Morning, ladies and gentlemen. The 2017 Annual Meeting of the Stockholders of NASDAQ is hereby convened and called order. My name is Bob Greifeld, Chairman of the NASDAQ Board and Chairman of this meeting. On behalf of the Board of Directors of NASDAQ, welcome to the NASDAQ Annual Meeting of Stockholders. I am pleased to introduce to you the individuals at the head table: Adena Friedman, President and Chief Executive Officer Edward Knight, Executive Vice President, General Counsel Michael Ptasznik, Executive Vice President, Corporate Strategy and Chief Financial Officer and Joan Conley, Senior Vice President and Corporate Secretary.
Members of the NASDAQ Board and Executive Management are also in attendance in this meeting. Representatives from Ernst and Young, the company's independent order, and from Broadridge Financial Solutions, the Inspector of Elections are also in attendance. The representatives from Ernst and Young are available to answer any questions you may have during the Q and A session. Now I will proceed with the meeting formalities. I will ask Mr.
Knight, Executive Vice President, General Counsel and Chief Regulatory Officer to make the report of the General Counsel. Mr. Knight?
Thank you, Bob. Welcome, everyone. Good morning. I present proof by affidavit that notice of the meeting has been duly given and that a notice of Internet availability of proxy materials has been mailed on or about March 29, 2017 to every stockholder of record as of March 13, 2017. As of March 13, 2017, the record date, there were 166 1,143,644 shares of NASDAQ common stock outstanding.
Subject to voting limitation in our certificate of incorporation that generally prohibits a holder from voting in excess of 5% in the total voting power of NASDAQ. I also report that the Board of Directors has appointed Broadridge Financial Solutions to act as the inspector of the election at this meeting and any adjournments hereof and to count and examine all votes. The inspector of an election has filed with me an oath of the inspector and a report of inspector that a quorum is present at this meeting.
Good. As you enter the room you would have received an agenda and a set of meeting rules which will govern the meeting. As the agenda notes there are 5 matters for consideration by the stockholders. No other business will be presented at this meeting although time has been set aside for a question and answer session. At an appropriate time, those stockholders who wish to address the meeting will be provided an opportunity to speak and will be recognized by the Chairman.
If there are any stockholders or proxy holders present who have completed proxies and have not delivered to them, please do so at this time. Stockholders may deliver their proxies to the table Mark Broadridge Inspector of Elections. Okay. Moving forward, I'd like to call upon Adena Friedman to provide a few remarks at this time.
Thank you, Bob. It is my pleasure to welcome you all here today to the 2017 Nasdaq Annual Meeting of Stockholders. We're very excited to be hosting the meeting from beautiful new Philadelphia office facility, which is home to our U. S. Equities options business as well as an important hub for NASDAQ's U.
S. Trading operations. It's been 9 years since the Philadelphia Stock Exchange, the oldest exchange in the country became part of the NASDAQ family. We look forward to continuing to be part of the rich exchange history of this city and its economic development in the years ahead. NASDAQ is a world class market infrastructure technology company and we continue to see a wide range of opportunities where we can apply our expertise and our technology assets across businesses.
I've been CEO of this organization for a little over 4 months. During this time, I've been listening intently to our employees and clients to gain new perspectives and deeper insights into the nuances of their challenges and better identify areas where we can bring our technology problem solving skills to bear. And to that end, we continue to work effectively across all of our businesses to solve our clients' greatest challenges and create more constructive opportunities to interact with the global capital markets. Today, I want to highlight a few of the key opportunities and priorities that will enable us to continue to better serve the capital markets ecosystem, deepen our client relationships and drive value to our shareholders. Let me start with a topic that I'm very passionate about and that which is very important to the long term health of the U.
S. Capital markets. Nasdaq has never shied away from being an advocate for bettering or the continuous improvement of the capital markets. We view the U. S.
Capital markets among the most robust and efficient in the world. And as good as our markets are, we believe that there are still fundamental structural concerns today impeding their attractiveness. Today, there are almost 1,000 fewer public companies than there were a decade ago in the U. S. Market, and we are currently experiencing a near 10 year low for the U.
S. Initial public offerings. While there are a number of factors at play, the markets have become more complex and costly for issuers, particularly for publicly listed small and medium growth companies and for private companies that might consider initial public offerings. To address the areas of concern, we introduced our plan, the promise of market reform reigniting America's economic engine. This is a blueprint containing our insights, recommendations and proposed actions for addressing the uncertainty that exists in the U.
S. Financial markets today. It is our hope that this blueprint will spark discussions within our industry and serve as a way forward towards actionable reform that will reignite our U. S. Capital markets and make them more attractive and efficient for all involved.
I look forward to updating you on our progress in the months to come on this very important initiative. Now shifting to other areas of focus where Nasdaq is leveraging its core expertise and resources to add value to our clients around the capital markets ecosystem, I want to highlight a few. In our listings business, where we are working to improve both private and public markets, we introduced the Nasdaq Private Market Alternatives or what we're calling NPM Alts, an expansion of our private market offering designed to facilitate liquidity in alternative investment funds. NPM Alts will bring together participants including fund managers, financial advisors, investors and secondary liquidity providers to facilitate regular auction based liquidity events for alternative investment funds. MPM will initially support secondary liquidity for private equity feeder funds as well as funds registered under the Investment Company Act of 1940 and plans to accommodate a variety of fund vehicles over time.
We are excited about the opportunity to enable clients to access more liquidity in this growing area of the private equity market. Technology has always enabled us to do more for our clients and will be even more important for our success in the future. Over the past several years, we've increased both our own experimentation and investment in new technologies and we believe that we believe will shape our future and that of the global capital markets. A big focus for me and the management team is not only new technologies themselves, but how we can better apply them to accelerate our pipeline of new commercially viable products and add greater value to our clients. And to that end, we recently announced a new effort called Nasdaq Ventures.
We're very excited about this initiative as we see Nasdaq Ventures as an avenue for us to discover, partner and invest in emerging companies in the fintech space that are developing and leveraging groundbreaking technologies that align with our clients' needs. Since its launch, we've had over 30 companies that are using cutting edge technology and providing unique client solutions request meetings with the Nasdaq Ventures team. Importantly, these efforts are part of a broader ecosystem we are designing and developing at NASDAQ to accelerate our innovation, growth and efficiency in ways which align with the long term objectives of the global capital markets. Central to our delivery of these new technologies for our exchange clients and broker dealer clients is the Nasdaq Financial Framework. We unveiled the Nasdaq Financial Framework last year and it brings together all of the elements of our market technology capabilities in one platform.
This framework is already enabling our clients today to leverage the latest technologies that we are developing such as blockchain driven services and cloud applications to help achieve their objectives. Since its launch, we had a number of our market technology clients using our framework to power their infrastructure, including the recently announced New York Interactive Advertising Exchange, which is expected to be the 1st exchange to be deployed in the cloud using the blockchain. We are entering into one of the most dynamic and exciting times in our industry and NASDAQ is developing and bringing more commercial solutions online that leverage these new technologies. Moreover, we see opportunity to apply our technology to sectors outside the capital markets and this is a unique opportunity we're currently evaluating. In terms of our more immediate priorities, we have outlined for ourselves this year, we are progressing well against each of these.
The first priority we have set for ourselves is to improve our competitive positioning across all of our businesses. Probably the most significant area where we've seen our competitive position improve in the 1st couple of months is in our market services segment. During the Q1, we achieved market share gains across our equities and derivatives markets despite a low volume environment. And we are very optimistic that we will continue to build on these increases with additional market functionality and enhancements that we're making throughout the year. Our second priority is to complete the 2016 acquisition integrations and to deliver on their full potential to customers and shareholders.
As of the end of the Q1, we achieved $50,000,000 in annualized cost synergies across our 4 2016 acquisitions and are in a good path to achieve the full synergy potential of €60,000,000 by the end of the year. We are well on our way towards achieving our core product integrations across our Global Trading and Market Services and Corporate Solutions businesses as well. Our third priority is to prioritize I'm sorry, to commercialize our capabilities in key disruptive technologies putting them to work for our clients. And as I mentioned earlier, the Nasdaq Financial Framework is a very important delivery platform for our such as Nasdaq trading such as Nasdaq trading insights, data offerings within information services and then important enhancements to our smart surveillance offering in market technology using cutting edge machine learning and cognitive computing technologies. Overall, I'm very pleased with the direction that Nasdaq is headed in right now and with our progress.
Our financial results remain solid and we continue to work on behalf of our shareholders to drive value. We have a number of new product concepts and ideas across all of the areas that we are bringing together in our labs as well as in our core businesses and which will be ready for commercial release later this year. And it is the potential of this firm and the opportunities in front of us that I'm so passionate about and why I remain so optimistic about Nasdaq's future to deliver. We are building on what is already a very strong foundation that was put in place by my predecessor, Bob Breifeld. We are well positioned to bring all of our wonderful assets to bear for our clients and shareholders and to continue to grow this franchise over time.
And speaking of Bob Breifeld, I want to take a moment to honor Bob here today.
Not again.
Again. Again. It's very important.
That's enough.
Bob may be stepping down as our Executive Chairman, but his competitive spirit and extraordinary leadership example he set for all of us at NASDAQ NASDAQ will forever remain part of this organization and I really, really mean that. Thank you, Bob, for your mentorship, for your courage and for the ways you inspired us all to reach higher, much higher than we thought was possible in the many over the many years. Please join me in thanking Bob for his contributions to the firm with a big round of applause. Okay. And with that, I turn it back over to you, Mr.
Chairman.
Thank you, Adena. We will now proceed directly to the matters described in the proxy statements. We have 5 proposals. Proposal number 1 is to elect 9 directors. We have an outstanding slate of directors in front of you today.
New Director Melissa Arnold, Charlene Begley, Stephen Black, Adena Friedman, Glenn Hutchins, Issa Kazeem, Tom Clowett, Michael Splinter and Lars Weidenborn. Proposal number 2 is to approve the company's executive compensation on an advisory basis. Proposal 3 is an advisory vote on the frequency of future advisory votes on executive comp. That's interesting. Proposal 4 is to ratify the appointment of E and Y as our independent registered public accounting firm.
And proposal 5 is to consider the stockholder proposal entitled right to act by written consent. Mr. Kenneth Steiner or his representative is invited to present the stockholder proposal within the 3 minute timeframe set forth in the meeting rules. Do we have Kenneth here or his representative? Is Stephanie Adams is here?
Hello, my name is Stephanie Adams. I'm from Kelly Services. I'm currently just supposed to read a proposal. Okay. Proposal number 5, right to act by written consent.
Resolved, Shareholders request that our Board of Directors undertake such steps as many be necessary to permit written consent by shareholders entitled to cast the minimum number of votes that would be necessary to authorize the action at the meeting, at which all shareholders entitled to vote thereon will present and consent with giving shareholders the fullest power to act by written consent consistent with applicable law. This includes shareholder ability to initiate any topic of written consent consistent with APCO law. This proposal topic won majority shareholder support at 13 major companies in a single year. This includes 67% support at both Allstate and Sprint. 100 of major companies enable shareholder actions with written consent.
Taking action by written consent in lieu of a meeting is a means shareholder can use to rise important matters outside the normal annual meeting cycle. A shareholder right to act by written consent and to call a special meeting are 2 complementary ways to bring an important matter to the attention of both management and shareholders outside the annual meeting cycle. Taking action by written consent saves the expense of holding a special shareholders' meeting. NASDAQ shareholders support topics to improve our corporate governance, such as this proposal and the 2016 proxy access proposal, which received 75% shareholder support. Please vote to enhance shareholders' value, right to act by written consent proposal number 5.
Thank you. All right. This is the question and answer session for the 5 proposals for consideration. We'll have a general question and answer session later. But with respect to these 5 proposals, we open the floor for any questions on them.
Do I have a question? Yes. What is the tenure of E and Y? How long have they been the IPAs? Good question.
It's about 15 years right now. All right, thank you. Any other questions? I will now proceed with the vote on these five matters. Stockholders who wish to vote in person should now take a ballot.
Okay, the polls are about to close. If there are any stockholders who have not turned in a ballot and wish to do so at this time, please raise your hand so that we can pick up your ballot. And we have one ballot. Okay. The time is now 8:48 and the polls are closed for all proposals.
No further voting shall be permitted. We now have the time to take a few questions. Please raise your hand and wait to be recognized. The microphone attendants will assist you with the use of the microphones. Remarks should be pertinent and as brief as possible and not more than 3 minutes.
Upon being called upon, please state your full name, firm or affiliation, city and country, and the subject you wish to discuss. Question and answer is now open. Perhaps you want to make another comment, do you?
I think I've said enough.
Okay. So we will move forward from the question and answer session. One last chance for questions? No. So let us move forward to announcing the results of the election.
I'll call in preliminary results. I call upon the Inspector of Elections, Mr. Tony Credo, to announce the preliminary results.
Mr. Chairman, preliminary results of the shareholder vote indicate that all of the company's nominees as Director were elected to another term. The company's proposal number 2 was approved. On the recommendation on the frequency of advisory votes on executive compensation, the 1 year auction received a majority of the votes cast. The company's auditor was ratified and the shareholder proposal number 5 was not approved.
Wonderful. Good. Okay. So let's move forward. This concludes the official portion of the business portion of our meeting.
I want to thank everybody who attended today. As Adena mentioned, this is my last official act. And those of you who watch the Game of Thrones, I think of the Night's Watch, and the word there is my watch has ended, right? So I do want to say as my watch ends here, I want to thank the Board for believing in myself all these years. It has been mostly good times, not entirely good times, but they've been with us through the whole realm.
And clearly, the efforts of the management team and in particular, Adena to my right has been the direct responsibility for the success of this organization. And for that, I will always be grateful. But I do want to close on a more positive line than my watch has ended. And our General Counsel who has been with me before I got here sent me a line from TS Elliott just last week and I wanted to read this out. And what we call the beginning is often the end.
And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from. And it's a new beginning for NASDAQ. It's a new beginning for myself. And we're all going to do quite well.
So thank you everybody. The meeting is now adjourned.