverage that as a clearing house and a clearing partner to us, we should be able to continue to grow and expand in that business and learn from our past attempts. And I'm so I'm continuing to be very committed to it. In terms of the I would say the medium term outlook for that business, our goal and Tom's goal is to get it to a status is what I call sustainability, which means that it's at least breakeven for NASDAQ, so that we can then have that as a really nice area for us to continue to grow in. And that's over the kind of, I would say, short to medium term is making sure we get to that sustainable state.

Speaker 1

Great. I think we have time for just one last question.

Speaker 5

This is a quick one. Sorry if this was already disclosed before, but on the stranded cost you brought up, maybe this is more for Mike. You quantify that for us again? How big is it? How long will it take to get this out?

And this is a situation where maybe you can just take a bunch of one time charges at the beginning and be done with it and just carried

Speaker 4

it

Speaker 5

at like below the line items.

Speaker 1

I'll just summarize a little color on fully removing the costs related to the divestiture of the press release and multimedia businesses.

Speaker 22

Yes. So what we said last quarter was that assuming and we gave an example, we said that assuming the deal closed on June 30, just for simplicity, we said the business itself has about $170,000,000 in run rate costs and that we talked about being able to that the second that the Q2 of the year would have roughly $65,000,000 I think it was $65,000,000 to $75,000,000 of costs in there on a run rate basis. So say roughly $30,000,000 to $40,000,000 of stranded costs that will take, we'd say about 12 months from the time of acquisition to fully eliminate. So that's roughly the number that we said that roughly the 30 to 40 would be the time and we take a year for us to be able to get that out. And we'll look at how we do the accounting and all that as we get closer to the transaction.

Speaker 1

Great. Thank you. At this point, why don't I turn it over to Adena to kind of end where we started and just kind of wrap things up with the most important messages?

Speaker 3

Well, I first of all really want to thank you for staying and listening. I have to say the time passed really quickly for me. I don't know if it did for you. But we have lunch next and we have some demos that we can provide to you. And obviously, all of the people who've been speaking today are here to continue to talk with you.

I think that NASDAQ is really positioned to continue to accelerate our growth to drive to our strength and technology, analytics and our market structure expertise to make sure that we are continuing to grow the clients that rely on us in the capital markets and help them take them into the future of what the capital markets and the potential that the markets have to offer. I'm really, really excited about the organic opportunities we have here and the composition of our businesses and the leadership that you were able to see today. I really believe that we will succeed in being able to continue to improve our organic growth across our non trading businesses, continue to succeed in driving our market share and sustainability of our trading businesses. In terms of managing our expenses well, so that we can deliver to you operating leverage off of that growth, we are definitely going to be focused on targeting that 10% plus ROIC across our investments, both organic and inorganic, and ultimately to continue to provide to you a great double digit total shareholder return. We're a great business and a great franchise and I'm incredibly fortunate to be able to lead this organization.

And so we're excited that hopefully you'll take the journey with us as we continue to drive and expand and accelerate our growth. So thank you.

Speaker 1

Thanks everyone. And I look forward to talking to you more at the lunch, showing you some of the interesting product demos and finding ways to answer more of your questions.

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