First, I want to point out our Regulation FD disclosure language. Next, I want to point out the agenda and point out certain key logistics. Presenting today are our senior management representing the CEO, our presidents, CIO, CFO and business segment heads. We will have a 15 minute break midmorning, about halfway through the presentations and are expected to finish the formal presentation around 12:30. For those on premises, Wi Fi is available on the network NASDAQ market site using the login Ignite and password ambition.
And restrooms are available if you exit through the rear doors, where NASDAQ personnel will be ready to direct you to the facilities. We're going to open with a short video, and then Bob Greifeld, our CEO and Adena Friedman, our President and COO, will present an overview of the company, its capabilities, our strategy and our vision.
There's a little feedback at the end of that music there, Ed. Good morning, everybody. I thank everybody for coming here today. So today is called NASDAQ's Investor Day. And if you see from I got to hit the button.
This chart, our investor returns have been quite outstanding over the last number of years. So you might think with Nasdaq Investor Day and these returns, we at Nasdaq come to work every day thinking how can we please our investors. But unfortunately, I have to disabuse you of that notion. We at Nasdaq with the exception of Ed, don't come to work thinking about investors at all. Our focus, 1st and foremost and always is upon our customers.
Now Steve Jobs famously said the customers do not know what they want and he came up with products that they didn't know they needed. Now we here at NASDAQ and the management team and probably throughout the organizations have, aspirations or pretensions to be Steve Jobs. But it's important to recognize that we do not run NASDAQ like that. We have a focus on our customers and we listen to what they tell us. And it's remarkably clear and consistent.
And if you think back in terms of what we've done over the years that was new and innovative within the NASDAQ family, each and every one of those has efforts have come as a result of us listening very clearly to our customers. So going back in the day when we only traded NASDAQ stocks, it was our customers who said, why don't you build a franchise in trading NYSE listed stocks? It was our customers who said to us, you have the best matching engine on the platform on the world, why don't you use that to branch into the options marketplace. It was our customers that said that really you should be soliciting us to switch your our listing from NYSE to NASDAQ. And the list goes on.
When you think about the flash crash moving forward a bit, our customers said to us we need pre trade risk management, we need post trade surveillance. And that's how we acquired Smarts in F10. And if you think about what we're doing today, we certainly listen to our customers and they said, we have a desire to stay private longer and we launched NPM. We certainly listened to our customers when they said to us, that if I'm going to trade commodities in the U. S.
At $1.38 per contract, when you can trade a similar contract in the U. S. Options market at $0.16 why don't you do something to bring those efficiencies to those market? So when you think about NASDAQ beyond the quarterly reports, think about us as an organization that's built to listen to the customers first and foremost. They guide essentially everything we do.
And I do repeat again, the customer feedback has been clear and consistent. You have to listen, but if you do listen, you'll get the message of where you have to go in your direction. So with that as a bedrock principle, where do we go from there? We recognize that we have to have employees to execute, that mission. And you cannot just have employees, you have to have employees who come to work every day with a strong passion to achieve.
And an important insight in terms of how we run NASDAQ, one of the big things that we get involved with through the year is employee engagement. And every single one of the management team has a fairly significant part of their bonus tied to the positive results of how engaged our employees are. And the business we're in, if you have an engaged employee, you really could have 4 times the productivity of a person just coming in to work 9 to 5. So we have to make sure that we focus on engagement of the employees. So the extent these employees are coming to work every day and are engaged, then it's our job to provide, the structure and the organization that allows them to succeed and to build the institution that is built for the long haul.
Now you'll have evidence of the power of our institution. This management team when you see the following presenters today, they represent a small part of the team obviously and the management mingle you'll be able to see more of the team. And it's important to recognize that Nasdaq is run on a very objective basis. We weigh, measure and count everything. We plan the work and we work the plan.
How many platitudes can I get out in 20 seconds? It's a lot. But it's important to recognize because we just kind of came through the process. So we set up what we're trying to achieve in the year and we put it down in minute detail. So every single person in the company knows what their job is and doesn't know it instinctively, but knows in black and white on a piece of paper.
And they know if they hit those objectives and they will get paid for achieving those objectives. So what we're trying to avoid is a culture where people have to be nice to their superiors because there's a subjective bonus associated with those niceties. So we have the great pleasure of walking around and somebody can say, Hey, Bob, that is really a bad looking tie. And I don't have to care because you have to pay me anyway, right, no matter what you say. So sometimes it goes a little bit too far, but it also encourages open feedback.
So we just got through the planning cycle recently. And when you see the performance on that chart there and what we've achieved year after year, it doesn't happen accidentally. It happens as a result of a plan with engaged employees working the plan. So in addition to the employees being properly organized, properly engaged, listening to the customer, we obviously have to operate in the society, that we live in and we have to recognize stakeholders in that. Now, we're very proud of the charity works we do in the communities we're involved with.
But for this audience, the most important thing we have to recognize is our stakeholders are primarily regulators and legislators around the world. And it's certainly something that we also excel in. So to the extent we address the stakeholders, have organized employees who are motivated, who are listening to their customers, then what happens is what you see in that chart here. And that's a story of NASDAQ, what I'm proud of. That's certainly a story that can grow for a long period of time.
Now when we think about core principles and what we try to do, it's important to recognize that we are clearly a technology company. A largest single group of employees in the company are technologists. But it's also clear to recognize that we are an applied technology company. So we're not going to be trying to develop the next search engine, but we certainly will be the people who will be early adopters of the next search engine. Just as we talk about machine learning, we're not going to write the core technology for machine learning, but we will certainly utilize our ties in the Valley and other places to make sure we're on this first.
And our job obviously is to be very open to the stimuli that's out there and respond to it in a fast and rapid fashion. So to the extent that we are applying the technology, then we certainly will be innovating in the space. And you see an increased amount of innovation coming from NASDAQ and we're quite proud of that. Now we live primarily in regulated worlds. We have a great brand name that we need to protect.
So in terms of our desire to innovate, to grow, to apply technology, our core principle obviously beyond that has to be we're resilient. So when you look at all the applications we built, the focus in this company on being resilient is quite amazing. So even though we see as our competition some small software startups, we recognize that we have a different role in life and we always are very aware and respectful of what Nasdaq means and make sure that we build things that are built for purpose and built to be incredibly resilient over time. We do all those things and it ties back to the first slide again. You'll have great shareholder return and that's certainly our focus.
All right. So in terms of what we do today, I think most people here know this. I won't spend too much time on it, but there are some impressive numbers out there. When you look at our IPO win rate in 2015, it's 73%, the highest IPO win rate in my tenure. So we're quite proud of that.
You don't think of us primarily as an index player, but we crossed the $100,000,000,000 number in assets under management. That's pretty impressive. Our uptime 99.998 didn't quite get to 5.9s, but very close and Brad will get there soon enough. And a number that's shocking based upon the last number of acquisitions we did, we're up to 17,000 corporate customers, 17,000, Adena. That's a big number, right?
And our technology business, we power over 100 global markets including our own switch rate. We're at $800,000,000,000 of switches from NYSE to NASDAQ, so that's increasing. So we're well situated in the businesses we're in, but it's important to recognize how we think of the markets we compete in is quite different than probably what you see on the quarterly calls. So if you look at where we compete in the capital markets infrastructure, exchange technology, We're the market share leader in that space by a bit, but it's a $2,000,000,000 a year industry. Our data business, our index and data business, we're quite proud of and it's certainly a high margin growing business for us.
But there's such a world of opportunity. When you see that market being $25,000,000,000 to $30,000,000,000 and the index world being $2,000,000,000 you can see we have a lot of glide path to go to. Corporate Solutions, dollars 2 plus 1,000,000,000 industry and I think growing quite rapidly and certainly ripe for innovative innovations to come. We're a very small player in GRC with our BWise acquisition. We certainly see that.
As you think of the size of the company and the size of the companies that exist today and the size of the global operations, GRC is by definition something that has to grow to control these increasingly complex organizations. And certainly, the Exchange business where we started, it's a $15,000,000,000 a year business. So in the world we compete in, it's important to recognize we have no lack of opportunities to think about. And in each of those segments, we have a healthy and profitable market share, but a long way to go. And we have, we think, the management team in place able to do it.
I do want to go back to talking about the management team a bit. So we are a bunch of player coaches. And what I say to folks that if you have to prepare for a presentation, something is not right. And that these folks are living this responsibility really 7 by 24 physically at work for 80 hours a week. And when you're dealing with the Board of Directors, investors, you don't have the luxury or the burden of living like we do.
So we have a tremendous bias towards operational excellence in this management team and obviously great depth of knowledge. And I have to say that one good thing, there are other good things, but one good thing about these kind of presentations, it forces operational people to put white space on their calendar to think about what they're about and have a little different perspective to it. So if you look at this team, we have a predilection for filling up the calendar with day to day operational things, which we excel in and we force ourselves to sit back and think strategically and this process actually helped us there. So as you think of this management team and you think about this opportunity set, which we showed the multibillion dollar opportunities to every segment here, it's important to recognize the guiding principle that we have is we will always lever the mother ship, right? So we have tremendous assets.
And if we're doing a new initiative, such as NFX or making an acquisition such as Marketwired or ISC, the first question is, how does it lever the mothership? And if that is not a predominance of the value set of the thought of what we're thinking about, then it's probably something not worthwhile for us to do. The other way we say it is, we're going down the bowling alley, we straight down the alley or we're a half a pin to the left or right. We're comfortable down the alley and the last four acquisitions we did are straight down the alley in terms of what we do. We're comfortable half a bowling pin to the left to right.
Anything more than that, then you're probably not leveraging the mother ship in some fundamental way. So that guides all our actions and so we feel very good about that. So first off investors get certainly the results of our efforts customer focused, engaged employees, properly organized, operating properly within the context of the regulatory structure we're in. We make sure that we're levering a mothership and we make sure we keep our, obviously name brand and resiliency protected through all that. So we have an exciting day for you.
And hopefully Ed we're not behind schedule at all, but it's my great pleasure to have Adena join us here on stage. So welcome Adena.
Good morning, everyone. Good morning, everyone. My name is Adena Friedman. I'm the President and COO of Nasdaq, and it truly is my pleasure to be here today. Very excited for you to meet the management team, for you to understand the businesses in more detail, and obviously, how those businesses translate into shareholder results this morning.
Well, we want to start with and I want to build from Bob's comments around our mission. So when we look at the suite of services and solutions that we provide to our clients, we are very, very focused on making sure that we stay true to our mission. Our mission is to provide market leading technology and intelligence to help our businesses and investors succeed in today's global capital markets. And I think that it's important for us to dissect this a little bit. So we are in the capital markets business, as Bob said, and everything we do is surrounded by the fact that we do serve the capital markets, both our own as well as others around the world.
We are a technology company and we focus on things that we can do to leverage that technology to make sure that the capital markets advance appropriately and in a way that's very innovative, whether that's in terms of the innovations we provide to our own markets and you're going to hear a lot about that from Tom and Han Solo later this morning. But also in terms of the technology we provide to dozens and dozens of markets around the world in terms of our exchange technology, our surveillance technology and our suite of services we offer to our corporate clients. So we're there to help our corporate clients, exchange clients, broker dealers and investors make sure that they have the chance to succeed and advance themselves today in the global capital markets. So how do we do that? Well, we are founded on the fact that we are a cash equities business.
We launched in 1971 as a U. S. Cash equities business. We're very proud of that business and that heritage. But what that did was establish very deep relationships with 3 key client groups.
Corporate clients in terms of companies that are trusting us as a partner to come and raise capital on our market and manage their public stock. In terms of the broker dealers that were interact have been interacting with our market for dozens of years and managing their liquidity through our markets. And then investors who trust us to make sure that we are providing a well regulated and properly surveilled marketplace in addition to giving them the transparency that they need to be able to make smart investment decisions. So we started as a cash equities market and then we started to say, well, how do we choose those bowling lanes to go a half a pin over left or right or down the middle to continue to advance our position. And we started to grow out in terms of multiple asset classes, multiple geographies for trading, that we could serve more broker dealers around the world and we could also make it so that they have more a deeper relationship with us.
We launched our index business and made sure that we're starting to really drive through the smart beta space. We have 12% of the AUM and smart beta indexes today and we consider that a major growth area for us to provide more transparency and intelligence for our investors. And then in the corporate space, we looked at the relationships we have with our corporate clients and they are very, very critical relationships. But at the end of the day, we want to make sure that not only do we manage their liquidity, but we give them the proper actionable intelligence and ability to communicate with their investors and the public to really be the best public companies that they can possibly be. And then beyond that, with the private market and the private companies, we wanted to make sure that as they navigate through and become mature as a private company that we can offer all of those same solutions to them in that space as well.
And then wrapped around all of that, of course, is our market technology business. Our market technology business, we use what we sell. We also have very deep partnerships with the exchange clients that leverage our technology. We are not a vendor to them, we are a partner to them. We look at our intelligence, all of the things expertise that we've been able to develop in our own markets and we offer that to them as a partner.
Some of our clients will take just a trading engine or they might just take a surveillance engine. But some of our clients have deployed 9 or more systems within their markets and they work with us as a partner over a long term. These are long term contracts, long term relationships and we just continue to build those relationships with more and more solutions. We are an innovator and we're very, very proud of how we've been able to leverage our own capabilities that we give to our own clients and then build out that client base for other exchanges around the world. So we have 5 business units that we're going to you're going to meet the 5 business leaders today.
And Bob mentioned that there are some common themes that run across everything that we do. We're an applied technology company. We offer very resilient we have a resilient business model and we offer very resilient solutions. And we are constantly innovating and all of that should drive to growth and therefore shareholder return. Well, if we I'm just going to highlight a few things because honestly you're going to hear I think you're going to hear some great stories from each of our business unit heads today.
But if we look at starting with the listings business, people think of the listings business as a relationship business and it is. We are very, very focused on those partnerships and relationships with our listed companies. But what we've been doing in recent years is making sure we're also wrapping technology around those relationships, whether it's in our IPO enhancements or in the workflow tools we offer through the Nasdaq Private Market. And we are looking at how the blockchain can enable the Nasdaq Private Market going forward. Moving to market services, of course, we are the world leading exchange technology right now and we are very, very proud of that.
That doesn't happen by accident. We never sit still in innovating in our own markets. The split engine technology is one example of that. How we can look at becoming a disruptor in the post trade space through the blockchain is another example of that. Constantly looking at ways that we can make our systems more resilient, make sure that there's more deterministic speed and capabilities and scalability to our model.
All of that is a constant investment of time, energy and technology. And we're very, very proud of what we've been able to do to maintain that leadership position for many, many years. In the information services space, it's a little bit of a different level of innovation. We're looking at how machine intelligence can help create more actionable decisions for investors, for broker dealers using our data. And Saleel will spend some time talking about that.
But we're also focusing on more and more smart beta strategies. With the acquisition of Dorsey Wright, they had a very interesting momentum model that they've been able to apply to every asset class globally. And we want to make sure that we continue to innovate in those models and can offer out more smart beta strategies to grow our to grow the investable tools and investable products that we can offer to investors in that space. In the Corporate Solutions business, it has been an area of focus around integration and innovation. And we're really, really proud of the IR Insight tool, the platform that we've built because not only is that really we built it from the very first line of code.
Not only does it just create an incredible workflow and intelligent solution for corporate executives, but it also is the architectural foundation for the future of Corporate Solutions. And Stacy will spend some more time on that to show how that integration and innovation will continue in Corporate Solutions. And then turning to market technology, I already spent a few a couple of minutes on that, but the market technology is basically bringing all of those capabilities together to be able to provide those solutions to other exchanges to the broker dealer community and to corporates with our GRC platform. And there are 2 key areas of innovation in the Market Tech business today. 1 is in the blockchain.
So embedding the blockchain capability into our post trade solutions and the other is in market and the machine intelligence in terms of the partnership that we've entered into with Digital Reasoning to continue to enable our surveillance solutions for the broker dealer community. So we are constantly looking at these kind of levels of innovation across everything that we do to bring the best of what is in the marketplace today to our clients. And we're very, very proud of what we've been able to do to serve those clients. But what does it mean for you as investors? Well, today we have a very high recurring revenue base in 2015 because of the broad breadth and depth of what we offer.
We had a 75% recurring revenue base for our shareholders. And we're very, very proud of the fact that we have both the combination of volume driven businesses and subscription and recurring businesses to drive shareholder value. That means that we are a very resilient business model. We've been able to grow and manage our business through the cycles because we have such a broad range of clients, a broad range of solutions and on a lot of recurring revenue that makes our business model very resilient through cycles. It also means that we generate a lot of cash.
And so when we look at our consistent operating leverage, we have generated more than 100% cash flow conversion of EPS over the last 5 years. And we have a 50% EBITDA margin and growing. So we've been we're scaled. We're able to provide a very nice strong cash flow and therefore we use it. And we use our cash flow and our operating leverage to make sure we can grow our business through acquisitions and organic initiatives, but also return capital to our shareholders through a growing dividend as well as our buyback program.
So what does that mean for you? And that ultimately results in double digit total shareholder return. And we're very, very proud of our ability to deliver that to you and we think that our model is consistent and resilient in its ability to do that. Well, thank you very much for listening to me. But now I'm going to go ahead and turn it over to Brad Peterson and Ed is going to go ahead.
Thank you.
Q and A with Bob and Adena at the end of the session today. So next, we're going to go to a quick video, and then I'm going to turn it over to Brad Peterson,
Can you fly that thing?
Not yet.
Operator.
Tank, I need
So, I don't know if you guys are fans of The Matrix, if you haven't seen it, you definitely I would recommend it. And that scene, Trinity picks up a new skill instantaneously and becomes an expert in being able to fly the Bell helicopter. That may not be as far off as we think. So that is what I want to do is forward looking statements in financial meetings are frowned upon, but in technology, I think we have to be looking out into the future. And I want to set the context for some of the things you're going to hear about from the other business leaders about where technology is absolutely foundational to the success of NASDAQ.
Brief introduction, I've been with NASDAQ for 3 years. My name is Brad Peterson and I joined after spending 24 years or so in Silicon Valley, the Bay Area. Couple of duties at Schwab, running their technology. So I probably saw some of you in the analyst days that cover Schwab and also, in telecommunications and e commerce. So I was in the same position for eBay and PayPal.
I was attracted to NASDAQ because when I came in and looked under the covers, it wasn't a traditional Wall Street firm. It wasn't a traditional firm like NYSE. It was in essence had emerged into technology being absolutely core. You could debate what is the definition of the technology company. Is it 50% of the revenue?
Is it 50% of the employees? But you'll see that we're very close by any definition of being very much a technology driven organization. So timing, so when you think about this, timing is one of the most important things that you need to track in terms of when these technologies are coming online. And I mentioned that acquiring of skill today, we differentiate ourselves humans from chimpanzees because we can pass knowledge on generation to generation. We've developed language and we've been able to compound our knowledge over time.
So that is accelerating. And when you just think back and we're trained to think linearly, you can get surprised sometimes when technology actually moves at an exponential pace. It can catch you off guard. So it's very important in financial services. I think there's this trend of exponential growth is meaningful and creates opportunities for companies like NASDAQ, but it also can create disruptions.
So it's important to have an opinion on when these things will come online. I picked out 2, they're in the handout. And just think what would happen if software and machines are capable of learning and creating knowledge independent of the human process, which has been historically how we've done that. There's an accelerant there. There's an incredible one.
And that is about to happen. We're right on the verge of machines being able to create knowledge. The accumulation of knowledge is going to accelerate. 2029, what we've done is we've there's a couple of different sources you can track, but Ray Kurzweil is a good one. He's been making predictions about the improvements in compute.
He's now actually employed for the first time in his late 60s at Google working on their cognitive computing initiative and they were in the news with a big milestone with the Go competition. So there's is someone that believes deeply and has been following artificial intelligence and has just gone with an employer that he thinks is going to change the world. The other one is, you're all here with about 300,000,000 pattern recognizers. That's how we do cognitive thinking. And imagine if you want to create really insightful conclusions coming out of this meeting, you might decide maybe I should burst, maybe I shouldn't come into the meeting with $300,000,000 but maybe I want to add a couple of 1,000,000,000 So in 2029, dollars 1,000 computer will have a 1,000 times the compute power of the human brain.
So you could come in with 300,000,000,000 pattern recognizers. I think you guys could make some very insightful connections. So that's not that far off, 2029. So timing is really important. Timing, we have to get this right.
So we think about this deeply and we debate amongst the team. So what else? There's also technologies. So, not every technology, there's huge innovation going on across every industry, but which ones are really important to financial services. In our labs, we're having some fun with augmented reality and virtual reality.
And maybe the next meeting, I can actually demo some of those things. We think that is going to change the user interface. So you think about the graphical user interface today, it dramatically changes the way someone could surveil a market for someone to actually bring in insights. If you have a full reality perspective of the view with augmentation. But I'm going to pick out 3.
I think there's 3 that, in to help focus, my discussion here and also the 3 that I think you'll see are most immediate for the time frame that we're talking about: cloud services, machine intelligence and blockchain. So it was only 10 years ago. This is that exponential growth. I think 10 years ago, people when Amazon invented infrastructure as a service platform as a service, it was only a few years about 6 years before that, that sales force started to talk about SaaS. So you had this company that was Amazon out there in a retail grown up mega bookstore was talking about running infrastructure for companies.
No one thought it was going to happen. And financial services was one of the last industries to really adopt this. This was a platform that was for companies that were unregulated companies that really needed to move fast and a lot of new companies. Financial services resisted it and it was predominantly a U. S.
Phenomenon as well. NASDAQ took a leadership position with FinCloud and we went through the process to get regulatory compliance for storing data in the public cloud. And it turned out not to be a significant economic product, but it really set, I think, the thinking forward. And we have regulators like FINRA. One of our ex CIOs came back to FINRA after he left Citibank.
And he's putting a lot of the compute for FINRA in the public cloud. So we blazed the trail for companies and financial services in New York. I get a lot of thanks from CIOs going, how did you do that? How did you get that going? Well, that was before I came.
So we can thank the folks before. But we've continued that the revenue management system, every one of our customers. So we looked inside like Adena said, we look inside of what we do and then we think about how is this is applicable to our customers. Every exchange needs to have a revenue management system. Every exchange needs an analytical system to understand what's going on in their market.
We had a traditional Cognos BI system that was developed in Philly. And we said, let's that can be something that doesn't have to have the latency characteristics of the exchange itself. Let's put that in the exchange. So we built the revenue management system in the cloud. We moved our data warehouse in the cloud.
And the last trend I want you to think about is, as I said, it was an American, it was predominantly a U. S. Phenomenon, the cloud services. It's now going global at a very rapid rate. So a lot of our customers, a lot of people that said, well, I can't have my data for privacy reasons in the U.
S. Because most of the U. S. Cloud properties were in the U. S.
Europe was okay. Europe got around that with eBay. All of our data was there, was in the U. S. But now you have in country Singapore, Hong Kong and you have competition.
So Amazon has competition from Microsoft, from Google and there'll be another a few other players. So now there's choice, there's competition and we think this is the right way for us to build future software. So where we can, we are going to deliver our platform in the cloud. We can meet our customers there. We can deliver faster and we can add more value to them because they have the cost of running of network engineers, DBAs and Sys admins that don't add a lot of value to their business.
So if you actually have someone else running your infrastructure, we can do we can be more responsive and we can take costs out and we can benefit from that. So it's not a pure cost on compute. I think that's missing the message. The message is the overall embedded costs of infrastructure in a lot of firms that get freed up to do other things. And then the last one you'll hear from Saleel, this becomes a neutral place for data to meet.
And when you try and do anything, in machine intelligence, the power comes when you can add our data with someone else's data. And whenever you try and do that and decide whose home do you go play at, like when you're kids, I like my toys, you like your toys, you can never put your data in their data center. They will never put their data in your data center. We think that this is a neutral zone. And this unlocks a lot of opportunity for machine intelligence.
I think I wanted to do a little bit of a primer on machine intelligence because you've already heard a little bit about it and you're going to hear about it more in the different sessions. Great quote from Sam Altman, where he paraphrase, and what's the difference between artificial intelligence and machine intelligence. We're choosing to use machine intelligence. And he took a stab at artificial intelligence and saying, when it gets built, there's going to be nothing artificial about it. This is real.
This is real capability. So we like that quote. So when you think that when you're reading, what is Brad talking about? What are we talking about here? We are talking about what has traditionally been in artificial intelligence, but you'll start to hear people refer to it more, I think, in the future about machine intelligence.
There's a couple of sections. Let me flip to 4 different components that make this Excuse me, my automation looks like it's not working. So I will these were going to be callouts. So what I'll just cover this here. Machine learning is really where you have algorithms that are available and they can see the data in an unbiased way.
So you're applying different clustering techniques, different analysis and these are available in open source libraries. So you actually have the ability to build systems. And as Bob said and Adena, we don't necessarily have to come up with the algorithms ourselves, but we're going to apply them and we're going to be great at understanding and applying. Natural language processing is just that. So we all developed a way of communicating in language.
And language, 20 years ago, there were banks of computers that were doing voice recognition at places like Schwab and Fidelity and the airlines were kind of the leaders. It annoyed a lot of us, but you needed massive racks of computers. Today, we have Alexa sitting in our kitchen listening to us and we have our smartphones as well. The computer is very capable of processing and understanding written and spoken text. It's phenomenal.
And that is an example of an exponential improvement. Expert Systems first started as rule based and this was the notion of you want to you see decisions being made, you want consistency, you wanted the to deploy an expert. I would say a lot of the robo advisor is that rules based. You build a portfolio for diversification and that's some of the early versions of that. But where it really gets exciting is cognitive computing.
If you think of the limitations of all of those, those are batch, those expert systems are somewhat static in the past, rule based. Where it gets exciting is when you start to emulate human thought. And this is where I think Nasdaq has a natural advantage. So the way that we process information is we take the batch, we take all of our experiences and they're there latent. We build these algorithms, these pattern matches.
But what we do is we stream massive amounts of information to us and that's the power of human cognitive thinking. If you can expand that and if you can actually build systems that operate that way, that I think is going to be game changing. So what does NASDAQ do very well? We handle information at micro sub micro second. We are very good at building high performance systems.
So we think that this is a very natural place for us to be a supplier of to financial services of the next generation machine intelligence applications. I'm going to share one of the areas and you're going to hear more so in the effort of time. What we're calling holistic surveillance, we have a smarts our smarts product that was very good at surveilling, doing what humans couldn't do at very fast speed, looking at different data feeds, we're able to generate alerts, allow brokers to not submit things that shouldn't go into the market, allow markets to see what's coming from multiple brokers and to allow regulators to look at what happened across multiple exchanges like in the U. S. Where you have multiple exchanges.
It is a leading product. It's looking at market data. What we're adding to that and you see all the components that I talked about. You have the unstructured and the structured data. You have the natural language processing.
You've got to be able to read this. And what we're talking about is now taking the smarts platform and adding in the communications of the people who are interacting with the markets, the traders. There's also then applying the algorithms. And ultimately, the goal is human reasoning that you can make these connections and you can understand, potentially over a long period of time relationships that are unknown at the moment of a trade being submitted. So we've announced a partnership with Digital Reasoning.
So that's one of the ones that I can talk about. We have other things that are going on in the labs. But it's a great example of us applying technology and extending a product that we already have to what we think is going to keep ultimately keep markets a lot safer. As I said, there's other applications, but I'll let my colleagues cover those. So let's go into one that we've been in the news quite a bit for in blockchain.
And I know there can be some skeptics. So I wanted to give you the moment and why I think this is so important to financial services and why it's everyone is starting to have these moments. You have what is essential to financial services is secure data stores. You have a lot of reconciliation that goes on across financial services between financial and it's unnecessary. So that's the crime is that it's unnecessary to have to waste all this effort keeping track of something that if you kept track of it from day 1 and you did a good job of it and it was a robust record keeping system, there's huge efficiencies that can be gained.
So that's why we started with private market because we're right at the genesis of companies getting started. So someone has an idea, they found a company, they have stock, they bring in other stockholders. And if that stock grows up to be Google or Apple, it's going to live on for many years. So the thing that is the principle, if you want to think about and this applies to products. So at eBay, there are products that are manufactured that stay on this earth and get resold over and over again.
Our nirvana was having that original set of attributes about that product. We could have accelerated the transfer of sale. And transfer of sale is another one, like homes, like assets that are long lasting. If you get record keeping from day 1 correct, you accrue huge benefits. And then the other one is decentralization.
And this one is not as obvious. But what happened when we formed a lot of the systems in financial services, it was only alphanumeric. So that it was one of the first industries to automate. And it was simple. We didn't have the complexities and media was one of the later ones because of handling large files and graphics.
Financial services though implemented in the 70s, the only solution was centralized, mainframe based databases and they still exist for a lot of the record keeping functions in financial services. Distributed technologies have been deployed in music. So in communications with Skype, in music with distributed file distribution. That needs to come into financial services. So that's not that one is probably not the most obvious, but that is behind.
Those three things are the reason why block chain is getting so much excitement and causing so much enthusiasm. It also has captured, I think, the imagination of financial services executives who know they need to modernize. So this is the way we can start talking to boards about it. Our role here and our journey is as a technology supplier as well as a technology applier. So we're going to be applying this technology.
It was only 2,008 that the seminal paper from Satoshi was so even a shorter timeframe that this exponential growth has started. We first applied it to private market. We have also done a number of R and D efforts. And as Adena said, this is really being built in as a service into our core platform. So the blockchain service, we think is not going to do all that much around the microseconds of trade matching, but it really helps on the life cycle.
So shortening the 3 days, you can we can do a lot better with that and also facilitating the transfer of ownership of assets. So if you think about blockchain, if you hear about it, those are the principles that I think you should be listening for and is the application along those lines. So we are also in the process of engaging a number of design studies with our existing market tech customers. So in conclusion, we have a set of core technology that we build. We're not dependent on any of the software enterprise software companies.
So the core technology, as was mentioned earlier, we have a set of engineers that are excellent at scaling, creating performance systems and creating secure systems. And at the front end, we're building in the innovation like blockchain and the platform to do the machine intelligence, new products around the data and corporate solutions. Our scalability comes from the fact that we operate these systems ourselves. So the most verbose market is the options market and you get that because of the number of instruments. So the equity market everyone thinks about, but there are not as many instruments.
So what you really stress your systems out in is in the options market where you have the quote activity coupled with a number of instruments. So we have the opportunity to ensure our customers that we are scaling. If they buy our solution, it has been tested. Every time we do the Russell, every time we open in a high market, our system does it. And we run we build that technology ourselves.
So I think that gives us a couple of economic advantages. If I'm going to end on this note, if you think about it, it's very tough to get those engineers to work on a problem. And once engineers solve a problem, they want to go solve another problem. So what we have is we get to amortize the work of those engineers on the systems that we run and implement ourselves every day. But we also then get to amortize it over as many implementations around the world for Hong Kong, for Singapore, for Borsa Istanbul.
That's an economic advantage that is tough for any competitor to really match. So that's what gets me excited. That's what got me excited to come here is to continue on this path and to really think into the future about what innovations are going to be impactful for NASDAQ and Financial Services. Thank you very much.
Thanks, Brad. Now some of the ideas Brad talked about are going to be gone into more detail in the different business presentations. And then at the end of the day, we'll have Brad available for questions and answers with the rest of our executives. For now though, I want to shift to listings. I want to show another short video, and then I want to introduce Nelson Griggs, our EVP of Listing Services.
It's
really my true pleasure to welcome Atlassian.
Blue Buffalo. The Match Group. T Mobile. Entek's Midstream Partners. Bark Therapeutics.
Inovalon.
PayPal on your first official day of trading as a standalone company.
T Mobile USA reporting its earnings from a new place this morning, the NASDAQ. Toss it over to our own Jim Cramer, who's at the NASDAQ with a special
guest. I
think we are accessing the capital markets to make sure that we always have access to the lowest cost of capital to build our infrastructure.
Congratulations, Scott and Mike. Thanks so much for joining us and we'll continue, of course, to value your progress as a public company.
We feel very good being here at the NASDAQ. I'm very excited to watch the next phase of the growth of this company while we're trading on the NASDAQ.
All right. Well, welcome, everyone. My name is Nelson Griggs, and I run our listing business with NASDAQ. I've been with the firm for 15 years and took over the role 18 months ago. And you saw some highlights of 2015, but I can confidently say that it was a historic year on many levels for the listing business we're pretty proud of and we'll walk through some discussion to back that up.
There we go. So but real quickly, I wanted to revisit what Adena said when she started. We are a very customer driven division at NASDAQ, where our value proposition and we offer to the marketplace has to align with our customer goals and we do work tirelessly to make sure that there is a perfect match there. And over the last several years, we expanded that not just from the public markets, but also to the private market space. So on the right hand side here on the public side, we have a very well established business in the U.
S. And the Nordics, and we're very focused on the efficiency and effectiveness inside those that is on the public side. What's new to us is the private markets and this has been about a 2 year initiative. We think there's a huge opportunity to provide a cohesive offering in the private space that really leveraged our 40 years of intelligence in the public space to bring our operational efficiencies, regulatory expertise along with what is a very efficient inefficient marketplace today. So some of our technology scale to really offer a long term offering for these customers that we're excited to share with you more about as this presentation progresses.
So I said it's a historic year. What you look at on this slide is 4 years of a lifting base building, which certainly has some nice tailwinds in the marketplace, but it was also driven by executing on our client retention rates, increasing the IPO win rate and attracting marquee listings from the New York Stock Exchange. And when I talk about this slide with customers, it is about really a massive brand increase of NASDAQ over the last 10 years. And I'll highlight by saying the top 3 largest companies in the world are on NASDAQ. Look at the companies in the U.
S. Are above 300 blade in market cap, 5 are on NASDAQ, 4 Fortune 500s top brands, 4 of the 5 are on NASDAQ. So you look at that, how this spills over to the U. S. Market and a 73 percent IPO win rate, almost $85,000,000,000 in additional market transfers from New York Stock Exchange and an all time low in transfers from our exchange, really only one company above $250,000,000 in market cap.
So proud of those statistics and excited about the U. S. Market. But what was even more impressive in 2015 was the Nordic markets for us. So if you follow that marketplace, we have 2 different tiers.
There's a main market and First North. First North is more of a growth market. We had 91 new listings in 2015. That was also a historic high raising over $6,000,000,000 in market cap. And we have now 200 plus companies on this First North market.
So, what encourages even more is this year there are a lot of companies lined up on First North to transfer the main market. So it's a story of both quantity and quality, which excites us. So when we look at our brand, we feel it's never been stronger. And this is what we kind of call, and truly our money slide. I've gotten more value on this slide than I have on any other slide in my 40 page decks to clients ever.
And what this is we're looking at here is, in 2,005 is really when true competition started between us and New York Stock Exchange for transfers. Prior to that date, there was what New York had called Rule 500, where if you wanted to leave that marketplace, you got to notify your top 35 shareholders and there was other owners parts of the process that really made a non starter. So that coupled with 2,007 when companies were able to transfer their symbols really started to accelerate the process of companies coming to our marketplace. So in ADP, for example, companies get very close to their ticker symbols, they want to keep those. So when they transfer, they want to keep that ticker symbol.
And then if you just look at the bottom here, calling out some of the names, whether it's a Walgreens, a News Corp, a Craft, etcetera, NASDAQ is obviously incredibly proud of our technology heritage and growth innovation. But what we are seeing now is all sizes, all shapes, all sectors are finding us to be a very attractive marketplace. We already started this year off, which is usually Q1 is a slow switch time of the year, but Scripps just moved their listing NASDAQ $7,000,000,000 plus to our company. So look at our value proposition, we feel that it is exceptionally strong, resonating better than it ever has, and we're very proud of that. And so that slide always leads to the why.
Why do our companies choosing NASDAQ? And the first two points I'll mention here are more on the day 1 experience. And if you're watching that video, all those different clips you saw there, they did not happen until 2015. So the redesign of this marketplace, the visibility, the brand attributes we provide to companies on day 1 are really unmatched. And I'll spend a little bit more time on the second one.
Later today, you'll have one of my colleagues, Jay Heller. Jay runs the IPO execution process. And what we're talking about in the second one here is really technology solutions. And Adena touched on this as well too. We started a 2 year process, a customer driven process.
In this case, the customer is not the listed company, but the stabilization agents trading desk. So for 2 years, we had conversations about what they wanted to see from NASDAQ and provided a series of solutions to them and really came down to information flow. And what they wanted was more detail on that all important first trade and how they were working with the difference in the different customers to price that stock efficiently. And this culminated last fall in rolling, it was called a Book Viewer. And there was enhancements prior to this, but today you'll get to see a live IPO of the Book Viewer and what this does is provide the stabilization agent full access to the book, anonymize order flow down to nickel increments and helps them really allocate their capital that morning and inform customers at a level that is unmatched and incredibly efficient.
So they can really look at exactly what they need to do to get a stock to a certain level and how that might hold through the rest of the day. So I'll tell one quick story on this. We have very hard customers here in this space. And when we had these meetings, quite frankly, we heard some things that weren't quite as positive about our process. And we delivered this book view where one of the toughest said, when you left, we thought you may deliver 10% of that in about a 3 year period.
He said you delivered 95% in less than a year. And I can tell you with more to come here. So technology is becoming more important to us. So we look at the 1st trade process, the visibility, how stocks execute on NASDAQ, another technology component you'll hear more from my colleague, Stacy Swanson, about the Corporate Solutions. This is a critical component to the listing decision.
So we're able to get into very deep, rich conversations about the quarter by quarter involvement we have with clients to target investors and communicate with investors, which is very powerful. And then on the ongoing attributes, you look at the visibility, Times Square is obviously a place. We have a whole platform of visibility assets. What's unique to NASDAQ is the index side. So whether they're a large cap and it's the NASDAQ 100, a Biotech and it's the NASDAQ Biotech Index or even a Nasdaq Composite, this all resonates with customers as indexes are much more important than they ever have and our ETFs are.
And lastly, just our fee structure is viewed as a more logical regional fee structure and we provide enormous value based on the fees that we do charge and clients recognize that. So my sales, we provide And when I take it a little step deeper, we And when I take it a little step deeper, we are laser focused on this message to our clients on really a sector by sector basis. So we look very closely at where the IPOs are coming from, where we're strong, where we think we can have room for improvement. And this is to me the message internally to my team is about protecting the base and where we have opportunity to expand. So across the key sectors that are most active, we love our position.
We think we have a very strong story to tell. But as we have added assets like Corporate Solutions, we are one of the largest providers to intelligence the energy sector. So this opens up new doors. This is definitely a marathon game, not a sprint. Let's look at how our story has evolved to clients over the years, the size of companies, the sectors, the level of activity that we're able to see across a multitude of areas is we're very, very excited about.
We also think we're in the early innings of our success here. So how do we look at the marketplace and our engagement? This slide is all about what we're focused on creating deeper relationships with clients, earlier engagement with clients and then how we are able to really increase or shine a light on their brand that we also get a glow from it at NASDAQ. So as I look through our increasing IPO win rate, which is what the blue chart is indicating here, really it comes down to some regulatory changes that give us opportunity, technology innovation that we provided to the marketplace and then some mindset changes we've seen over the last really ten years in terms of how they look at NASDAQ. So on the regulatory side, I'll hit on more of this when I get to NASDAQ Private Market, but the Jobs Act came along, which had both public and private attributes to it.
We just passed the RAISE Act, which codifies exemptions for private securities, which is a helpful bill for MPM. On the mindset change, it's been crossing that milestone of $500,000,000,000 switches. We're now up to the $809,000,000,000 that we had mentioned. The market site redesigned here. We launched the Nasdaq Entrepreneurial Center last fall.
So we look at the brand, how it's expanded and changed the mindsets. And in technology, it really is the book viewer, but we also see opportunity in other key moments that take place for stocks such as secondaries, etcetera, and also the Corporate Solutions. So it's really a combination of those that have led us to create a very cohesive story, but also keep an eye on opportunities on the regulatory side and with Nasdaq Private Market, this has been a 2 year initiative that is funded out of my P and L. And if you look at how this started, it really gets its impetus in 2 areas. The Jobs Act, when that came across in 2012, what was attracted to us there was the change in beneficial shareholder count.
Prior to 2012, if you had 500 shareholders at a private company and you needed to go public, Now that level has been increased to 2,000 and that does not include employees. That's a lot of shareholders. So companies can really stay private for a very long time. So that was the regulatory side, but companies also have been wanting to stay private longer, where we used to see companies go public after 4 to 5 years. Now that's 8 to 10 years, these are VC backed companies, 8 to 10 years or even we're seeing some companies stay private for 15 years or longer and some are talking about staying private beyond that.
So if you look at this, our process here with this is we go in the front door, every trade we do, process we go through is with the company sponsorship or board sponsorship. And what we're doing is bringing significant efficiencies to a very inefficient process. So if you think about a private transaction, it's much more akin to a real estate transaction than it's a public company stock transaction. So it's a lot of workflow, a lot of contracts that we have streamlined into a process to help close the inefficiencies, the potential for regulatory challenge, etcetera. So we really wrapped the NASDAQ brand technology efficiency around this process.
And to give you a size of how the market is developing in 2015 between NPM and now 2ndMark, which is part of NPM, over 40 transactions, which was 33% more than the year before. And the transactions were about 1 point $6,000,000,000 in size. And we've also seen in 2016, even though there is a slower market in general, that we're on pace to eclipse 2015. So I'll talk more in a second about how we see that market expanding. But in addition to this product, which is liquidity based, we do offer a service that keeps track of cap table management, stock plans.
So we get a very deep relation with clients. We have over 74 clients in that space. These are mostly C and D round type companies that have a future to go public at some point. And the integration between the cap table, the stock plan and liquidity is really critical in the private space. When you think about a company going through multiple rounds of financing, different preferences, keeping track of that the right way is very important to us.
So this ecosystem to us is part of getting the door early to key companies, key prospects that may also go public, but it's also helping them manage their private life much, much more efficiently. And when we talk about how the market will grow, gets back to the concept, there needs to be some regulatory changes, needs to be some mindset changes and there needs to be some friction reduced in the process. So when you talk about regulatory Jobs Act, I mentioned the RAISE Act, what that really did is codify an exemption for private security transfers as long as the various rules were followed and NASDAQ was a MPM was a sponsor of that. It wasn't perfect, but it's in the right direction. So the ability for companies not to rely on legal exemptions.
And then when we look at the mindset, so if you think back to after 2013, it was known as the Wild West Private Transactions. Companies shut them down, completely changed their charters. And now we saw that evolve to companies doing yearly programs. We have a whole handful doing semi annual. We're talking to companies about doing quarterly programs.
We're running an ESOP plan for 1 company. So this is letting a private company letting employees buy shares. So we really do view this is at the early stages, but if you look at how this market will evolve, that mindset liquidity for private companies is out of the bag as long as it can be controlled by the company. And that is where we are a true partner to them. And the last piece after the regulatory, after the company mindset is really a friction reduction.
So we are aggressively focused at NASDAQ, really an elegant solution in NPM. It's a modern architecture built on Ruby on Rails. Clients kind of look at this and say, okay, this makes sense now to offer liquidity because I can do this in a controlled environment. So we're very excited about the opportunity and how we have built the platform. It's really a scalable offering here where you think about what we're driving is taking a very inefficient process to illiquid securities and providing an efficient way to do that.
So and it's also the ecosystem. So 2 products we're launching now. 1 is to help private companies close M and A transactions. This is more for law firms, which are also a key component to the MPM product because they get involved in the contracts. So they are a customer of ours as well now.
So we're very excited about that opportunity. It's actually a bigger market than the company focused one. And then we have also we have aligned with several general partners, which are fund managers in this case, to offer controlled liquidity via auctions to limited partners in the private funds area. This is a very exciting opportunity for us. We are many of these funds do not offer liquidity today, and we are really co developing these products with partners in the space.
So if you think about what MPM has let us do, it's opened up this window of NASDAQ playing this neutral partner that has technology expertise to really bring some efficiencies to an illiquid marketplace. So this is early days, but we're very excited about the potential for what we bring in the marketplace. And I think in one of Bob's last speeches, he talked about innovation on top of innovation. And Brad hinted on this, but with the linked product that we have, which is our blockchain initiative, it's not just for NPM, but it's a start. And if you look at NASDAQ's unique position, so we know the pain points of Microsoft, Apple and all the large and mid caps and small caps on NASDAQ in the public space.
We've had a 2 year crash course on the private space. And you think about what a certificate does across a life cycle of a company, it gets moved around in many different ways, different holders, different owners, different institutions. So starting out right, as Brad said, and having this in an immutable ledger where those securities can be tracked efficiently, managed efficiently, is really kind of some game changing stuff. So this is again long, long term effort here. But if you do this right, the kind of companies around MPM are founding, doing their search the right way, offering liquidity, having that maybe transfer the public space, there's a ton of opportunity for Nasdaq to play a leading role there.
So I think that's an exciting opportunity for Nasdaq. We think it's about a year or 2 away from being material to my revenue results. So when you look at how the last 4 years have evolved for Listing Services, we're a very cash flow rich business with 45% margins. It's best to really look at our growth in 5 year increments. I'll say two reasons because of that is it's not a business where we have yearly fee increases.
We're very, very close to our clients. And over time, we do have opportunity have had opportunities to increase fees. 2015 was one of those years where we did see a 15% revenue increase, reflecting that fee increase that we successfully worked on with our clients, but that is not a year over year process. And secondly, when we do have a robust marketplace, like you look at the revenues, the initial listing fees are amortized over 6 years. So that is doesn't show up as much of the revenue in the positive years.
When you have a slower start like we have in 2016, there's a cushion there as well too. So the corresponding growth in the growth in the EBITDA is represented the 7% CAGR there and then the margins increased 45%. So with that,
Thanks, Nelson. Let's take a few moments to see if there's any questions on the listings business. Do we have a microphone in the room?
Sure. Thank you. Can you talk about the long term revenue opportunity around the NASDAQ private market? I mean, it sounds all pretty exciting, but how are you going to make money on this thing? Like I know there's some corporate solutions you can cross sell, but how do you think about this business really contributing to the bottom line?
And what different areas can it help us?
Yes. We are starting to it is a revenue generating product today. As mentioned, I think we're probably a year or maybe 2 wavefronts to be material to the business, but it is it's on the cusp of doing that. So we've gone looking at the number of clients we have. These are mostly software clients, and we do charge fees on the Exact Equity cap table plan.
It's a reoccurring revenue stream. On the NPM liquidity as a transactional revenue. But again, we think we're a year away from being able to tell you how that Yes. Bob likes to hit on this and also he gave me a little note here, which I'll expand upon. But if we look at what we're able to make off a private company today, the ones that we're most engaged with, It is equivalent to what we're making on a publicly traded company.
We factor in the Corporate Solutions and a listing fee. When I look at what I what we work with our larger NPM clients, it's actually greater than the NPM side. So we need to expand the base. And again, the 40 clients we had last year that expanded this year and the ExactEquity, 74 clients. So we're again, we're getting close.
And maybe just asking a question a little bit different. Like, do you think there's a point or can you quantify like how much of NPM in a few years, let's call it 3, 5 years, can be revenue can like how much NPM or private companies can contribute to the listings business? Can it be a majority at some point? And in particular, if companies stay private longer? Or how do you think about NPM over time contributing to that business?
Yes, we wouldn't say it'd be majority. I mean this is I think if we look at 50 years, there's potential of that because there's still a whole health there's a lot of companies that do want to go public
for sure.
And at some point, those private companies will not want to go public, so we lose them as MPM clients. But again, we think it will we'll have more to share in a year in terms of the materiality of it, but it's getting to the point where
Thanks. Can you talk a little bit about the Corporate Solutions part of the pitch for grabbing listings from NYC? The evolution of that, is that a bigger factor now than it has been in the past? And as you're building that those capabilities, do you think it will be even a bigger factor going forward? And maybe just talk a little bit about what kind of bundling you are doing now versus what you've done in the past?
Yes. It's a substantial part of the pitch. It's actually can be a lead. We have the ability in a pitch meeting to bring in experts that the competition is something we cannot do. So when I'm able to go in, in an IPO pitch, and this is with our existing clients as well, but talk about the trends in their sector, how we're going to support them day in and day out after the, what we'd say, the bell stops ringing, that really resonates particularly at the CFO level, but even more so at the CEO level, increasingly at the CEO level.
Because our suite of offering, if you think about it, as Stacy will expand, is just very comprehensive. We own and offer everything. The accountability they like the accountability and the breadth of services. And even what we are seeing more and more is that we do offer a package for a 2 year period to get started with their through their IPO journey. But they are actually more and more clients are even buying services on top of that, because again, they see the benefit of this not like we don't like to say one stop shop.
That's really what it is. We're able to deal with a single point of contact in the process. So it's a lead for us.
Do you see that improving?
Yes, every day. As our teams get more aligned, quite frankly, and we both have teams throughout the entire country that are geographically located, we are very focused on getting them to work together. So it's not only a lead generation source for both sides, but it's also we do joint pitches together. So as that, Thompson become more and more the integration become more and more solidified, it's growing by the day.
And one more behind. Mike?
Thanks. And this might be a little difficult because it's not just the listings business. But when you look at some of those switches from, say, 2012 to 2015, When you win that business, do you have any stats on like those companies, how many products or services they're using today versus that relationship back in 2012?
Well, one I'd say, we do look at that very closely in terms of what the clients I don't have a number to report to you, but we do look at them. These are usually larger cap companies that are paying me a max listing fee. They're usually more active stocks if you look at the names there. So they bring revenue on the trading side. On the Corporate Solutions side, the overwhelming majority are using all of the services.
That's actually sometimes how the lead starts, to be quite frank. Now we do offer some of the services to them to be on to come over to NASDAQ. But when that does end, they stay on as clients. So it's really a 95% plus retention rate there and they're all using our services, everything's one of them.
Okay.
The
only I was going to wrap up with is just when we do go through the Q and A, we'll have people on my team here from the IPO execution side. Nasdaq Private Market Bill Siegel will be here. Eric Faulkimer is running the private funds initiative for Nasdaq Private Market, will be here as well too. And then Alex Sinder is going to be there to show a demo of Link, if you would like to see that.
All right, great. Thanks, Nelson. Appreciate it. Next, I want to welcome Hanz Ole Jakumsen, our President in Charge of Market Services and Tom Whitman, EVP of Global Equities.
Thank you, Richard. Good morning. So I am Hans Ole Jokomsen, and I'm responsible as President for our Global Market Services. And I'm going to present this business segment together with Toc Mittmann, who is our Executive Vice President and running our Global Equity business. So let me start out and then I will leave the floor for Tom for some time and I'll come back.
So as Athena started, in reality, a lot of NASDAQ are coming out of our cash equity business, our history strength in that area, both on the U. S. Side and in Europe. And there are a couple of things, and I believe also Bob touched upon it in his welcome, which is important for us. Number 1 is scalability.
That is definitely what we look for in our Market Services business. It is, of course, about technology. Brad mentioned also that, but it's also about operations. The customer focus, as we have heard about earlier, is, of course, extremely important also in this area. And I would like to connect that to also a third element.
Because we are a global company, we are very focused on that. We are able to handle our customers locally and using the strengths of being a global company. So from the starting point with cash equities, we have been moving on into the U. S. Options business.
We also have what we call equity derivatives in Europe. We use that word because it includes both options and futures. We are in fixed income. Historically, we have the fixed income business in the Nordic countries, but we also have the acquisition of e Speed. We have our venture in NLX, the London based activity.
On the commodity side, we some years ago acquired a future financial business in the Nordic Energy area from in relative to the Nordic governments. And we have expanded that into European Energy. And that gave us an opportunity also to expand into U. S. Energy, and I'll come back to this later in the presentation.
But you will also see that we also are in the post trade area. We have in reality a European based clearinghouse. We also have 4 CSDs in 4 countries. And we have a back office for hire. There's not a lot of revenue related to these businesses, but I want to mention it because it has something to do with the knowledge base we have in the company when it comes to the post trade sector.
And we also talked about blockchain. And if there is somewhere where blockchain is very, very relevant, then it is everything which have to do with Post Trade. So that's why it's important to understand that we have the knowledge that even that the revenue is limited. From here, we would like to go into Equities. And I will leave the floor for Tom.
And when he is done, then I'll come back. Tom, please.
Thanks, Hanzola. So my name is Tom Whitman. I'm the Executive Vice President responsible for Global Equities for NASDAQ. I've actually been in the space since 1987, and I'm only 40 years old. Make sure you're paying attention.
So of course, my background was technology. And as I look at this business, it's very technology based business and we use technology and I use technology in my business to make it more efficient and also take advantage of opportunities. And what better place than NASDAQ to allow for them to allow me to run these businesses, which I love. So with that, I'll turn and we'll do a quick tour through the business I'm responsible for and we'll start with the equities business and we'll start in the U. S.
I think if you take a look at the market share for the NASDAQ stock market, we look at it as individual market. We are number 1 in market share, which helps us attract listings. So it is the single largest pool of liquidity amongst our peers. We also run a trade reporting facility, so it kind of gives us a lens into what trades as we call dark pools or dark trading. And that is 31.8% for NASDAQ.
NYSE also runs a trade reporting facility. So if you look at those 2 combined, it's 36 percent or somewhere around that area. There's still a fair amount of trades dark. From a revenue perspective, which I know you all pay attention to, I think couple of years ago when I presented, the notion was that capture for the equity markets was capped out and we would not be able to increase our capture. Of course, I have a very strong team behind me and Walt Smith is here with me today and we can talk more about this.
But I'm a big proponent of segmenting order flow and taking a look at places where we can increase capture. Us being a primary market, we're able to charge different rates for opening, closing cross, midpoint and then you've got the slate. So on the bottom left, you can see that over the past couple of years, we've increased our cash or increased revenues for our shareholders. Similar story in the Nordics. So top right, our Nordic equity markets are around 65% market share, primary market, and there is a lot of flow that trades on our books.
There's a lot of turnover there. In the bottom right, the same type of graph, which we have notional pricing in the Nordics, but we also have gained capture throughout the time frame in the past few years. So it's a positive story there. I wanted to mention on the market reg stand front that Chair White said recently, so I like to look at can regulation change what we're doing in the U. S.
Markets, be it options or equities. Chair White said recently, I want to quote her, she said the agency is unlikely to complete rules intended to bolster market stability before she steps down. And I think this is an indication that there won't be any real big changes. There's a Market Structure Advisory Committee. We're looking at change in Reg NMS and how that will go about, but there's a lot of time being spent in the industry, but it looks like there will not be regulatory changes into the near future.
Trading in dark pools continues to be around the mid-thirty percent, and I wanted to mention that we have created an offering, which is technology, so we use NASDAQ technology to allow banks or internalizers to use our technology, our operations, Reg SCI compliancy, a backup in Chicago, and this is a way for them to use this and allow us to regulate it and run this for them. We're in conversations with a few firms here, nothing public yet, but we are entering a space. It's a big opportunity, I think, for us to provide technology, which is in line with what NASDAQ does for these customers. So stay tuned for that. So we talk about dark trading.
I don't think that the industry and the public really knows what happens in times of volatility. So this graph is really to depict what happens in high times of volatility. Of course, the most recent one is August 24. But when there is high volatility, flow migrates to the lit exchange and NASDAQ becomes a winner on high volatility times. Our market share increases, TRF and dark trading decreases.
And I think it's just an illustration of the value and the price formation on the NASDAQ stock market as volatility spikes. August 24 was obviously a big driver there. So coming out of August 24, there were and I think you're probably familiar with limit up, limit down, so it's a single stock circuit breaker. So they go into trading halt. So there were a lot of trading halts in individual stocks and ETFs on August 24.
So we started thinking about what can we do with our listed companies to support a stock in those times of volatility. So we came up with this dynamic pricing idea. So in a limit up, limit down situation, when a stock gets pressure, sell pressure, right before it gets into a state where it would actually halt, we provide pricing incentives to our market makers. So they electronically get a feed. We say we're going to get ready.
It's going ready to go into a limit down state. So it's a call for liquidity. So it's an event pricing mechanism. And we say we will give you a much higher rebate to come in and support bids in this stock. So the technology is being built.
We filed a rule, it's public and we hope to bring this live in April. And we'll have to experiment with it, but we think it's a very unique, neat idea to support our listed companies. We believe it will work and we're looking forward to implementing this in April. We turn to the U. S.
Options market. Obviously, when NASDAQ acquired Philadelphia some 8 years ago, we're very proud that 6 years running, we're number 1 in market share for equity options. And we've done that a few different ways. I think we were the first to realize that not just one venue could support the needs of all of our customers. So we developed a second venue called NASDAQ Options Market.
And then we started a 3rd, which had a whole different market model in the BX platform. And so by doing that, we were able to increase our market share in the NASDAQ family to support our customers. The pending ISE acquisition will allow us to further diversify our offerings. They run different models and I'll get into this a little bit later. They run different models that are yet they run 3 exchanges, they launched a third exchange.
We believe we can offer more diversity for our customers here. The options business is a mature business, but it's one in which retail investors and managed accounts really don't take advantage of using options. So I think that there will be continued growth. You've seen the growth of options over the past few years peak, it's kind of plateaued, but I believe we're going to see another uptrend as more retail accounts and managed accounts use options to protect their long term equity investments. If we turn to European derivatives, we've taken some ideas we've used in the U.
S. Like trading weeklies and implemented those in our derivatives platforms over in the Nordics. And you can see as a starting point going back to 2011, if we measure our derivatives volume against our competitors, we've actually seen an increase compared to the Euronext and Eurx in derivatives trading. Access and Post Trade Services. So this is an area, it's new for me, new responsibility for me, but it's one in which as you run these businesses and add businesses, our Access Services business collects revenues 1 from running and managing the trade reporting facility, which is a very good business, but also co location ports, membership different ways to transmit data between data centers like microwave or millimeter wave technology.
So this is a business, a very strong stable business and one that will look to grow and it will grow as we build new functionality, new businesses like NFX. NFX will at some point have colocation services and will be in this area, so we'll see this area grow. The dark pool that I mentioned earlier, code name Ocean, will be managed and run from this facility. Brad spoke about blockchain technology. So there is an area here that we've implemented in Estonia for proxy voting using blockchain technology.
And we all talk internally, there's many implementations that we think we can use blockchain, so we've chosen this one in Estonia. This for me is probably one of my more exciting slides to talk about. If you look at honestly the Chaix acquisition that we did, we have 2 ATSs now in Canada that represent 25% of all trades that take place in Canada. We'll take this technology because it runs on Chi X, it's that technology. We'll implement our technology here.
And the technology that we'll implement will be the NASDAQ stock market, one that we're capable of doing opening crosses, closing crosses, so full feature and functionality of the NASDAQ stock market in the U. S. Will be implemented in Canada. We will apply over time to be exchange status. So as we go through this technology migration, I'll pick the right time to become an exchange in Canada.
And I think we need to do that because of the amount of volume that we do there. And also our desire to move into our as Bob said, we're driven by customers. When we announced this deal, I had many customers, both U. S. And Canadian customers say, Tom, you've got to get into listings, can you do ETF listings, we know your DNA and options in the U.
S, can you bring a competitive options environment to Canada? And of course, these are things that I want to do and we want to do as possible. We listen to our customers. I think we can implement these new features and functionality in the Canadian markets. If you look at the recent announcement for ISE and as a technologist and also reflecting on Bob and Adena's comments about down the bowling lane, you can see exactly how to execute this acquisition.
We know that we can take our technology and run that business very effectively and use our scale and size to continue to hold on to this volume. So you can see it's $162,000,000 in net revenue. So this would be a great add on to our current options business. 2 things that you really look for in ISE, they've been a pioneer in complex order flow. Complex order flow is a growing trade amongst retail investors.
And then Precise, they have a front end that they have out at the banks and the IDBs. And we think that, that piece of glass out on the desk will help us capture that flow and we have aspirations to modify that technology to trade more than options. I'd like to see equity trading, equity tied to complex order on that platform And there's no reason to believe we can't extend that to fixed income, E Speed treasuries and other asset classes.
I think the other thing
in closing for these acquisitions is when you bring these types of businesses into the NASDAQ, it feeds other areas of revenue throughout the company. So if you look at co location, membership and even coming up with new ways to sell data, these all facilitate that across our company. So, we're excited and I'm excited about that. So with that, I'll turn it back to Hans Ole.
Thank you, Tom. So we call it FICC. In reality, I should stress that it's only fixed income and commodities because we are not in FX. And let me start with commodities. And as I mentioned earlier, we entered the commodity business that asset class through the acquisition of the financial business of Nord Pool, by the way, just around the merger between OEM and NASDAQ in 2,008.
So we came into the Energy business in this way. We expanded by buying us into freight. We have expanded organically into German and other European energy markets. And now we are also with an FX in U. S.
Energy. So in reality, a successful execution of what we do with NASDAQ Future Exchange could turn us in to be a global competitor in commodities. And I'll come back to this and say a little bit more about it. But before I do that, a little bit more about our fixed income business. And let me this time start with the historical strong base we have because we are serving our customers in the different Nordic countries with a very broad spectrum of Scandinavian currency based products.
I would say, in reality, all the products they would like us to have, we can deliver. So it's going all the way from listings, as you can see. We have quite nice listing revenue coming from more than 7,000 bonds being listed with NASDAQ, all the way from government bonds, mortgage bonds, corporate bonds and structured products. So a relatively sizable business where we can use, again, scale. The clearing business is also very substantial for our Nordic fixed income markets as we are the supplier to the markets of the Scandinavian currency products and clearing of especially OTC products is definitely going to grow.
And you can see how it had developed so far. So we are talking about that so far we have cleared SEK 8,000,000,000 in interest rate swaps. So even that the currency rate should be taken into account, it's still a relatively sizable number. Next month, we are going to do compression with the large Nordic banks. That's a way for them to in reality clean up in their portfolio, get some capital relief and have a better portfolio.
So we're going to do that, as you have heard about that other clearinghouses are doing. And you will also know that in Europe that the mandatory clearing are now starting to come into place in a couple of steps. So we have reasons to believe that this is going to grow. And the first step will be that the Nordic banks will start to backload all their interbank market interest rate swaps. So we believe that we will see some growth already this year and then continue in the years to go.
On the European scene, we also have Nel X, where we are trying to get more into the European markets through the fact that we are offering trading in the short and the long term fixed income derivative products in Europe. We also have our acquisition of eSpeech. And I guess you all know the story we have here that this is really a market which during the last couple of years have changed a lot. And you think about it, you will find out that there's a lot of similarities to development the U. S.
Equity market was true a number of years earlier. At the same time, we have also seen that the interest level is the interest rate level is extremely low. And thereby, we have an extremely low level of activity in the market. And this combined with much stronger regulation, higher capital requirements have created a much more fragmented, much less liquid market. And there may create a situation where it's very difficult for our customers really to earn money.
So the big question is, how do we and NASDAQ try to address this? And we're mentioning 2 things up here. Number 1 is, we should try to see if we can do something on the pricing side. And you're just seeing and listened to Tom Wittmann talking about what we have been doing on the pricing side in U. S.
Equities and in U. S. Options. And we are trying to see how can we use that knowledge base also to be much more innovative in the way we price in the U. S.
Treasury market. So that is one of our initiatives. The other one you can read about is elect. So in reality, it's pretty simple. We are not trying to segment the market.
We are trying to segment the market. And we do it by allowing the customers who want to use this new functionality to be able to reach a group of our clients. So take an example, you have a primary dealer who are prepared to go in with a bid and offer of a certain size and they know that they can choose just to reach out to other primary dealers. So that is one way, and we have a number of different groups you are able to choose. So in reality, the customers have 2 opportunities.
They can either improve size and when they do that, they know that they can choose a specific group they want to reach or they can in reality price improve, which allow them in reality to trade at the midpoint. We are still in early days. More or less, every week, we have new customers who start and use these new functionalities. But I would like today to share with you a couple of results. Number 1 is that for the deals we have executed, then the average trade size is 5 times higher when you select.
And secondly, for each or all of these trades, the customer are earning $600 more per trade. So I think that's quite interesting results we have been able to deliver so far. The other initiative you can read about here is cross rate. That's a little bit different in a way that, that is invalidity fragmentation. It is a partnership with CrossWave Technologies where we are trying to create a solution together based on our technology and using our customer base.
And think about it in a way that you will have a number of liquidity providers who are big enough to be able to stream prices into the marketplace. That will allow smaller and medium sized customers to execute up against these streamed prices. Now these guys from the CrossWave Technologies have patents pending for the time being, which is a way to calculate a fee if you create toxicity in the market. So there will be a penalty if you don't behave in an orderly manner in this setup. And we have so far met very good response from customers.
A nice number of very used players are very interested. And I think it is worthwhile to think about it in a way that 5 of the biggest players are in reality providing services for 60% of the institution clients. So our goal is to see if we could have at least 2 or 3 of these 5 to be streaming prices when we go live. So definitely a lot of focus on being innovative, try to meet the challenge in a different way and thereby creating new momentum in our U. S.
Treasury business. I promise to come back to this commodities. And what we have learned to our European business because there is still a lot of U. S. Players also in European Energy Markets is that there definitely is a need for competition in U.
S. Energy Markets. And if something is in our DNA, in NASDAQ, it is competition. We love that. So we in reality started to look at the market, and it's pretty sizable.
The 2 in company exchanges have revenue of $1,300,000,000 So why not do something about it? So we have a partnership with 20 players all the way from the biggest players in this market between the global banks, market makers, FCMs and also a number of commercial players. And then, of course, your question will be, but how can you know you could be successful? And of course, nobody can know. But there are a couple of reasons for us to be optimistic to some way.
Number 1 is that our partners want to make sure that it's not going to free ride. And that means that there is either you play or you pay. So if you're not coming with the volume you have said you will, you have to pay the customer fees even if you don't have volume. Number 2 is that we succeeded to enter an agreement with OCC, the big option clearinghouse in U. S.
They can clear a trade for $0.04 per site. That's $0.08 for a trade. And with our scale, it means that our breakpoint for having profitability in this setup is extremely low compared with the average price in the market of $1.3 And Tom is running options markets below $0.20 So why $1.3 The third element is that we from day 1 had so many FCMs connected that 80% of the potential customers could find an FCM and connect day 1. And finally, we are using our global organization to really have scale. So this is a 23.5 market.
So we operated partly from U. S. And partly from Europe, and we can switch seamlessly between our organizations and you will scale on both sides of the Atlantic. So at least we are optimistic. I think that I have a slide with some results here because how are we doing?
And I guess it's a little bit up to you to make your own conclusions, but we started in end of July last year. And we just updated we're just missing one day here, that's today. But before the roll, we reached open interest of 770,000 contracts. And why do I mention that? I mention it because it's not that difficult to create a platform where you have a lot of trading.
But if you are flat every day, you don't build up open interest. Open interest is only coming if you get customer flow into the platform. And that's why this grow in open interest are something which is very critical and what we are looking at every day to see how do we improve on that one. The volume are also increasing pretty nicely, and you will see that we have a number of months here where we have around 20% growth in volume month by month. If you look at where we are market share wise, our strategy have been moving into the area product by product.
It's a pretty large area. We are looking at 5 of the big natural gas products. We're looking at 10 of the oil. And then on power, there is a lot of products. But we take them a little bit step by step, so we can try to focus on it and be successful there.
We started out with natgas options. The market share is going very much up and down from day to day because it's an OTC market with trade reporting. But we definitely have a market share between 10 20 most days. Gas oil is another area where we have seen that we have a steady market share around 15. And we have recently started also to go into Brent.
And of course, the next step will be to go into some of the bigger products here as we can see that our customers are ready. And we have a lot of dialogue with customers about where we're going to launch new products. So let me move back to what do we deliver for our shareholders within our transaction segment. And we have, of course, in this business some headwinds coming from FX because we have a sizable business, as you have seen also from Tom's presentation, within the European space. And if we then try to look at what is in reality our organic growth where we adjust for FX, you will see that we have had the last number of years a pretty nice organic growth of 4%.
We're also able to do it in such a way that we keep also a similar growth in our EBITDA, and we have even been able to deliver a higher margin. So at least we feel that we have been doing something good in a time frame where which is short, but also where we have not seen a lot of organic growth coming in the market. So I think with these words, Tom and I will finalize our presentations. This is some of the areas where we have a lot of focus, as you have heard us talk about. And if we have time, we are ready to take questions.
Thank you, Hanzola. Thank you, Tom. Let's take a couple of questions if you have them. Can we get a microphone to Rich right here in the front?
Thank you, guys, for all the detail here. First question is, over in Europe on Enel X, we haven't talked about Enel X in a while, but supposedly there will be cross margining potential available from LCH in April or sometime in Q2. Can you give us a feel with everything that's going on in Europe and the exchanges, can you give us a feel whether you think that will have any impact on your volumes? So NLX has been low profile here for a little while.
Yes, definitely. I mean, with the uncertainty that LGS need to get the final approval, I think their own expectation is that we are talking about an April timeframe. So when that happens, the only opportunity to get the benefit of that is to use Enel X. So that's of course very interesting. I think it's also interesting to remember that there are these 3 margin pools, the OTC pool, the short term pool and the long term pool.
LCH, Eurex and ICE. The biggest of the pools are the 1 in LCH. And you should try to think about it. Then you would like to consolidate your flow where you have the biggest pool. That's why we have partnered with LCH.
That's why we have been the 1st to sign up to use this possibility to create these offsets in margins. And it is relatively sizable amounts we talk about. Now our European Kleinhouse can already do what Lorna clearinghouse are going to implement soon. So we know from our experience that the big Nordic banks have been able to reduce the total amount of margin with between 25% 40%. And if you think about just the pool of margin they have sitting there, which is 1,000,000,000 of dollars.
So we are talking about very sizable amounts of money. And that is why we still have some of the global banks, which are connecting the GCM, as it's called in Europe. So they are able to take benefit of this when we go live. And of course, we also benefit a little bit from some turmoil in Europe around a merger, which means that a lot of customers are more focused on NLX than they perhaps have been before. So I think there's still reason for us to look closely at this and work closely with our customers to show they are able to benefit from this opportunity.
Okay. And one follow-up. So Tom, when you talked about the ISE and the dominant position has in complex option flow, I think you stated or we've calculated as well, it's roughly 40% of the complex market and that in an estimate complex being 30% of the entire market. So I guess the question is you dominate 40% of the complex market with ISC. Your NASDAQ, I believe, have some as about 20% as well.
Why wouldn't you what's the benefits like the initial guidance is that you're not the platforms will be operated independently. So is there a benefit in sometime in the future to connecting them? And it's also, from what I understand, the IAC uses Bats for the equity portion, not there's a lot of volume, but are there benefits to bringing that to the mother ship, I guess, so to speak? Yes.
So it's a great question. The IAC has a certain trade allocation within their complex order book. And over the past couple of weeks, we were told by some customers, Tom, we still like the Philly model, starting auctions when you create a new strategy. We have an auction that's blind. I see as an auction that's not blind.
So those we won't bring those 2 together. We'll because our customers are saying, we kind of like this and the other customers are saying, we like the way this one works, so we're going to keep them separate. I mean, could there be something where you could actually pull some of that data together and create a better view of the book? Yes, there probably is. I mean, that could be something we could do.
But as far as pools of liquidity and the way those businesses run, we won't change them. We will really focus on making sure that we can replicate what the ISE has in rules and functionality on the platform.
So liquidity is sort of virtually combined then, is that fair to say? No, still separate?
Yes, still be separate. Still be separate.
Okay, great. Let's go behind Rich to Alex.
Thanks guys. Just going to NFX for a second. Can you guys give us an update the robust growth in OpenShift you've seen in the level where you're at right now? How much of that is the banks and the kind of market makers versus the buy side and the end customers? And I guess secondly, if you think about the progress you've made in turning that into revenues, any update on the magnitude and the timing of turning some of the fees
on? On the first one, what we can what we know and can say is that around 40% of our volume are coming from non partners. So that's one signal. The other signal is that we know from the FCMs we are working closely with that they are starting to get also flow in from institutional clients. So I think that the best way for us to have a strong feeling about whether the direction is correct is the open interest, because people who just trade, they don't create open interest.
So open interest is created if somebody have a position out in the future. And we, of course, know I mean, we know that we have open interest into 2017. So that's not trading activity. That's somebody who decide to have a position on this exchange. So I think we are comfortable that we are on the right track here.
When it comes to pricing, it's correct that we have not implemented pricing for a fee for trading yet, but it's going to happen soon. So in reality, within the next week or something like that, Dina, Robin and I are sitting down and making our decisions there. I think the direction we are looking at is that in products, where we have a sizable market share, then we will implement a fee. Of course, it will be discounted compared with the incumbent. But that's been the plan all the time that it should be cheaper because it's difficult to understand why the price should be $1.3 in average if we can have a very profitable business with $0.20 So it's going to come.
If you look at it with our calculations in reality, once we could have revenue from all products, we in reality only need a couple of 100,000 contracts a day to reach breakeven. So it's a very low point compared with that. There is 4 points from between $4,000,000 $4,500,000 trades a day. So you can calculate how small its market share we need to be breakeven once we have pricing in place.
All right. Let's go to Chris.
Question on U. S. Equities. Wondering if you guys could talk a little bit about what happened in the marketplace that's been supportive of the higher capture rates you guys are seeing there? And then, how sustainable do you think those capture rates are?
So could you repeat the first piece?
Yes. Just wondering what's going on in the marketplace that's been supportive of the higher capture rates you've been getting in U. S. Equities? I mean is it just that volumes are up a lot and that's been the driver?
Is it more complicated than that?
So, I mean, the way that I look at this business, we build it, we can build it for 4,000,000,000, 5,000,000,000, 6,000,000,000 shares a day. And hopefully, we do 20,000,000,000 shares a day. So the way we look at pricing is we try to attract adders. But what has really driven the capture rate is trading at the midpoint, because if you look at our pricing, which is public, it's not we're not paying a higher rebate for midpoint trades and you've capped on or removed at $0.30 So that volume at midpoint creates higher capture. And then the pricing changes that we made around the open and closing cross, which are largely driven as a primary market, your customers want to be part of that closing cross to get that closing print.
We made some changes there, which have driven capture. So now the question is, how do I play with that capture to modify behavior in tape A, B or C? So we trade NASDAQ listed tape B ETFs and NYSE listed stocks on one platform. So, how do we look at that and how do we shuffle capture around to take advantage of higher market share and where does it make sense to
do that? I won't do it
at the cost of revenues, but if I can take capture down a little bit and increase market share to be net where we're at, we'll do that. But it's very sustainable. That capture rate is very sustainable. It's a matter of what do we want to do, what do I want to do with tweaking other segments within the system. Does it make sense?
Let's take one more question here.
Thanks. I think for the last few years, I think the NASDAQ story has basically been around subscription and recurring revenue growth. But with Chi X and ISE, you obviously have shown that you're not shying away from building scale on the trading side again. So just wondering how big that appetite continues to be if you see a lot of other opportunities to scale up both through acquisitions and organic or potentially organically by new initiatives. And specifically, I'm wondering about European Equities.
You're actually with the Nordics still somewhat smaller player in Europe. And few years ago, you were very excited about MiFID 1 and those opportunities and those never materialized. So are there other opportunities with some of the more regional players that are out there or may become available that you would be excited about?
I think Bob would like to take that.
And transactional revenue. But I think we've said very consistently that we love the transaction business. When opportunities present itself, we'd avail ourselves of that. ISC in particular, CHIEX in particular, our marginal cost as you define at Horatio there is not very high. That's right down the bowling alley.
We'd always look to do those type of transactions. And that's not a statement negative to the recurring revenue. And obviously, it's interesting we've done 4 deals, 2 on the recurring revenue side, 2 on the transaction side. But it's also important to recognize on the transaction deals, that's why we were excited about it. When you look at Chai X, they have a substantial portion of their revenue coming from recurring, the same with ISC.
So it's always kind of a mixed bag. So we have a guidepost, but we're also going to be pragmatic within those general guideposts. So whether it's 70five-twenty 5 or 80-twenty or 60five-thirty 5, we're not going to get hung up on those numbers. We're going to take advantage of the proper opportunities as they present themselves at the appropriate times.
But one thing, which is not a secret is that there is one Nordic countries, which is not operated by NASDAQ. If I can mention one thing customers complain about every day, it is why do we need to have 2 infrastructures. If I can mention one thing customers complain about every day, it is why do we need to have 2 infrastructures to trade the Nordic markets? Why is one not enough? So the customer demand for us to acquire Oslo Burs, as they call them in English, is there.
But as long as they don't want to sell and especially when the biggest shareholders don't want to sell, we don't want to take that dogfight. So of course, we look for this, as Bob mentioned, but these opportunities need to be there before we can consider it. And the day the Norwegians are ready, then we will sit down and talk with them.
Thank you, Hans Ole. Thank you, Tom. Thank you, everyone. We will again have more questions at the end of the day. We'll also have the management mingle.
But for now, I think we should take a 15 minute break and look to restart at 10:35. All right. Thank you. Okay. Thank you, everyone.
Welcome back. We're going to continue on, on the Investor Day. And at this point, I'm going to welcome, Saleel Donde, our EVP in charge of Information Services. Saleel?
Good morning. Thank you very much for coming. And it is a privilege for me to be here with you to share with you my excitement about our Information Services business. Internally, we call it GIS. So if you hear me refer to it as GIS, they're 1 and the same thing.
But it's a very exciting business, and 2 of my colleagues are here as well, Dave Gideon and Jeff Kimsey. And you should feel free to walk up to them during the mingle and pick their brains about how we're doing and what we're doing. So really, the GIS business is about providing smart beta strategies and products that leverage our even smarter data. And what we do is we enable financial professionals, financial institutions, investors of all sizes, all the way from the largest one to the smallest retail investor, to gain actionable insights into investing, looking for alpha, looking for value and making good trading decisions. The story I'm going to share with you today is very simple.
And if there's only 3 things you're going to walk away with after my presentation today, they are the following. Number 1, we will continue to drive growth through innovation and technology. Number 2, the sandbox that we play in affords us ample opportunity for growth. And last but not the least, we will continue to be good stewards of the investor capital by delivering the type of cash that we have out of this business, the earnings and the total shareholder return. So come along with me as I share with you a little bit about this business.
So our growth in this business, as I said, has been driven out of innovation and technology and by leveraging what I refer to as our ecosystem. It's a very unique ecosystem that we play in. Our competition doesn't have the breadth and scale of this type of ecosystem. And we've nurtured this ecosystem over the last many, many years. And what this allows us to do is it lets us get very close to our customer, understand their needs and then come up with really responsive products that help them in their investment and trading decisions.
The mission critical and highly differentiated information and the intellectual property we provide is in high demand with our customers. And we have a global reach in our ecosystem ranging from the smallest investor to the smart beta ETF sponsors to banks to retail online brokers to asset managers, real money managers like insurance companies. And I can go on and on with the type of reach that we have. The way we go about it building this business, we have a very consultative sales process and a product development process. And Bob touched on early when he began about how we get close to our customers.
And we really take it very seriously. During the sales process and the product development process, we spend a lot of time with our customers understanding their workflow. We take a lot of time educating them about the proper use of our products and we get it integrated in their workflow. And guess what? Once your products are integrated in the workflow, they become very sticky and they stay with you for a long time.
So we spend a lot of time educating them on the use of our products. One other thing we do that's fairly unique is we work on different PR and marketing programs with our customers. And the objective here is to help them attract customers to their platforms. Now there's a pretty selfish motive here. By attracting them to their platforms, we're essentially driving customers to use our products that are on the platforms of our customers and distributors.
So we spend a lot of time upfront in driving marketing programs to attract customers there. So with over $500,000,000 worth of NASDAQ revenue coming out of the Information Services business, Our products are integrated. It makes it very sticky. And what that results in is retention rates in the high 90s, high 90% retention rates on all our products. Our unique data and index IP is in high demand.
And we leverage the elastic and the marquee NASDAQ brand. And a public association with the NASDAQ brand is in very high demand for our customers, Being associated with our products, being associated with our IP allows them to continue to scale their business. Some of our flagship products, starting with TotalView Basic, the NASDAQ 100, the OMXS 30, the NASDAQ Biotech products are specified by name. So there's a call out from the customer to build an index on it. There is a call out to use a specific product.
And again, drives for sticky products, drives for long term recurring revenue and higher shareholder return. So our business model is very resilient given the large geographic footprint that we have, the broad product portfolio that we have, the high margins that we get out of the business and the closeness that we enjoy with our customers, our business model is very, very resilient. And we talked a little bit about as we began today's session on technology. The leading technology that we offer to our customers allows us to come up with products very quickly. And you'll see a chart later on, on how we've driven growth by launching new products pretty consistently over the last many years.
And the technology then allows them to accept our products through the connections that they already enjoy with us directly or through the distributors that through whom they may take our products. So the net of all of this is it makes for a very solid information services business that drives good shareholder returns and keeps on growing. Let me share with you a little bit about our key accomplishments. 2015 was a terrific year for us. We spent a lot of time in ensuring that there was high value coming out of our products.
We spent a lot of time looking at our operations internally. And the 2 together is what resulted in the great results that we delivered for all of you in 2015. With the January 2015 acquisition of Dorsey Wright, and by the way, for those of you who don't know what Dorsey Wright is, they are the leading provider of smart beta strategies, models and indexes. And with that acquisition, NASDAQ became one of the leading smart beta providers anywhere around. Dorsey Wright has a very consistent track record of delivering high value models and strategies that use rules based, outcome based index development.
And with our proven competency with acquisition integration, Dorsey Wright was no exception. We did a good job at Dorsey Wright. And we leveraged our internal teams. We leveraged all our external ETF sponsors. And as a result, the assets under management on Dorsey Wright from the time we acquired them to the end of the year grew by 98%, pretty phenomenal growth in the assets under management.
And guess what, the revenue from the time we acquired Dorsey Wright grew by 50%. So we have delivered on the acquisition integration. We have leveraged the ability, the analytical abilities that Dorsey Wright brings to us and have delivered on that. We added 57 new exchange traded products, and we grew our assets under management by 21% in 2015. And as a result of all of that, as Bob mentioned earlier on, our assets under management now exceed $100,000,000,000 Actually, at the end of the year, they were at $114,000,000,000 Moving on a little bit to the data side of the business.
Our data team is very focused on delivering incremental value to our customers with new products to buy side firms, be they large individual investors. And we are very proud of our accomplishments. We had a 9% CAGR over the last 3 years from 2012, and we launched 11 new products last year on the data side of the business. Now there's a point to be made here. We don't willy nilly launch these products.
We take a lot of time. Some products are a hit, runaway hit. I'll talk about a couple of those. And some products do okay. But it's not in the quantity of the products that we launch, it's the number of successful products that we launch.
So to give you an example, last year with the launch of the e Speed Itch product, we added 50 customers to the e Speed Itch product line. That's a pretty big number given the timing of the launch and what we achieved with it. Last year in Asia, we signed on a significant number of data customers. I'll talk a little bit about what we're doing in Asia. And we launched the 2nd ETF on our indexes based on the Nasdaq 100 in China.
And here's an important point of note that makes us really unique. We are the only U. S. Provider that can provide a complete life cycle on the ETF side, ranging from product development, index creation to ETF listings, all on NASDAQ. And our ETF listings grew by 25% to 218 last year.
Let me now talk a little bit about the index business with over 40,000 indexes. I think it's 43,323 to be precise, indexes on multiple asset classes, multiple sectors in 29 different countries, we are delivering really innovative and compelling index solutions to our customers. We have a complete offering ranging from benchmark indexes to the most advanced smart beta indexes. And here, I need to share with you a little bit about our index strategy. And I need to go back almost 17 years to March of 1999, which is when we launched the Nasdaq 100.
As most of you know, NASDAQ 100 represents the most disruptive, most innovative, the fastest growing companies on the planet. And they have disrupted the landscape much like NASDAQ has in the financial services space. And the NASDAQ 100 is a tradable representation of all these great companies out there. It's an ecosystem by itself with the 3rd highest liquidity riding on that index. And we use that index as the tip of the spear for us to get it to different markets.
If you think about it, the ETF space today is largely focused in the United States. We have, what, 325,000,000 people here roughly. And if you think about it, 10 times that size of population in Europe, China and India today don't even use ETFs. So we are using the tip of the spear with the Nasdaq 100 to get into new markets, and we follow-up with our other great innovative products, such as the NASDAQ Biotech, the green economy, the dividend and income families, all marquee products in their own right and in the sectors that they serve. Let me now come on to the key element of our story here.
And that we think is in the smart beta space. Smart beta is formulaic outcome based indexes that drive to a certain desired outcome. It uses a lot of different models. It uses a lot of different strategies. And we are seeing a generational shift with people moving from active investing to passive investing.
And smart beta is the representation of people moving into ETFs and mutual funds, leveraging the rise in smart beta and passive investing. So the driving force for smart beta has been both the institutional side as well as the retail investors. And they're realizing significant gains as a result of this shift here. And with our technological strength and with our innovative abilities, we have the ability to very rapidly create these models, very rapidly test them and bring them out to market. For example, the First Trust, Dorsey Wright, Dynamic Focus 5 ETF that was launched based on our Focus 5 index rose up to $1,000,000,000 at a pace among the quickest in the industry.
And that's now pretty close to about $5,000,000,000 worth of AUM, the FV product. So here's an indication of our ability to take an idea, create models, create strategies and bring a product quickly out to market. And as a result of this, at NASDAQ, 40% of our AUM, the $114,000,000,000 AUM is today in smart beta. And that's 12% of the global smart beta AUM. And we are among the top 3 players with smart beta AUM.
That gives you a sense of the pace at which we're driving this business, very excited about the business. And we have a whole bunch of family, a whole bunch of different products, the dividend income product. And these are all market definers that we have. The DWA product line has a very passionate following among the financial advisor community. And that's because of the research that we provide and the web tools that we provide the financial advisors.
And we have been very successful in converting this research to actionable models and actionable strategies. So to sum it up, our growth on the index side comes from 3 areas: number 1, creating these exciting new product strategies and models number 2, cultivating the deep partnerships with our ETF sponsors and last but not the least, acquiring and leveraging market leading companies in the space and putting the NASDAQ sauce on the acquisition and taking it further. Our and as you can see from the slide here, 34% CAGR growth on our index business, and our revenues grew to $113,000,000 Let me now give you an inside look at our data products business. That's a pretty exciting chart to me here. If you look at how successful we've been on a consistent basis, taking an idea, converting it to a product, bringing it out and making it material to our results, Data drives about 80% of the information services revenue.
We have a product suite that spans all asset classes. We use the most resilient of technology. But the competition in this space is very fierce. And Tom indicated early on about the liquidity on the NASDAQ market and combining that with our trade reporting facility, the our market data represents over 45 percent of the total U. S.
Equities volume. Now here's what that means. We have the most cost effective and I would claim the best product for making a decision, for doing some research as you're placing a trade. There are times when you do need the data. And basic, which is a very, very innovative product we launched in 2009, meets that very need.
We have over 200,000 customers that use our basic product. And I'm proud to share with you that over the last few years, we have saved the industry over $100,000,000 as they use basic at times when they are not actually implementing a trading decision. Another one of our flagship products, TotalView, it is the market leader here. It provides full depth on the NASDAQ markets and gives you a good insight and transparency into different events that could happen on the market, IPO, openclose and so on. The Itch protocol has now become a market standard, and we continue to launch different products there using the Itch protocol.
And I can keep on going here, but in the interest of time, we have products that cover all geographies, all markets. We also recently launched our fixed income analytics product, a very exciting product here. It is a product that helps you understand the quality of the mortgage bonds. This was an analytic that was not available on the market thus far. We came up with that, and it looks at Dutch bonds and many other mortgage bonds.
So we are branching out and taking advantage of the data that we have and the analytics that we have. Let me start looking ahead here a little bit, and that really creates excitement in me. As some of you may know, I'm relatively new to NASDAQ, but I've been at this for a long time. And my background is primarily from the data and analytics space, robotics and machine learning. So as I start looking out into the future and the opportunity that the landscape presents to us, it's really very exciting.
So there is a generational shift underway that I have mentioned earlier on. And the scope and scale and the innovative ability that we have allows us to take advantage of the opportunities out there. So we fully expect smart beta to continue to grow, number 1. Global demand, we expect that to continue to grow. I talked about the dynamics between the ETF penetration in the U.
S. Versus the rest of the world. Machine intelligent techniques, Brad alluded to that earlier on. This is a very fascinating area where you can create and look at index compositions, index weights and components and let the machine go through a large amount of data and come up with that. There are areas where you can combine different data sets.
I don't know if you guys looked at the read the article in the Financial Times this morning about Wayfair, an online retailer and how looking at the app downloads and combining that with the reviews. So it's the combination of data that can really give you signal insights into what's happening. And so I see us looking at combining multiple data sets to continue to build new indexes for us. We are building out centers of mass, as I refer to them. So we are very responsive to our customer needs, the latest one being in Bangalore.
And we continue to partner with our sponsors. Here's something very notable. We pioneered the use of a single CUSIP portfolio. A single CUSIP portfolio is a combination is an ETF where you have multiple assets asset classes. So you have a strategic view on what assets one needs to be in or out of.
And below each of these assets are multiple sectors. And so you have a tactical element to that as well. And we've pioneered the use of a single QSiP portfolio, for example, with our FV product. And it's doing quite well. We see Asia as continuing to be a pretty significant growth driver for us.
And as and when automated investing starts becoming mainstream, we are ready for it. We already have a UMA platform that we can plug into many of the robo advisors or the automated investing players out there. Coming to some growth dynamics in the data space. There is certainly a lot of buzz around the fintechs and how they're about to disrupt the entire landscape in the financial services space. We are very active with the fintech players.
We are very supportive of these startups. And again, the motivation is very selfish. As we support them as they grow, so do we. And our data and our products are tightly embedded into their offerings. So we are very supportive of the fintech space.
And so where are we likely to go? We can certainly start with our own data, our gold source, our root data. We can look at how we can get incremental value out of our equities, options, some fixed income instruments. So the combination of data is likely to be a great growth area. And leverage that with machine learning to gain more insights, we think there is some runway there.
This is my favorite slide here. If you look at the returns that we have delivered to the shareholders over the last 3 years, on a FX adjusted basis, our CAGR has grown 9%. Without even adjusting the CAGR, it's still 9%. They both round out to 9%. So it's a pretty significant number.
Our EBITDA margins continue to grow and our revenues hit $523,000,000 on an FX adjusted basis. Over this same period of time, we did about $50,000,000 worth of acquisitions. And our total revenue grew $123,000,000 But interesting to note is off the $50,000,000 in acquisitions, 20% of that was actual organic growth from the time the acquisition was made. And with the higher recurring revenues and the margins and the solid revenue and EBITDA CAGR, we continue to deliver good shareholder returns. So in closing, I want to say that we have a very resilient business model.
The economies of scale that we have, the broad product portfolio that we have, the geography, the margins and the high-tech uptimes. As data volumes grow, the cost of managing that data grows. And therefore, the temptation to store vast amounts of useless data also grows. And the key then to get real insights is not how much data you store, rather how you interact with the data. And towards that end, over the last year or so, we've been working very hard on the NASDAQ data and analytics platform.
And this is a platform that allows not only the various businesses in NASDAQ to use the platform to avail of the data that's there, but it's a platform that allows us to massage, manage and use the data for our customers and deliver to them and use it for pretty sophisticated machine learning type applications. And we've got this going on in our GIS Innovation Lab. So I want to sum up by saying that we're excited to be here. We had a banner year last year. This year is a new year, but our commitment remains the same, which is to continue to drive growth through innovation and technology, collaborate with our customers.
And by doing that, we will continue to be good stewards to your money, to the capital you give us and deliver to you the great returns that we have thus far delivered. Thank you.
Thank you, Salil. Let's take a moment to take 1 or 2 questions on Information Services. Let's start over right over here. Ken?
Yes. I was just wondering, how big a focus pricing and reference data is for you guys right now in the market? Some of your competitors have been pretty active on the M and A front. Do you think you're missing some opportunities there? Or is there more out there that you guys are interested in right now?
Okay. So the question is on pricing and reference data. Pricing and reference data is certainly very important as you start getting into the fixed income space. But we think there is ample runway out there for us to avail of the different opportunities still out there.
Okay. If I could just follow-up. You have a follow-up.
Sure. So most of the data growth for you guys seems to be some of the industry data versus more of the proprietary data. I think you've historically grown pretty well. Just wondering like from a client perspective, are you seeing that some of the clients are fairly saturated as far as the new proprietary data that you can provide them?
Proprietary data versus industry consolidated data. Actually, our growth in our proprietary data has been faster than our the consolidated data segment. We continue to drive more and more products into our customers there. So as we come up with new products such as the fixed income analytics, we should continue. It's a mature market, but it's certainly not stagnant by any means.
Okay, great. Let's go to Vince.
What's the basis points fee you get on the Smart Beta ETFs? And going forward, as we see growth in that area, is that sustainable?
While I can't get into the specific number of the smart beta fee, it's pretty substantial. It's substantially higher than the fees most index providers get for their benchmark products. And the key here is not whether a certain area is going to have a sustainable amount of basis points. The key is how innovative you can be as we have been to be able to get new products out at the high basis points that we've been getting.
Okay, great. Thank you. Let's move on at this point. Thank you, Saleem.
Thank you.
And now we're going to do a quick video on Corporate Solutions. And then I'm going to turn to Stacy Swanstrom, our SVP and Head of Corporate Solutions.
We have a very broad base of clients. They rely on us as partner to meet their ambitions as either public or private companies. We look at the challenges that those companies have in communicating with their investors, managing their board. Have PR services that allow companies to look at how they communicate with the public. We also have director's desk, which is essentially a governance tool allowing the company to communicate with their Board, whether you're a small private company, all
the way up until you're
a very large public company. Our Investor Relations Services, for instance, they really are a holistic solution using technology and service to really meet all of their relations needs in a single interface. We are looking at how we can continue to evolve and develop in terms of the products that we offer to our clients. As they increase their ambition in life, we want to make sure we increase ours.
Hello, everyone. My name is Stacy Swanstrom. I'm the Head of Global Corporate Solutions. I've been at NASDAQ for 23 glorious years, most recently as the Head of Global Access Services for 6 years and then 9 months ago, I took the helm of Corporate Solutions. Let's see, going into the first slide.
So what is Corporate Solutions? Essentially, we're a business that helps our clients navigate the capital markets successfully. We think of our products in 2 verticals. The first is corporate intelligence and then corporate communications. Let me talk a little bit about those.
In our Corporate Intelligence vertical, we have 3 products, our new Investor Relations platform, which is IR Insight, which we're very excited that we launched back in January. We have our advisory services, which is a more consultive service obviously. And then our Board of Directors sorry, our Directors Desk Board portal, which allows secure collaboration. And our communications vertical, we have 3 main products. We host IR and PR websites to almost 3,700 clients.
We have a webcasting business and then we have PR Distribution and Media Intelligence. We serve 17,000 clients in Corporate Solutions, it just got much larger as a matter of fact. 10,000 of those are public companies. The rest are nonprofits, privates, agencies, things like that. Today, we sell point solutions in a very competitive market, but our portfolio is unmatched.
And so we're very excited about where we're going because we're looking to leverage that suite of services and integrate them into a single platform. That will also support our land and expand strategy. We are trusted by, I guess, let's see, all the major companies around the globe. We have most of the clients in the S and P 500 and we have the majority of the clients in the major European indices. So we're proud about that.
I mentioned before that we have 17,000 clients, which gives us size and scale. A few stats that's I think a testament to our resiliency, we do about 18,000 webcasts a year. We distribute 260,000 plus press releases a year. We host over 3,700 IR and PR websites to assist our IR clients with their compliance obligations. And we support over 50,000 board portal users.
So we host their clients' most sensitive information. So what is our vision here? Our vision is simple, a single integrated platform to serve the needs of our clients. This will create a shift from the Spirit workflows that exist today and create interconnected collaboration across our clients. And as you can see, these are the clients that we serve here in the middle.
All of this will drive operational efficiencies and growth for Corporate Solutions. We've been a technology leader here at NASDAQ for 40 years. I've witnessed over half of it. And I have to say, this is a very exciting place to be. We're really just at the beginning our journey here.
And with the assets that we own and the clients that we have, it presents tremendous opportunity for us here. Hold please. All right, great. So as I mentioned earlier, I'm pleased to report that we launched our IR Insight Investor Relations platform in mid January. That will serve as our foundation in GCS for our integration strategy.
We're only 70 days in to our migration and I'm proud to report that we've already upgraded over 600 clients and 1,000 users. We're hoping to have the migration done by November, I believe. And as you can see by a few of the quotes of the clients, we're off to a very good start here. So there's a lot of enthusiastic feedback from them. The platform was built in close collaboration with our clients.
As a matter of fact, it was client led design. We have I have one of my colleagues here today. I have a few of my colleagues here, but one specifically that runs our product management and our UI team. So if you have time to swing by and take a look at the product today, we'd love to show you. We'll leverage this UI and the core of the platform actually to build in our other products.
So if that wasn't enough, in February, we announced and closed our Marketwired acquisition. This is exciting for us. It's Marketwired is a Canadian company. It's essentially a press distribution and social analytics company. So this bolsters our public relations business and it's one of GCS's fastest growing and highest margin businesses.
So we're excited about what we're doing there. What's our strategic rationale? Plain and simple. They have 8,500 clients, primarily in Canada, but also in the U. S.
There's little overlap with our clients. So this gives us the size and scale that we like for this business. The additional 7,000 clients gives us a big opportunity obviously to cross sell into. So this is good for us. It also moves us away from a traditional media press distribution company into more of a press distribution, social distribution and analytics company.
So I think that this is going to be a great addition to our portfolio. So, we launched Ira Insight in January. We announced and closed Marketwired in February. And a few weeks ago, we also announced our intent to buy BoardVantage, which is the 2nd largest board portal and leadership collaboration tool in that sector. What was our strategic rationale here?
Plain and simple. Again, it's got a solid client base. They have approximately 1900 clients, about 80,000 users. So in addition to our 1500 clients and our 50,000 users, that gives us a very interesting sort of scale in that business. It's also a subscription business.
It's got very high retention rates and so we like that. And it also will give us organic double digit growth, which is really nice. So these are all scalable SaaS businesses that are high in margin and the synergies will allow Corporate Solutions to expand our margins. So good stuff there. So what are we doing in terms of platforms and product integration?
Corporate Solution was built on acquisition and organic investment. If you can imagine this slide was actually a little bit uglier, but we tried to simplify it a bit. As you can see, we've made a bit of progress in the last 2 years, but we have a little bit to go in terms of creating our single platform for all of our suite of services. And when we acquired TR, their IR, PR and multimedia assets back in 2013, that kind of started our journey in terms of this platform consolidation. So we've gotten rid of a few platforms and we're moving in the direction to make sure that we do go to a single consolidated platform.
All right. So besides focusing on product innovation and acquisitions and platform consolidation, we've also been working very hard on our client experience and our service. We've made dramatic improvements to our service and our operations area. For 1, we hired a head, a new head back in August of our services and operations area, Greg Liffer. He's got vast experience in terms of setting up global teams and running global service and operation teams.
So we're really happy about that. We've made strategic investments also to expand our footprint globally in terms of getting more effective and cost efficient resources to follow the sun and support our clients. And we've also created an account management function, which essentially helps us manage our clients better, our relationship with them, also gives us the ability to upsell and to address any needs that they have. We've also built a new lead to cash system that's been in the last couple of years where we've transitioned our 6,500 clients that we got from Thomson Reuters out of their billing system into ours as well as our G and W transition. And last but not least, we also have added some automation.
We'll continue to do that to improve workflows and reduce errors. So what's the future of GCS? Simply put, we have a number of initiatives here as you've seen to drive organic growth and margin expansion. We'll be shifting the businesses towards our higher growth, higher margin sectors. So you can see by the 2 acquisitions that kind of supports that move.
And we'll also continue to invest in our product innovation, our service evolution, our product consolidation and platform consolidation, so that we can drive scale and efficiency. And I think overall operational simplification is also part of what we want to accomplish here. All right. In terms of revenue growth since 2012, it's driven predominantly by the 2013 acquisition of Thomson Reuters. There are, as I mentioned earlier, IRPR and multimedia assets.
The organic growth has essentially been flat to slightly down as we've scaled back our distribution of a few product lines. We've also done a big integration and we've done a number of migrations. However, our EBITDA and margin contribution has grown since 2012. But let's talk about 2016 a little bit. While we have some headwinds in our uncontrollable retention, which is the M and A and the bankruptcies, our web hosting sales in the energy sector, I think there's a lot of really positive things happening.
Our retention is up significantly, particularly our controllable retention year over year. So that's moving in the right direction. We've been working hard on the top line. However, likely we'll see that uptick later in the year. And our product roadmap and the integration of the 2 announced acquisitions should propel us to even higher margins over the next 18 months to 24 months.
So in closing, I just want to say our focus is on innovation and simplification of our business, platforms and processes to drive profitable growth here. We're investing in the businesses and doubling down in our 2 highest growth higher margin businesses, the PR and the director's desk or board portal space and we're leading the sector in innovation with IR and PR. We have an unparalleled portfolio of products and we're not afraid to use them. And that's it.
Stacy, thank you. I think we should take a couple of questions here. I'm also going to invite Adena up here because Adena has been spending a huge amount of her time since returning to NASDAQ on this sector as well. And with that, let's see if there's any questions for Corporate Solutions. Let's go first to Chris over here.
So the 2 recent acquisitions you guys are executing on here, should we be thinking about those businesses as fully additive to your existing portfolio of services? It just seems like there's a little bit of overlap with what these businesses do versus your legacy business?
Can you just bear with me? Okay. They're definitely additive in terms of what we're doing. The customers, we will be expanding our customer base, as I said before. In the PR business, we had 3,500 clients.
We're now adding 8,500 with very little overlap. In the Board Vantage side, we haven't actually done the exact customer overlap, so I can't tell you there. But it does take us into the leadership spot there on the Board portal and leadership space.
Thanks. So you're a market leader in a number of the businesses within the Corporate Solutions segment. And now that you're through some of the platform integration and the retention rates have stabilized, can you talk about the pricing power that you have across your businesses? Thanks.
Well, within our contracts, we have the ability to do periodic price increases and we did do but there's modest price increases the context of the contracts we have with our clients. And we did implement a price increase at the beginning of this year on a modest level across our product base. We make a decision about that every year to make a determination how are we adding value to their offerings, are we giving more to our clients that then justifies the ability for us to make that decision? But this year, because of the launch of IR Insight and the G and W new platform, as well as continued integration or implementation innovation in our Board portal space, we felt that it was appropriate for us to do some price increases within the product set.
Thanks, Kyle. Let's go over here to Rich.
When you said that the top line, you'd expect to see that later in 2016. I'm just trying to see what's the catalyst. Is that penetration of the or conversion to the new IR insight plan? What's going to what puts that off into later in 2016 that gets it?
Well, essentially, we're in the middle of some big migrations here and some integrations. And so I think there's a challenge of a shakeout when you're in the middle of something that big. So unfortunately, I think the sales are coming in strong. We have some challenges in some businesses, I mentioned, in our MMS business that we're working on. But essentially, that will push out sort of the revenue into later in the year.
Yes. I also think that we're continuing to work on enhancing our retention. So she said that we've had very strong improvement in the retention in our client base, and we in addition In addition to completing these very large migration activities, we feel very good about the fact that, that stronger retention, a better platform to be able to sell should first start to propel growth across the IR sector. And then in the PR side with Global Newswire continues to grow very nicely, but with the integration of Marketwire, that obviously should catalyze further growth in the business as well.
One more question from Ashley.
As you think about your Corporate Solutions product suite, you've done a lot over the last few years. You did more this year. You built scale into a few higher margin businesses. What's missing today? And what are you hoping to achieve, say, 3 years to underline?
Sure. I think there's a lot of opportunity, as I said, in this business. It's one of the most exciting businesses at NASDAQ. That's why I'm here. But I think that there's an opportunity here to introduce some of the things that Brad's talked about.
When you talk about scale, our business really benefit from some of the technologies that he was discussing. It really takes it to a whole another level in terms of where we can go with our advisory business and some of our other businesses that leverage data. So in the next 3 years, this will be a much more scalable business. It already is. And so that's, I think, where our opportunities are on the technology side.
Okay. Thank you. I want to remind everyone at the management mingle, this is a great example of something where we're going to have a lot of incremental opportunities for you guys. Not only will our executives be around to talk, but some of their chief operating managers, for example, people that develop the IR Insight software. We'll also have demos of those software available for you guys to explore.
With that, we are going to move on to the Market Technology segment. And I'm going to show you I have one last video to use. I'm going to show you that video about market technology. And then Lars Ottersgaard, our EVP and Head of Market Technology is going to talk to you.
Nasdaq is a technology based company. Those businesses that we're in have a unifying theme that they're built upon our technology. It's important
not just the software code, it's all
the best practices that have been It's not just the software code, it's all the best practices that have been developed on a global basis that they get to integrate into their operations. Horsa Istanbul is a leading example of how through the provision of our technology, our software services, our consulting, we can help develop this market in a faster fashion than might have been possible otherwise. We certainly know the technology and the advances in technology will give us great opportunity to be in lockstep with our customers in decades to come.
Hi there. My name is Lars Otersgaard, and I'm Head of the Market Technology Division. I joined OMX back in 2006, and then we were acquired by NASDAQ in 2,008, and it's been a fantastic journey ever since then. First of all, what are market technology? Market technology really consists of 3 different business units.
The first one is where we provide technology exchanges, clearinghouses, CSDs, but also regulators, so marketplaces all over the world. This is an area where we undisputedly are the number one provider of standard solutions into the market. The second area is the broker space where we come with risk and compliance surveillance technology. For the surveillance side, we are the number one provider of solutions into this space too. 3rd area is that we actually now entered into corporate also.
Expanding on our risk, our position with risk and surveillance, we go into the governance risk and compliance area. So we don't know exactly how to define this area. So it's hard for us to judge whether we are number 1, 2 or 3. But we say that we are among the top 3 of the enterprise governance, risk and compliance solution providers in the market. Being in our business, being the world leading provider of solutions and know how into this industry is a responsibility you have.
And your trust is a responsibility from your clients. Today, we actually operate, as Bob mentioned in the beginning, more than 110 markets are using our technology, 27 of them being our internal markets, but 84 markets are using our technology externally. We have the strongest and most proven track record of delivering technology into these marketplaces. We have done 100, 100 of open heart surgery implementation in mission critical operations globally, and we do it in time and on budget, and we're proving it time after time. But it's not only about delivering the technology.
It is about being the long term partner to your clients. So we're supporting our clients 20 fourseven from centralized support centers, but also from local customer client teams in more than 10 locations all over the world. No one else can match that way of operating in our industry. 1 of our key mantras is that we sell what we use, and we use what we sell. And this is important for two reasons for us and for our clients.
First of all, we are sometimes a competitor to our own clients. And if we were to at any time be suspected to not providing the best possible technology we can build, we could lose that trust. And this business is about trust. The other thing is that we develop our technology, it becomes scale impact and cheaper to develop it from our internal markets, but also our internal markets can gain from all the development we're doing together with clients worldwide. We also have an advisory business.
We have a small team where we provide know how and experiences that we have gained being a big player in this industry into the marketplaces all over the world. We don't have a Boston Consulting Group or Anderson Consulting Group. We have a few project leaders, and we take experts from all of my colleagues' departments, and we bring those professionals into our clients that know this business being a part of this business. That is unique as a technology provider. If we look at how we have grown the business, we started when NASDAQ acquired us back in 2008.
Our mix was strong, the number one player in the mission critical transaction chain of exchanges and clearinghouses and cities. So it was a core transaction, and that was what we had. Since then, we have expanded our business, adding new functionalities to be in full end to end provider to this space. It has also given us the new areas that I just mentioned on the first page. By acquiring Smart, we not only did get the surveillance capability, but we also got into the broker space with the compliance abilities we had there.
We then acquired F10 TradeGuard and we got the pre trade risk management capabilities, both for marketplaces as well as for the broker space. We acquired Sentinel, giving us the post trade risk management capabilities that I would argue is we're leading today. Further on, building on our position as strong in the risk and compliance space, we acquired BWise back in 2012 and therefore also now enter into the corporate markets. These new business areas has given us contracts that has a backlog, backlog meaning the value of our contracts yet to be recognized as revenue in the future, that in the end of 2015 was $166,000,000 up from 0 in 2,008. So it's quite a good business that has been built.
Very recently this year, as Brad mentioned earlier, we also entered into an exclusive and global partnership with the reasoning on e comms or holistic surveillance. I will come back to that later. So I think this is one of the most exciting opportunities to have in front of us. If I look at it through the 3 different units, I will try to explain how we try to grow our business in those areas. Our core technology, our core market, the exchanges, clearinghouses and CSDs, that had a highly modular business model or technology.
We have now, in principle, every function end to end that you need to run and operate markets. What we have done is that we've taken our own in house developed software, we've taken our acquired software, and we're putting them on one and same fundamental architecture and technology. We call it NASDAQ Core. We could call it, as Bob suggested, an operating system for financial markets. Let's use the NASDAQ Core.
It is more than a buzz. It is a framework to where all our business applications are leveraging and working on. This gives us a base for our strategy of where chains spread out. Whatever application you select, if you take the core and a settlement engine, you take the core and a risk management solution, it gives us a footprint into that client from where it's beneficial both from the client and for us to then take the next function from us, the next business application and grow our business by this spread out strategy. Some example of that, you see here with Bolsa de Valores de Colombia, they are in the early stage of this process.
They have the trading engine. We have discussions on other areas, but so far, they are in the initial steps. Hong Kong Exchange, they have gone further. They started with trading, clearing, then they added pre trade risk management and surveillance, and they're growing the number of applications that we are providing to them in the top rated markets. As you saw in the video, Borrze Istanbul is probably the sweet spot example of what we try to achieve with all our clients in this industry.
They use in principle everything we can offer, trading, clearing, settlement, in this calculation, market data, you name it, surveillance, everything. But not only that, they have also engaged with us in hundreds of mandates of business consulting where we help to develop their abilities in the market. So we are a true partner to them, much more than just technology, and that was a real differentiator to win that technology deal in the 1st place. 2 years ago, when I had the opportunity to talk to you about Market Tech last time, we said that post trade will be a growing segment for our market. That is true now.
The post trade area has experienced a lot of changes, meaning a lot of new needs in technology. This is mainly driven by all the changes of regulations where the markets are being pressured to be stronger on risk management. We also see how gradually more and more products are being pushed into centralized clearing. We also see how markets are open up for competition. As late as yesterday, the Australian government took away the monopoly from ASX in this space, a monopoly they had ever since they started their business.
Many of those clients sit on old technology, monolithic technology, including cash, CCP, settlements, etcetera, in one monolith. They're not flexible. They're not agile. They're not modularized. They need to be faster, quicker, cheaper to survive in this more competitive market space, meaning they need new technology.
We can provide it. We have the world leading cash and derivatives CCP technology. We have the world leading risk management technology, but we also have a full CEC offering. We think we're very, very strongly positioned to get this market opportunity into our hands. And our pipeline, the value of the deals that we're working on has grown in this space.
So now the post trade opportunities represent 33% of all my opportunities, and it's growing as we speak. If I look at the core technology only, the exchanges, clearinghouses and CSDs, it actually represents 52% of my opportunity base. So it's a huge and growing area. But that's where blockchain comes into play. Blockchain is something that has captured the interest in all over the world.
All my clients talk about blockchain, irrespective if they are a small company in Africa or Hong Kong. Everybody is excited about this. So what does it mean? Well, for me, that's trying to take what Brad so nicely are building and put it into the business, it's difficult to say. There is no killer application.
There is not one solution that ever says, yes, that's what blockchain will solve. That's the problem, the one and only. All my clients come from very different backgrounds, very different market structures, very different regulatory situations. So very different backgrounds, very different market structures, very different regulatory situations. So what we need to do is to be able to work with our clients, help them develop the blockchain capability and be part of the journey with them, lead them and support them.
Our way of doing that is that if you go back to the first picture, the core that we developed, the fundamental operating system for capital markets that all our solutions are being placed on have been blockchain enabled. We built an interface between that core and the blockchain support or structure. It supports any protocol, so it's not proprietary for our best partner, Chain. It could be any other provider of blockchain. And we then allow them to implement this in a 3 stepped approach.
In the simplest form, you can see blockchain being just a database like a flat file or a relational database or anything else. You can implement blockchain, use it totally in house without changing any of the APIs and interfaces to your client, without having to have any permission from any regulator because it's just the technology inside your own operation. This will allow you to start to enable your applications, the business applications to use blockchain, but it will also give you the opportunity to learn where blockchain really can be the disruptive technology that we all think it will be. It will be different in different markets. The second step, if you have the blockchain, you have your applications running on the blockchain, we will help them and we can enable them to start to open this blockchain's database to users' members, even the regulators, banks, brokers, other clearinghouses because we do believe this is a post trade area for the moment.
When you do that, you can guarantee that everybody will see exactly the same data, totally validated at exactly the same time. There is no confusion in the market. Reconciliation needed or no errors to fix. Everybody will have access to the right data at the right time. The 3rd step in this is then obviously to when you have all your members, you have all your participants connected to your blockchain network, data structure, distributor ledger, you can then allow transactions to be handled over this.
That's when you have the full benefit of the blockchain. But what we can do with our technology is not only giving them that last stage, we can be part of the journey and gradually help our clients mature in this space. The good thing it is, is not only that we can help them with blockchain, but it's that our current technology, where still the majority of the pipeline we're talking about is focused, is future proofed. This is a key differentiator when we sell our technology to the clients today, buy our current technology, get the blockchain enabled, and you don't end up in a dead end or in the wrong technology as you go forward. So this is another very exciting implementation of very new technology.
If I move on to the Bruker space, especially this March, that's a success story I'm very proud of. Back in 2010, when we acquired SMarch, it was a surveillance tool for equity markets. About 50 markets were enabled, and we had about 130 subscriptions in the world. End of 2015, we had more than 110 markets enabled and more than 10 60 subscriptions. This has given us a 19% CAGR since the acquisition.
The way we have done it is that we have made the product multi asset class. So it's gone from a cash equity trading surveillance tool to any asset class more or less. What we do now is we're enabling for new areas. We are putting functionality in to help buy side firms to leverage the same technology. We have 3 clients, I cannot name anyone, already signed up and working with us to make this solution perfect.
This is a market opportunity of about $600,000,000 according to our analysis. We're also putting it into the trade supervision, the front office, but they now want to have a tool similar to what you already have in the compliance departments. We continue to develop new user interfaces, more advanced alerts. So the product is evolving. But the most exciting part, and again, coming back to Brad, is what we're doing with digital reasoning.
We are taking our world leading solution for trade surveillance and structured data and combining it with Digital Reasoning's unstructured e Comms capabilities. Ecoms meaning they can read mails, imessages and even go into voice. If you combine what you see in the trades and you combine it what you see what's happening with mails, etcetera, you will have a very, very strong fully holistic surveillance tool. Our value actually comes from day 1 of this agreement. It's a global exclusive agreement with digital reselling in the space of financial markets and for surveillance.
It's 2 products today. They come in with their product. We have our product. We can sell them together and start to give our clients value from day 1, but our ambition is much higher than that. We're starting a development work together to make one fully integrated solution with 1 user interface, giving a true holistic solution to provide to the marketplace.
We will also use this technology and the machine intelligence to make alerts smarter. It will help us to identify the difference between a true positive and a false positive. It will give us tools that will also speed up investigations and make proof stronger when you have to take someone into court, I guess. So this is a very, very strong offering. We think it moves our clients beyond regulations also because regulations is really about monitoring the trades, etcetera.
With this, they can find abuse and hopefully stop it before anything any wrongdoing is done and avoid penalties and fees, etcetera. The 3rd area, the governance, risk and compliance, where we have the solution BWise acquired back in 2012. That has also been a very strong story. We have a CAGR of 26% since the acquisition in 2012. We have in 6 consecutive years been ranked as the upper quadrant in Gartner and Forrester's Boston Matrices in this space.
There are 2 axes on this. 1 is the strategy and vision and the ability of the product where we're ranked in the top, not the number 1, but in a well positioned place. The other axis is actually the ability to execute and bring value to your clients, where we're ranked number 1. And that's I'm particularly proud of because that's what it all comes down to in the end, value to the clients. It's a very highly fragmented market.
So it's a $5,000,000,000 market at ERC Space, highly fragmented. There is no one vendor today that have 100% of the market covered. We have the same strategy with BWise, as I mentioned, for our core technology. The wedge seems spread out. We have the ambition to be full enterprise GRC solution.
But what we need to do to really grow this is to not only be the full enterprise wide enterprise GRC solution, but actually be top in each of the different segments. This to earn money in each segment on its own merit, but also working as entry points for the wedge in spread out strategy that we have also in the BWise area. Today, our solution is mainly operating in enterprise risk, operational risk and audit management. It's a business worth $1,000,000,000 in the market opportunity. But where we are entering into this information security or ITGRC, a market with worth $300,000,000 growing 15% per annum.
We are also entering into the 3rd party management space, dollars 100,000,000 opportunity with a growth of 20% or more per annum, and we are going into policy management. We have solution in those areas, but what we do is we're investing to make the solutions not just good enough in an enterprise model, but world class on its own merits. This will give us new business opportunities and new entry points for our wedging spread out strategy with BWise. I try to summarize the 3 areas, what is common with them. First of all, we always tend to be an end to end provider in the areas that we're addressing, and we only seek to be number 1 where we go in.
I would argue we already succeeded in the core exchange and clearing space, and we need to work hard to maintain that position. We are there in the surveillance space, and we're aiming for that in the GSE space. A very important part, if I didn't mention it in my speech, was our ambition to always be partner to our clients. This is about long term relationships. We have clients that has been with us for many, many years, more than 20 years.
And you trust that partnership, but you also then have to act every day believing that it's the right way to treat your clients. Their business is your business. And we also need always to be in the forefront of new innovations. We can never shy away from new technology or even disruptive technology. We need to embrace it.
We need to take the leadership as a show with the machine intelligence and the blockchain technology. We can never be the victim of disruptive technology by being complacent and not going after this. So these are the 3 key areas for us. We aim to be end to end providers, always putting the client in the forefront, and we have to be embracing everything of the new technologies coming up. So a little bit about our business model.
It's very resilient. As I mentioned, the backlog, the value of all the contracts we have signed yet to be recognized as revenue has grown in the last 3 years with $100,000,000 to at the end of 2015 be $788,000,000 The mix in this is 92% of the revenue is subscription or recurring revenue. Under that number is an even more interesting number. In 2012, 7% of this revenue was subscription based. End of 2015, 21% of this revenue was subscription based.
The difference for me between subscription and recurring is that the majority of our subscription revenue is SaaS Business, Software as a Service. This is highly scalable and highly profitable as you grow. So growing that part of your revenue mix is a good way of improving your margins. Our revenue, we've grown from $224,000,000 to $287,000,000 if you look at the constant currency. Unfortunately, my business is fully international, and therefore, I'm hit by the stronger dollar.
But with the constant currency from 2012, we would have a 9% CAGR since in the 3 years. Our EBITDA margin, and now not having constant currency, but the real margin, has grown from $33,000,000 to $70,000,000 We have almost doubled the margin in percentage from 15% to 29%. So we have a very strong business model. We have a scalable business model, and we have a very strong position in the market. I don't think I'm allowed to give any forward looking statements, but I would be disappointed if I saw this trend be totally disrupted as we go forward.
I think we're looking for a nice year in 2016 beyond. So finally, I think the closing word for me is the client is number 1. That is what drives us. The passion for the client and making their business a success, then our business will be a success. And with the help of Brad, we will be in the forefront of technology.
Thank you. Thank you, Lars.
Now let's open it up to see if there's any questions about market technology. It looks like you've answered every question.
I guess we have a kind one.
Thank you, Rich.
With the blockchain, I know one of the high profile, I guess, clients has been ASX. And can you just walk through what the application is with ASX? And like what type of revenue opportunity is that?
Probably not. First of all, yes, to put this right, ASX has signed a contract with us to implement our core technology for all clearing across all asset classes as we speak. So they're going to implement our technology. Then they are looking at blockchain definitely, and they've been very vocal about it. But I have to say it's not clear.
I think they struggle to find how to easily implement blockchain and what impact it will have. So I actually can't answer your question. I think that is one of the reasons that our strategy of blockchain, we don't have the answer. We don't say this is the killer app. This is the solution for blockchain.
But we have the answer on walk with us, be with us, and we make sure that wherever you go, we will be able to implement the right solution. Brad, please.
Yes. Another thing on there's a lot of talk about the core Bitcoin blockchain, the public. So we are both and it was just out today that we are not today, this week that we're one of the companies that's funding the core developers that are affiliated with MIT. So we think that it's good for that public blockchain to scale. It's only doing about less than 200,000 transactions a day.
So that clearly won't do anything for major payments, P2P payments, or even the volumes in the stock market. What we've done internally is we've been able to scale our own to handle all of our daily transactions within the U. S. Market. So one of the things that our contribution is going to be to a blockchain service that actually can scale well beyond the current experiment that's out there with Bitcoin.
So we're and that's where we absolutely strive and have the best expertise for scaling high performance systems. So that's something that what Lars is talking about, our Bitcoin service will actually be able to handle the volumes that you see on major exchanges.
Thank you. And maybe right behind you, we'll give the mic to Ashley.
If I look at the opportunity that you outlined for B Wise expanding coverage and we sum it up, it's $1,500,000,000 overall market opportunity. I guess you build the firm to be number 1 in everything. So do you think you can do this all by yourself organically? Or do you think you'll look to supplement some of your organic efforts with M and A over the next few years?
I think Bob answered it the same this is the same answer. We grow organically. We are investing, as you saw in the ITGSE space. We are investing in the policy management, 3rd party management. That is all organically.
So yes, we are making a lot of organic investment into the solution. But if the right opportunity comes for the right solution that will help us reach our number one aspirations, I don't think we shy away from it. I just have to convince my managers.
Yes. So in the gift So we're certainly going to do organic. But as Lars says correctly that if the right opportunity came along, we'd certainly consider it.
Okay. Thank you, everyone. Thank you, Lars.
Thank you.
Okay. With that, let's move on to the finance section. I want to welcome Ron Hasson, SVP, our Controller and our Interim CFO.
So as the accountant in this group, believe me, there won't be any videos in my section. So I've been at NASDAQ now for 14 years. I came here as the Corporate Controller. And when I came to Nasdaq a little feedback. When I came to NASDAQ, NASDAQ was just a U.
S. Cash equity business in a listing venue. Over those 14 years, NASDAQ went through a major transformation, and I was very happy to be part of that. So I'm going to talk a little bit about the story now. So I took this slide actually from Adena.
And what I'm going to discuss today is I'm going to use this more of an index. I'm going to discuss the high recurring revenue. I have a couple of slides on that. And talk about the organic growth of our businesses. Talking about also talk about the operating leverage and a strong cash conversion that the company has.
And then the last item I'll be talking about the effective capital deployment. So as we move to the first slide, as you could see here, we have a high quality business model. And this is quite unique in terms of exchanges. When you look at our revenue, we have recurring revenue of 75%, which is obviously quite high. And where it really comes from, it comes from the Tech Solution business primarily, and also comes from the information service business and the listing business.
Also in terms of market services, our access business also is part of recurring revenue. And what I did here for you is I did a pro form a to provide you with some insight about when we do close the 4 transactions, what the recurring revenue would be after those transactions are fully integrated and the synergies are actually realized. And as you can see there, the recurring revenue would be 72% versus where we are today at 75%. In terms of organic growth, as you could see, since 2012 to 2015, the organic growth for our non transaction segments has grown from 4% to 6%. In fact, in 2015, the organic growth actually grew 6%.
Market services should not be ignored here. As you can see, in 2014, the organic growth for market services increased 2%, and in 2015, it has grown 3%, and in 2016, we're off to a very good start. So and then just going back to non transaction segments, as you could see, we believe in the future that this business will actually grow mid single digits. However, we're not looking at a quarter over quarter basis or a year on year basis. Moving over to our recent acquisitions.
I wanted as Tom and Stacy spoke about earlier, with these acquisitions, we are going to drive the margin up. In Market Services, you'll see that our margin will grow by 200 basis points. And Technology Solutions, as a result of these acquisitions, will also grow by 200 basis points. And total NASDAQ will actually grow by 170 basis points as a result of these 4 acquisitions that we just recently announced. In terms of cash flow, as you can see going back from 2010 to 2015, it is pretty consistent growth in terms of that.
We also put in here the pro form a for those 4 acquisitions. And you can see that the cash flow actually grew by some $60,000,000 as a result of that once we're fully integrated and all synergies in fact are realized at that point in time. In terms of leverage ratio, I think we've told you this before that our target is always to be 2.5 times in terms of the leverage ratio. However, periodically, when we do acquisitions, as we did in Thomson Reuters deal in 2,000 and E Speed in 2013, we our leverage ratio went to 3x. And then we focus on deleveraging.
And as you can see, during that period of time, within the 18 to 24 months, we actually deleveraged back to the mid-two times level. This is also going to happen in the second half of twenty sixteen when we actually close ISE, in which our leverage ratio will go up to over 3 times. And we will also now focus on deleveraging right after that as well. And we believe within the next 18 to 24 months after closing, we'll be back to the mid two time range. Creating value through capital deployment.
This is we are here at NASDAQ, a return on investment capital focused. Whether we do internal investments or whether we do share repurchases or acquisitions, we insist on any of those investments to be exceed our cost of capital. So therefore, the return on capital always has to exceed cost of capital, and that is a primary focus we have before we do any of those initiatives. Here is some financial detail regarding the 4 transactions that we recently announced. I'll just go over to a combined column here where we talk about the purchase price.
All four deals will cost us $1,500,000,000 Revenues for 2015 for these 4 acquisitions were 265,000,000 dollars expenses were $162,000,000 We're projecting to have cost synergies of $60,000,000 in which we believe we will be able to realize within 18 months post closing. And as we said earlier, these four deals will be accretive to our earnings by $0.37 And if you look at comparing it to 2015, that is roughly 11% increase from our 2015 numbers. In terms of capital deployment, since 2010, we have returned $2,100,000,000 back to our shareholders through dividends and buybacks. As you noticed today, we made an announcement on our dividends. So in the near future here, our dividend and buyback mix will shift a little bit.
We will have more dividends versus buybacks. I would say more, I would say the mix will be, should I say more evenly in terms of dividends versus buybacks. As I mentioned just a second ago, we did in fact announced our dividend increase. We increased our dividend by 28% or $0.32 Or if you want to look at it on an annualized basis, it's 1 point 2 8 dollars The payout ratio is at 37%, and the yield is approximately 2%. That is in line with the S and P 500 Companies.
In terms of effective capital deployment, this is a quite interesting slide. Since 2010, we have bought back 66,000,000 shares for a total cost to NASDAQ of $1,700,000,000 If we took those 66,000,000 shares today, the value is $4,200,000,000 That is a return of 23% IRR from 2010 to 2015, a great return. Okay. In terms of double digit total shareholder return, in summary, we have a high recurring revenue, consistent organic growth, strong cash conversion, as I just spoke about and effective capital deployment, which gives us a great opportunity to produce double digit shareholders' return. Thanks.
Okay. Thank you, Rob. We're going to save questions for our CFO to the end of our presentation along with our CEO and COO. For now though, I'm going to invite Bob up to just give some closing comments.
With yourself. Okay.
So who here is a baseball fan? I got a couple of hands, right? A couple of hands, right? So what was the best team of all time in baseball? The 1927 Yankees, right?
And what did they call their lineup? Rich, you might know. Murderers Row, right? Now I believe I believe we have the murderers row of management teams here, right? Can we give that management team a round of applause here?
What a good presentation. Now it could be an active debate who's Babe Ruth and who's Lou Gehrig, who's Bob Musil, you guys can debate that or I guess that's my job to figure that out. But let's just do a quick review of what was covered and very quick. So certainly Brad did a wonderful job. And the message I want to leave with you is we're an applied technology company, right?
We are wired into the valley. We're wired into other force sites of innovation. And our job is to know that technology and apply it in financial services as rapidly as we can. We're definitely going to do that. When we move forward to the listing business, this wants to be a common theme.
We have a solid core, right? The public company listing market, we have a solid core. We have increasing momentum, but we're also aspirational. We're aspirational with NTM as a private market. And Nelson touched upon what we're trying to do in basically any alternative assay class.
And I love to have that balance in the business, right? Managing the day to day, managing the core, but also have that exciting visionary aspirational aspect to it. And we have that similar situation when we think about the transaction businesses, right? So we have very strong positions. You see IFC going straight down our bowling alley.
You see CHIX going straight down our bowling alley going to provide a very strong return to our investors. We also have aspirational aspects involved with that business also. Clearly, the NFX progress is beyond my expectation at this stage. It's only been live 8 months, I think, 7 or 8 months to have that amount of open interest and being doing 100,000 contracts a day is phenomenal. We certainly think with respect to Enel X, the commotion with the deal will help us and we're certainly focused on moving open interest.
Moving forward to S'il's business, the most solid core probably in all of NASDAQ, right? The cash generation from the index and data business is truly outstanding. But we're not there just to be the steward of that business. And I think Saleel and the team under Dena's leadership really has a leadership role in smart beta. And I love reading articles about robo advising and robo investing.
It's important to recognize to me smart beta is the other side of that coin, right? If you're going to put the computers in charge of investing, that's more than just a basic index to invest in to have the ability to get into a smart beta where you're looking to get some increased return is actually fundamentally important. When you think about what Stacy's business is about, we've been doing a tremendous amount of blocking and tackling. And we're happy to say that we're getting towards the tail end of that mode. But it's important to recognize that the acquisitions we're doing, both BoardVantage and Marketwired are in fact blocking and tackling straight down the Bully alley acquisition.
So we feel very good about that. And obviously, we referred to the fact that that will get our margin help get our margin higher as we achieve scale. Lars' presentation certainly covered a lot of different topics. We are the global leader in providing technology, certainly to the exchange space and growing rapidly in the broker dealer space. Our core is very strong, but then we have great aspirational goals here.
And that could be as you saw the wheel where all our solutions now are going to have a common core, common operating system tying it together and we'll be able to basically, let the blockchain technology have a natural integration into the existing infrastructure that's out there today. So we feel very good about that. So all those things tie into the fact that we are in fact customer focused. We have engaged employees. These engaged employees are properly deployed.
We're very respectful of stakeholders that we work with and all that leads to is a double digit TSR, which we think we're proud of, we've delivered and I think we have the model and the team in place to do that. So we appreciate your time here. So Ed, I'll bring Ron and Adena back now.
Yes.
Okay. Okay. Okay, good.
Great. Let's take a few moments here and just cover some Q and A with our top managers. Let's start over here with Brian.
Thanks very much. Adena, if I could just narrow down on Corporate Solutions a little bit more. Can you talk about the conversions? I think you said 600 I think Stacy said 600 client conversions so far on the IRN site and the conversion timeline through November. How many more to go through November and the revenue opportunity from that from repricing and contrast that with some of the headwinds that you mentioned that are slowing that revenue growth in that segment?
Sure. So with regard to the conversions to the IR Insight platform, we have moved 650 clients. We have about a little over 3,000 clients who use the service. And then we have about 7,000 users out there. So we've moved 1,000 of the 7,000 so far.
So we feel very good. We're ramping up. So January really, frankly, was in a way kind of almost like a beta of our, in fact, conversion process to make sure that we could do it smoothly and easily and quickly. And it's been ramping up ever since. What's great is that we're getting inbound requests from clients calling when can I be upgraded, when can I be upgraded?
So it's not pulling teeth at all. They're being very responsive. They're filling out the paperwork. We're getting them lined up and scheduled and the conversion has been very smooth. So that will go through November.
We're obviously selling the platform while we're converting our clients as well. And that pipeline is building. It's certainly building up, but we also just have the new platform to be able to demo and to be able to provide to our clients in January. And the sales cycle is anywhere from 3 to 6 months. So that pipeline will build and continue to generate some growth over time.
But we have to focus on both right now. And that obviously is making it so that it's a very busy year for the team.
And then is the headwinds from some of the things you mentioned, are those later stage headwinds that you kind of alluded to the back end growth?
Yes. Let me focus on the headwinds. I think in particular, there's been some headwind in our multimedia business, which is on the communication side, and that's particularly in the webcasting side on what I would call special event type of webcast. We have a very vibrant and ongoing business in terms of providing regular earnings calls and these types of events. And then you have special events, whether that's client events or internal communications events that are very high end video, something like this, but for non IR purposes.
And that's been a little bit more challenged in recent months quarters just as clients are looking at, number 1, scaling back on some of that, particularly in the energy sector as well as using less advanced technology. But we're continuing to manage that, and we have partnerships that we're developing in the space to make sure that we can manage through that. But that is creating some headwind against what I would say is a pretty strong base right now in the other businesses.
Just Bob, real quick on M and A. Just on the operating margin expansion, the recent deals obviously were accretive to the margins. How do you think about the margin strategically going forward over the next, say, 2 to 3 years? Do you think it will be driven more organically? Or do you think there's more opportunities from an M and A perspective to
improve the overall margin? Well, I've,
1, opportunities from an M and A perspective to improve the overall margin?
Well, I want our investors to think of us as balanced, right, balanced and measured. So clearly, we have more organic growth initiatives going on than probably any time in our corporate history. And we feel very good about that. And you heard mention of some of them today. But we have the great benefit of our business model allowing us to basically play at a couple of different levels.
So you've got to think of us pursuing organic growth, where there are acquisitions to do and certainly it's straight down our bowling alley, we'd be a player in those assuming the valuations are reasonable. Okay. Rich? Yes.
I totally I get the core and the aspirational theme I guess here today is helpful. There's some other stuff going on in the space too in the globe over in Europe. So I guess Bob, the question is where does NASDAQ fit in if there was consolidation between in Europe, whether it be ISO, Deutsche Borse with the LSC? And why do you think that's being driven? Why do you think they're compelled to do that transaction?
Where does NASDAQ fit in?
Well, I think there's sound strategic logic for that transaction assuming that they can get it approved. So, I would first say when we look at a transaction, we see how does that impact us in any way. So we do an assessment of the Deutsche Borse LLC deal and it doesn't directly affect us. If I'm, ICE, I can see that my life business could be threatened if Deutsche Borse LLC has both the, long end of the curve and also the swap book, right? So then they're missing one piece for the cross margin, which is what ICE owns today.
So I understand why Jeff would be more interested than we would. So we don't have to be interested. It doesn't directly affect how we compete every day. And if you look at the businesses that we just heard, when we come to work every day, there's nothing that LSC does in a material way or Deutsche Worse does or they'll do together that has an impact on us. So we have our strategic direction.
We know what we're doing. We know our plans and we feel very good about our positioning. And as I say on the quarterly calls, the gut check I go through every quarter is to make sure our businesses are becoming increasingly competitive, right? Because at the end of the day, the financials will follow that. So we do an assessment, okay, where do we stand?
Where do we stand relative to our competitors, unknown competitors? And where can somebody come from left field that we don't see today on the pitch and how do we respond to that. So doing that analysis every quarter keeps us focused and we feel very good about our overall strategic positioning.
Just one financial question follow-up. So Ron, what debt are you assuming? You said you could go up to 3, I think it was 3.3 or 3.1 in the second half
with the
what's the overall debt incremental debt?
Yes. I mean, in terms of what is available to them in the markets in the second half, we'll look at. But right now, we're looking at either a 5 or a 10 year bond. If we're looking at a 5 year, we're looking at 4%, and the 10% is more like 5%.
And then the overall level? Because it was supposed to be a mix of debt and cash
with Okay. Yes, it's going to be roughly $1,000,000,000 in debt and $100,000,000 in cash.
Alex?
I don't know if this is a question or more of an observation, but on the financial side, I think one of the things that stood out in the last couple of quarters was the really strong recurring organic growth rate. But I think there's been a few items that really have benefited like the listings repricing. I think Market Tech had a really strong year end, but I think there's some one time. And I think the information business with what's been going on in the marketplace has been really good until recently. So if I think about all those things kind of rolling off in the Q1 just and some of the comments in terms of some of the corporate not coming through until the rest of the year.
How is organic growth in the near term next couple of quarters not coming down substantially? And where might we be missing something where that actually can continue to be at this like 8% range that we've seen over the last couple of quarters?
Sure. So I think that organic growth as we've talked about here, we're looking at a multiyear story at Investor Day today. And when we look at our organic growth and the goals that we have in organic growth in the non transaction segments, you can see that's over a 3 year period. So every quarter is going to be a different quarter. And you are right, last year, we did benefit from the listings price increase.
And we benefit from very strong innovation and I think a lot of effort and growth within AUM in the Smart Beta space as well as we continue to deliver for our clients in Market Tech. We still see good growth trends across our Market Technology business and continue to see good longer term or mid term growth trends certainly in all of our businesses. But I do think that with the market volatility that we saw in the Q1, we definitely I mean, you can see it, it's public that the AUM has had some dips and then we also have continued work to make sure that we can drive to growth in Corporate Solutions in the near term. So I don't want to sit there and give you a projection of the next couple of quarters, that's not why we're here today. But we will see ebbs and flows, but we are very we feel very strong and very good about our long term or mid term growth trends and growth expectations for our businesses.
Yes. I would direct you to the fact the markets we're competing with are quite large. We showed that in the beginning. We're not constrained by where we can go. We have the team in place.
We have the strategy in place. So the organic growth quarter to quarter will change. But the fact is we have plenty of glide path to grow over a long period of time.
We'll go to Alex over
here. Great.
Thanks so much. Just a bigger picture observation. Financial Services industry as a whole has seen kind of continued pressure over the last several years, which obviously remains with us. There's been a number of fairly high level, high profile headcount reductions by the banks. You've seen announcements out of BlackRock yesterday.
So just help us, I guess, understand how does this trend impact various parts of your business kind of like exposure within either its market data or exoservices or parts of the business that might be more immune or the ones that could be more impacted by this?
Yes. I would say this, When you look at spaces where we have very high market share, then we're somewhat governed by what's happening in the macro environment in that context. But when you look at the spaces we compete in, for example, index and data, dollars 10,000,000,000 plus space, right? We have so many room so much room to maneuver in terms of where we have to intelligently pick out where there'll be growth within that environment. So if we look can you bring that other slide back up, the first one we saw, the definition size of market.
So when you look at the market sizes we compete in today, if we're smart and intelligent, there's tremendous growth in each one of those segments. When you look at a segment where we're 40% market share, you take options if we complete the IFC, then I think your point would be well taken. You're going to kind of ride the wave within that sector. But
I think he's going to have to put that on every slide.
What's that?
It's back at the very beginning.
So Yes. Yes. You can't go
the right number. Okay. So that's what I'd say. I mean, we have such large markets we're going after. And we catch the next wave, whether that's blockchain or machine intelligence, then there's no end of budget available if you're properly positioned.
Did we
get that?
Here we go.
There we go. There we go. So GRC, you see $5,000,000,000 plus industry, Investor Communications, dollars 2,000,000,000 plus industry, which is more on the corporate side. The classical exchange business, dollars 15,000,000,000 So that's probably where we have the highest market share being where we are. Data and analytics, I'm not sure I entirely believe the size of that number of Salil and Medina do, so $25,000,000,000 to $30,000,000,000 the technology business 2 plus.
So there's just ample room for us to maneuver in those spaces.
I guess, 2 part question. Just given some of the price increases over the recent past and kind of throughout the industry, industry? And then when you layer in some of the innovation that you guys are doing, you still feel like you're offering enough out there to continue that trend over the next couple of years? Because I think on the flip side, it seems like a lot of parts of the industry are facing pressure as well. And so do you have the pricing power you need to continue to do that.
And then when you look at the growth, I guess, goals that you guys have across the different businesses, It seems like some of them, like the index business, it seems like mid single digits is probably even low. And so like that has the potential to probably be higher. Corporate Solutions, maybe that's going to be a little bit lower in the near term. But just any update or maybe granularity on where you see maybe some opportunities for that growth?
Let me start and then Adena. So I would just direct you to your comment about pricing power. So to get an insight into the culture of Nasdaq, if we're thinking about pricing power instead of thinking about listening to our customer and what our customer wants to do and what problems we have to solve for our customers, will go in the wrong direction. Pricing power could be good for a quarter, a year, but it's not going to get you that far. So the success of NASDAQ in the past and will be in the future is being customer focused, seeing where we can meet their evolving needs.
And that's truly what we focus on. So I can't remember the last time I sat in a meeting, we're talking about pricing power as opposed to sitting in meetings talking about what do the customers need us to do.
Yes. And when we do make pricing decisions, we're doing them very judiciously and very carefully and we're managing our clients very, very closely to make sure that they feel that there is incremental value that we're providing that justifies any sort of pricing change that we're making within our portfolio. And you'll see that it's sometimes in certain businesses, it's very episodic. In other businesses, it's a little bit more regular. But it's only because we feel that we really do feel very justified in
saying that we're adding more value
to what their offering is. And I that discussion with our customers. With regard to the Information Services business, we have the Information Services business is a big business. We've got the data business. And as Celine mentioned, it is a relatively mature business in terms of where we are today in the Exchange Data space.
Where we're going to take it in terms of introducing more analytics and data capabilities and drawing more conclusions from our data, we think we'll catalyze more growth there. Then you're right, the index business generally is a higher growth segment, but it's integrated into a bigger hole. So that's why we feel confident in that mid single digits number.
Any last questions?
Okay.
I'll turn it over to Bob
for questions.
Okay. So, as I said in my opening comments, we're all player coaches, here at NASDAQ and we probably have a bias to be players, but we are also still fundamentally overhead. We don't like to admit it. So we do have a number of people who are more on the player side, still somewhat overhead, who will be with us at the management mingle. Can we have the other NASDAQ folks stand up?
So we have represented here all walks up. We have more folks in the back there. There we go, Walt. Walt is going to sing for us today, right, too? Is that true?
Okay. So just very quickly, Walt's in transaction I'll have you introduce yourself quickly,
Walt.
So any transaction question, Walt is your person. Bill? Any GRC question, Eric?
Brenda?
Good. And wasn't Deidre here? Oh, there's Lou. And then Lou. All right.
So we're opening up the real management team and they're there to take any questions you want in an unfiltered fashion. So with that, we're here to enjoy lunch, right Mr. Dittmeier?
Yes.
Thank you, everybody.