All right, our next section is with Nasdaq. Thank you everyone for joining today's section. For those of you who don't know me, my name is Owen Lau. I cover information services, exchange, and digital assets at Oppenheimer. Nasdaq, it's well known to be an exchange operator, but it has been transforming to become more like a technology provider through both organic and inorganic growth. In the first half of this year, Solutions business accounted for about 78% of total revenue. Today, we are pleased to have CEO and Chair Adena Friedman joining us today to talk about her journey. Thank you for your time, Adena.
Yeah, it's great to be here, Owen. Thanks.
So for the people who are listening to the webcast, please feel free to submit your questions online. We will do our best to address your question. So, as a starting point, Adena, why don't we talk about the Nasdaq, because the company has gone through a period of transformational pivot. How would you describe Nasdaq today?
Sure. Well, Owen, it's great to be here, Owen, so thank you. Well, today, Nasdaq is a global technology company that serves the financial system, and, and the way that we, we define ourselves is we want to be the trusted fabric to the world's financial system. So we provide technology that really helps all of the constituents in markets, so whether it's a corporate, an investment manager, a broker-dealer, or a bank, or, or even another exchange, you know, how do they... How do we make them successful through the technology that we serve them? And so obviously, we'll, we'll, we'll dive into all of that. We focus on three key themes: How do we maximize the liquidity in the world's financial markets? How do we maximize the transparency across the system? And how do we maximize the integrity of the financial system?
We really have aligned ourselves across those key themes. So we obviously have our own markets, and they're highly liquid. We provide technology to 130 other markets around the world. We now provide critical risk management technology that helps the broker-dealers maximize the liquidity in the markets. In the transparency side of things, we have our transparent index business, we have our market data business, analytics that help corporates and investors connect together. And then in the fintech division, we also have our RegTech suite, so that's our regulatory reporting and our Anti-Financial Crime suite that really help amplify the integrity of the industry. So that's really kind of how we've organized ourselves and how we kind of talk about ourselves inside of Nasdaq, too.
Got it. So, let's talk about one latest, like, most recent event. In late July, Thoma Bravo, one of your largest shareholders, sold 42 million of your shares. You were probably being asked this question a million times before. I'm not saying that, you know, your largest shareholder selling your shares, it's a good thing for the stock, but the stock did go up after the pricing. So it looks like it remove a big overhang, right? How do you see that?
Yeah, I mean, we were really, really excited about the execution. So I think the first thing to note is that, as part of the Adenza acquisition, Thoma Bravo took a 15% stake in the company, and the stock, at the time that we closed the deal, had two lock-up periods. So the first lock-up came off in mid-June. The next lock-up comes off in May of 2025. And as we, you know, work with Thoma Bravo, they've actually been truly, like, great partners to us. Holden Spaht is on our board. He will continue to be on our board after this, this sale that they made. He's been really terrific at really helping us think about our, you know, our operational efficiency, our integration, how we wanna make sure we define ourselves as an enterprise software company. But they also...
You know, they, they have their own investment thesis around this acquisition, so they sold half their position right after our earnings in July. And, I think that it was a pretty well-telegraphed, just because the lock-up had come off, I think it was pretty well telegraphed. We had really strong interest in the book. We were really proud of that. It was over 2.5x oversubscribed, and so I think it just lots of good demand, which was awesome. And now we have some really great shareholders that have come in to, to really help us along our journey in the future, and Thoma Bravo still has half their stake, and, and they're staying on our board. So it's, it all went really well. We were really happy about how, how it went down in the end.
So just a hypothetical scenario, some people may be interested to, in the role of, Holden going forward. So if, let's say, Thoma Bravo eventually sell all the shares, will he leave the board? How should investors think about, the arrangement going forward?
Yeah, well, so as part of the acquisition, we agreed, and actually, frankly, it was my idea, in fact, to have Holden join our board. You know, in working with him throughout the deal, I really enjoyed getting to know him. I knew he'd be a good cultural fit on the board. And he is a very experienced enterprise sales software owner of enterprise software company, so we had a lot of. We learned a lot from him and his team as we were going through the process. So we invited him to join the board, but the way that the agreement was written is that that Thoma Bravo has a right to a board seat, so long as they have at least a 10% position.
They now are below 10%, so then it's at our invitation to continue to have Holden or anyone from Thoma Bravo on, be on our board, and we did invite him to stay on the board. And so, you know, that's kind of the way it is right now, and we'll continue to evaluate that as we go forward. And also he will, too, 'cause it's, you know, it's a time commitment on his side, but it's been a great relationship so far.
Got it. So, let's switch gear to another hot topic, which is the IPO market. Could you please talk about the pipeline of the IPO market in the second half of this year and maybe going into 2025? Do you expect the IPO market can meaningfully improve from here? Do you have any numbers you can share?
... Well, so the, the way that we're looking at the market, and I think we've been saying this throughout the year, is that it's been a pretty slow year. I would also say it's been slower than we expected this year. I, I think that everyone kind of was expecting to see more of a recovery of IPOs as we went through the year. It's not that surprising to me that it's been a slow year, though, because even back in January, we were predicting that the Fed probably would not make any changes or material changes, I would say, to, to monetary policy, and we do not expect them to bring rates down until the second half of the year.
And I just think the high cost of capital environment, we're now sitting at a delta of about 3 percentage points between the inflation rate and the interest rate. And so, you know, that's a pretty big, that's a very restrictive environment from a capital, cost of capital perspective. Has kept, frankly, investors from having a huge appetite to come in and take and, you know, and underwrite risk deals. But frankly, some of the earlier deals in the year had a harder time. I would say we actually saw some really good IPOs in July, but the pipeline is really focused on 2025. So we have, I think we've, I don't know if we've given, like. I think we've, you know, kind of just under, just under 100 companies in the pipeline. I can't remember the exact number.
But they, you know, in talking to them and engaging with them, they're primarily focused on 2025. There are a few companies that are looking to get out in September, maybe in early to mid-October, then there might be a couple companies that come out in December, but my guess is that more likely that they'll push to 2025. That's been our expectation, and we've kind of been pretty consistent in saying that throughout the year. But as we look into 2025, if the economy stays resilient and we're able to manage, you know, get a lower cost of capital, bring rates down in a very deliberate way, land gracefully with the economy, I actually think there are a lot of companies that are getting ready to come out.
So we're kind of excited about what could be in 2025.
Got it. So another theme, it's about election. How could the upcoming election potentially impact Nasdaq, like, different business unit, and which business could, you know, benefit more and which business could potentially face more headwinds?
You know, I think we've done a very good job of managing through lots of different political cycles, different regulatory cycles. We're a diversified platform today. We work with regulators under every administration. And it's interesting because every regulatory regime that we work with has a little bit of a different focus, right? So we work with them where, you know, we're very active in engaging with our regulators proactively and reactively, but we try very hard to make sure that we have a strong and deep relationship with the SEC and other regulators. So I don't anticipate it being a materially different world. You know, we've had two very different administrations over the last 8 years. I think we've been able to manage well throughout that period of time. And so that's kind of how we're built.
We're kind of built to last, as I say, you know, and to manage through different political cycles. So I don't have an answer to your question in terms of, like, looking at specific business units. We just look at how do we make sure we maintain a strong relationship with our regulators, we help our clients maintain strong relationships with their regulators with our technology, and we continue to advance the markets from a technological perspective.
Got it. So, over the past, like, few quarters, I would say the leverage and deleveraging has been one of the key kind of message from Nasdaq, and also it's also a key theme for investor as well. I think at the end of the second quarter, your leverage had come down, like, below four times, I think 3.9 times, something like that. Could you please talk about your progress, and do you have any new commitment for deleveraging, given your level right now, it's below four times? Any new target you can share?
Yeah, yeah. So I think what we talked about on the second quarter call, and we'd actually said this earlier in the year, too, that we did expect that we would be able to get below at or below 4x about 9 months ahead of original schedule, and then get below 3.3x, which is our next kind of stated goal about 6 months earlier than we originally thought. So I think that would be in mid-2026, or even before that. I think Adena can correct me, but I'm pretty sure it's like around mid-2026. And we think, we think, you know, that's about 6 months ahead of schedule. We are actively pursuing a deleveraging strategy with our cash flows, and we've been doing that throughout the year.
Now we have an opportunity to think about, you know, our... You know, we've kind of have paid down all the term loan, we've paid down our commercial paper. We're in the process of finishing that up. And then we have the opportunity then to look at there's some debt due next year that we'll look at how to manage. And then opportunistically, as we continue to look at both, you know, share shareholder returns through buybacks and deleveraging, we'll continue to balance that and evaluate that. We can do that both in the, you know, by paying down that debt next year, but also through secondary purchases. So we'll have to see kind of just, you know, frankly, how we think that is the best return for our shareholders, but we are very committed to continue to deleverage, for sure.
Got it. So, last month, we saw a buggy update on CrowdStrike, which caused, like, a global IT outage. It impacted many industries, including an exchange in London, but it looks like Nasdaq and other U.S. exchanges were fine. Could you please talk about what Nasdaq has done to avoid this kind of outage? And is there something that, you know, company can actually do to minimize this kind of impact? I mean, it looks like-
Yeah
... a single point of failure can disrupt so many industries.
... Well, I think first of all, you know, we, you know, none of our client systems were impacted by the CrowdStrike situation. And so it was very, you know, it was a minor incident from our perspective, because it had a little bit more impact on just internal PCs that we were able to recover very quickly. But I think more generally, we really do focus on redundancy, we focus on understanding how different third-party software is integrated into different elements of infrastructure. We work very closely with our vendors. You know, the good news about having a lot of our technology providers listed on Nasdaq is we have very deep relationships with the companies.
We were actually, frankly, in the CrowdStrike situation, for instance, able to speak with them immediately and manage any sort of minor things that we were experiencing, and mitigate it very quickly. So I think that's one side of things, which is you really wanna know exactly how third-party software is kind of integrated into your infrastructure, even if it's indirect. And I think that's gonna be an area that a lot of, you know, different companies are gonna focus on. The second is, of course, constant vigilance on IT security, and understanding kind of how all of that part of our infrastructure is managed, and managed very proactively. And then the third element is really how do you recover?
So if you do have a situation like this, how you've gotta focus on that fast recovery. So how do you back up all your databases? How do you back up all of your applications? How do you make sure that you've got diversification across your infrastructure, so that you can back up into a diversified infrastructure? So, I mean, I think that's all of the things that we focus on kind of every day. But it is... I know these types of situations, you can always learn from them, you can always get, you know, better at, better at managing infrastructure on the back of them. So the entire world is learning from that situation right now, I'm sure.
Got it. So, maybe we can move on to each of your individual business. So let's talk about Financial Technology, which is, you know, a big part of your transformational process. So, Adenza has been part of Nasdaq for, I think, around nine months or so right now. Could you please give us an update on the integration process? What surprised you the most during this integration?
Well, honestly, I can honestly say there haven't been any surprises, so that's good news. And so I, you know, that's like the most important thing. The second thing is that culturally speaking, it's been a really good integration. And we actually do work, as we are diligencing companies, we actually do work with a third party to help us understand the culture of the company we're buying. Because, you know, one of the things you always hear is that, you know, the biggest cause of failures within mergers is actually cultural mismatch. And so we care a lot about that, and we do a lot of work upfront to understand that. But it has been a really good cultural integration. And then you focus on operational integration.
So, we chose, in this case, to integrate from day one, to build one leadership team, one org design that is focused on across all of our fintech capabilities, whether that's RegTech, whether that's surveillance, the regulatory reporting, AxiomSL, risk management with Calypso, and our capital markets technology, as well as our connectivity services. I just, you know, as one point to make is that our Anti-Financial Crime business is now part of fintech, but it still is being managed a little bit distinctly, because it's such a high-growth business, and it's doing well. So they're working together, particularly on the sales side, but they're not actually fully integrated into the operating model yet. But the operating model within the rest of fintech is one.
That was a very important thing to do quickly. And then, now we've been working on then the technological integration. So we've completed the integration of the CRM platforms, our customer relationship management solutions. We did that six months ahead of time, so we're really, really proud to get that done, because that really obviously helps us have a single point of view of our clients, and that can facilitate cross-selling and enterprise sales. And then we've been doing other, you know, and the backup, obviously, getting all of the Adenza employees technologically integrated into Nasdaq. So that's all gone, gone really well.
And then I would say the other good thing that's really come from it in terms of the client interactions, and I honestly, I'm not saying I'm surprised, but I am really happy, which is that in going and talking to the clients, it's kind of validating what our investment thesis was. They want to have a strategic partner. They do see us as that. You know, we—I think we do a great job in working with them in everything we do for them now, whether it's our markets, or surveillance technology, or other capital markets solutions. And so they're coming to us and saying: "Okay, how can we make sure that we're managing our risk for you? How can we do more with you?" It's been really good. Like, I...
As you go up further up in terms of the organization, the more holistic you can have that conversation, covering everything, including anti-fin crime, and that's been really, really positive. And so I feel like that hopefully is, you know, you're starting to see that, we're starting to see that with the cross-sells. And hopefully that kind of is a momentum that will continue as we continue to move forward.
Got it. Then how about the enterprise sales and go-to-market strategy? I remember when we talked about that, I think a year ago, you talked about how good Adenza has on the enterprise, like going after, like, the whole unit, and I think you want to bring that to Nasdaq. Can you talk about that progress so far?
Yeah. Yeah, that's been great. So, we have now an enterprise sales. We have, like, a whole sales structure that across all of fintech. So we have a Chief Revenue Officer of our fintech division, we have a head of clients delivering client success across our fintech division. The sales organization is organized by region, and it's organized by client, and then they are. We have sales, enterprise sales executives who will go in and engage the client across a range of areas of risk and opportunity, right? So, in terms of what they're trying to achieve. And then we have these point solutions, I would say sales executives or product experts really, that are coming in and helping make sure that as we engage with the client, we can answer every single question.
We have a very specific ability to kind of show the expertise and deliver that expertise for the client as they're making their decision and then after they've made their decision. So it's a really good. I would say that they did, they did in fact have that, in, you know, that kind of infrastructure in place. Valerie Bannert-Thurner, who's been... She spoke at our Investor Day. She's the Chief Revenue Officer. She's a longtime Nasdaq executive. She's excellent, and she's always. She herself has always taken kind of that enterprise approach to engaging clients. So, honestly, it's been really great, and I do think that Tal and I have also been engaged, so they kinda know when to escalate. They know when they can kinda keep it within the organization.
They know when to bring that, that expert in, so it's, it's working really, really well so far.
Yeah, but I talked to her as well. I think she's great.
Yeah.
So maybe let's talk about the financial crime of your Verafin financial crime management technology. Let's talk about some numbers. When I look at the slide, I think your medium-term growth outlook is still in the mid-20%. It implies around... And if I convert that to the dollar terms, it implies around $80-$100 million incremental revenue every year for the next, like, at least three to five years. So I think the question is: How can you maintain such a high growth rate in the near term, or maybe in the near to medium term? And what does it imply for your, like, penetration rate in the bank and credit union space?
Mm-hmm. Well, as you all know, the bread and butter of the Verafin business has been the small to medium banks across the United States and now across North America. And that continues to be, you know, like, the core underpinning of the business, and we continue to sign, you know, dozens of clients every quarter in terms of getting new client uptake of the full fraud and AML solution. We continue to innovate for them, bringing new capabilities in. Actually, we do weekly releases, and so there's just a constant level of innovation within the products to make sure that we're always staying up in the latest issues that they're facing across fraud and AML.
We've also been investing in the check fraud area and other parts of the whole ecosystem, and that's all delivered to them, for the small and medium banks, as like one solution. Then, as we go through a contract renewal, we look at their growth of their business, and then we look at the value added that we've provided to them over that period of time, and then we upsell them on renewal. You know, kind of bring them up on renewal. So that's a kind of a core underpinning of the business. Then we have our new clientele, our. As we've been moving upmarket into the tier one, tier twos in the United States, and there, it's a modular sale. You know, so we don't necessarily sell the whole platform at once.
We can sell point solutions to them and purpose-built for specific needs. So payment fraud has been definitely the number one seller, I would say, within the tier one and tier twos. We're focusing on the check fraud solution. And then we've actually been able to also show the real value of the anti-money laundering solution as well as we continue to move upmarket. So that's more of a land and expand, where we would sell them one module and then hope to upsell them on additional modules as we continue to expand the relationship.
But also, the next thing I would say about that, 'cause I have one more, is that it's important to realize that the tier one and tier twos really represent about half of the TAM, right? So in a way, we've been able to grow and expand the business well without even addressing half of the opportunity, and now we're addressing the other half of that opportunity, and we're very early. So we have a long runway to go, and I think we're showing really good early, early success there. The third leg of our growth and expansion plan is in moving into other parts of the world.
So, we're focusing right now on the UK and into Europe as we have been expanding our remit there, focusing first on payments fraud in areas that we know that we can show a very clear ROI on our solutions. The laws and rules within Europe are changing to allow for more data sharing across banks, and that plays well into our business model and into our technological capabilities. So that's an area, that's the third leg of growth that we're really excited about. But we're just, you know, we're just in the process of getting into that, and that's where actually the Verafin team will be working very closely with Valerie's team in terms of the go-to-market and basically take advantage of the enterprise sales capabilities we have.
So I, I think, Owen, you know, we just see this incredible growth runway for the business. It's a great solution. It solves really big problems for the banks. We're constantly innovating and trying to drive better outcomes. We've brought in Gen AI tool in place to help automate some of the workflows; it'll make them more efficient. You know, we just are constantly finding ways to make it so the product's the, the best it can be.
Got it. You also mentioned that at least the current growth is mainly driven by smaller banks, like, you know, credit unions, but there is still a lot of attention on signing tier one and tier two banks for Verafin, right? You mentioned tier one and tier two. It's half of the TAM, but the revenue could be very small right now. But your larger TAM is still in the... or larger revenue still come from smaller banks. I guess the question is: How do you balance the two? Like, do you put more resources to go after tier one and tier two because of larger bank, but small revenue, or do you still focus on the smaller banks?
We do both. So you can definitely do both at the same time. We have teams that are dedicated to what we call the SMB, the small to medium bank clientele, and we have teams that are dedicated to what we call the enterprise, which are the larger banks' clientele. So we have capabilities within the organization that are geared towards both. And then the product roadmap, we have capabilities that we're launching all the time to serve the SMBs, and then we have product capabilities that we're launching all the time to serve enterprise or serve all of them. Like, 'cause there are certain things that are just ubiquitous, and there are other things that might be more purpose-built for certain types of banks.
And so, you know, the nice thing about growing is that you can, you know, always continue to invest in the business, and we are continuing to invest in the business. In terms of R&D, we're continuing to grow our R&D, and we're continuing to grow our sales organization, our client success organization, just so that that engine works really well to serve our core clients while continuing to grow and expand into the new clients.
Got it. So you just touched on Gen AI, maybe more on the Verafin side, but could you please give us an update on some of the key Gen AI initiatives in Nasdaq? How can these initiatives create more, like, incremental revenue and incremental cost savings opportunity for Nasdaq?
Yeah. So we actually look at Gen AI in two constructs. One is introducing Gen AI into our products. So how do we bring more AI capabilities into our products? And then how do we introduce Gen AI across the business, so we call on the business? And, you know, for Gen AI as a specific form of AI is, I think right now at least, you're gonna see that the early use cases for that are mostly geared towards driving efficiency and in increasing effectiveness of certain workflows. And so if we look at, for instance, our, you know, Anti-Financial Crime tool, we use algorithmic AI on the actual, the data lake that allows us to root out and find criminal behaviors. That's more algorithmic AI.
We use Gen AI in terms of automating all of the report writing and researching that they do, potentially bad actors. So they'll, you know, we'll give them an alert, and then they have to go research the entity and determine whether or not that, that alert's a false positive or a real positive. And that work is time-consuming, and they're going out and basically searching the internet or searching certain sites, and so we can automate that now and bring that time down very materially of doing the research. And then we can also auto-generate a report, and then the analyst is just there to review the report and make sure that they tie it back to the links that they can see of the underlying data.
So it's a huge time saver for the banks, and that's a big efficiency play for them. I think another one would be on Nasdaq Boardvantage. We're in beta right now with clients, showing how we can do board summaries, which I can tell you, every single person I talk to, it's like, "Oh, my God, thank you!" You know, you can get these board books that are, like, 300 pages long, and what we're trying to do is say, "Okay, how do you show a 2-page summary?" We can do a detailed summary or a high-level summary of a different board deck. And so that's a huge time save for board members. It doesn't mean they won't read it, but at least they'll know what they're gonna read, and it makes it much more efficient to read it.
And then we also are introducing similar, the research and report capabilities onto the surveillance platform. We're looking at doing similar things in terms of we just launched in our investment platform, a pension board summarization. That's super important because if you're an asset manager and you're trying to figure out, you know, what the strategies of the pension funds are, they're all, you know, they're all, public pensions. They, they publish their board meetings, and so you can actually, get the summarization of those meetings to try to figure out where they're strategically focused, and it can help you with your sales. So all of that stuff is, like, in the product work we're doing, and it's. Now, in terms of value added, we look at it in a couple different ways.
One would be, look, this is a way to drive retention, and so we kind of increase the retention, and the value of the product is just a retention increase, and that obviously has a good revenue impact, but an indirect one. Or you could say, "Gosh, this is a, such incremental value, and it's so unique that we're gonna introduce it as a new module," and then you charge directly for it. So we go through a decision tree analysis of that as we are launching these things to figure out. It's so early days, too, that we might decide to, you know, kind of like embed it in the product now, but over time, maybe it becomes so much more value added that it actually is something you can charge for. So we're kind of in the midst of all of that.
On the business, sorry, long answer, but on the business, we focus on really focusing on our developer community and giving them the tools to be a lot more efficient in, you know, writing and delivering code, and automating a lot of the testing, so it makes it so we can actually have higher test coverage or code coverage with our testing, make it so that we can actually deliver code and, you know, faster and better. And so that's a really, really exciting area. We've given all of our developers now access to the GitHub Copilot tools, and they're working with them. We did a big hackathon across the company, all focused on the business. So all of the ideas were on the business ideas of how we can make the company more efficient and effective.
We had, I think it was like over 600 people, participate across four or five different hackathons around the world, and the ideas were awesome. So we're now in the process of actually bringing some of those ideas and productionalizing them. And then the last thing I'd say is we're building an AI platform, a Gen AI platform, specific to Nasdaq, where all of our IP sits within the platform, all of our documents, our code, everything can sit within, you know, enclave, that is then tied into Bedrock, at AWS. And so then it gives us access to multiple models, and we can then... We approve all the models that the teams are allowed to use, and then they can figure out which models are most effective in solving the specific problem they're facing.
So, we're building all of those capabilities out, and we're gonna be launching that very, very soon… Sorry, really long answer, but a lot of work being done on-
There's a lot going on. Exactly, that's what I want to say, there's a lot going on. I don't-
Yeah.
I'm not sure how many people, like, really appreciate that or like actually they understand the whole thing going on.
Yeah.
But I appreciate your answer.
But, you know, the thing is that we spent the last, like, 12 years, and really a real focus over the last 8 years, of moving all of our solutions into cloud or cloud being cloud-native.
Mm.
So we have modernized our data management, we've modernized the platforms, we've modernized the applications, and a lot of that stuff's been done behind the scenes. We, you know, some of the stuff we've talked about and some of it we haven't. But the fact is that we now have this really great modern infrastructure, and that allows us to play offense a lot faster than if we hadn't done that, for sure.
Exactly, exactly. I mean, look forward to hearing more from you, going forward. So let's switch gear to another business unit, which is the Capital Access Platforms. Your medium growth outlook for workflow and insights, I think it's high single digit to low double digits, but this segment has been, like, running at mid single digit or below the medium target. Could you please talk about what, like, what does it take for this segment to go back to your medium-term target and the timing of it? Is it mainly relying on the IPO market or anything else you can talk about?
Yeah, sure. So, a few things. First, as we've talked about within Capital Access Platforms, there are... Just to remind everyone, there are three subdivisions. So there's the Listings and Data subdivision, there's the Index subdivision, and then there's the Analytics, or Workflow and Insights subdivision. And that includes our Corporate Solutions, like our IR, and governance, and ESG platforms that we offer to corporates, and it includes our investment management platforms, which is like eVestment. And all of the solutions, we have something called Market Lens and other capabilities. We have Data Link inside that business as well, that is also providing a very modern way for us to provide both Nasdaq and third-party data to our clients. So, there's a lot that's, you know, that is encompassed within Workflow and Insights.
One of the headwinds that we have been facing is the really quiet IPO environment. So because for corporate solutions, that has definitely had a drag on, in terms of new sales and some impact on retention, just because we've had more delistings than we would normally have in a year. And so that has definitely created a much slower overall growth rate for the corporate Solutions business, and I would say that has probably been the biggest contributor to the slower overall growth rate within workflow and insights. But the other thing is, with eVestment, we actually had spent a long time, actually, out of 18 months, really working with Mercer to integrate all of their research into the platform and to start to make that available.
That was a huge effort for us, and so it kept us from introducing other smaller things that might have been revenue-enhancing in the short run. But now we have this unbelievable data set that powers the investment management industry. And now that all of that's integrated and we have this Market Lens solution, that's also fantastic in terms of creating a much better market intelligence or marketing intelligence for the asset managers. I think that we now have a lot of opportunity to play more offense with eVestment. And that, I think, will help us in terms of moving the growth rate going forward. I just wanna say, you know, there's just been a confluence of things. But I do feel like we...
You know, we have said that the medium-term outlook is, I think we've said, high single digits, mid to high single digits, or I think it's high single digits. We do think that the potential is there for that, but this is not the year we're going to be able to achieve that.
Got it. And then the other component, it's the index business. I think it contribute about 15% of your revenue, based on my math. I mean, sometimes I feel like this business is not, like, fully appreciated or somehow misunderstood by investors. Could you please talk about the strength and the pool of these, like, index business so that investors can appreciate more?
Yeah. I mean, first of all, the index business is an awesome business. I just want to say that. It's... You know, what I've always said about the index business is we're only limited by our own imagination. You know, so what was interesting is we've had that we've had the index business for 25 years. I mean, it's been a part of Nasdaq for a really long time. And, and a lot of, a lot of the parts of Nasdaq growing up, so I've been here a long time. So, you know, I've seen, I've seen this business literally get started in the late 1990s to, to building on what it is today. And, and a lot of Nasdaq historically as an exchange operator was highly regulated.
We had to, like, post everything and present, you know, kind of anything we wanted to do. We had to publish out and get regulatory approval, except the index business. So, yes, you have to get approval for new ETFs or ETPs on indexes, but to create a new index is just your own imagination. Like, what is it that investors really want to be able to invest in? You know, what's an investable theme, or a strategy, or things that you can do to kind of make investments more accessible to more people? And so we built this business first starting with the Nasdaq 100, but honestly, it's become a much more diversified platform. About 30% of our AUM now is not related to the Nasdaq 100.
It's, you know, that continues to be an area where we can grow thematically. We can look at different strategies, and we also, you know, that's kind of the overall business. But NDX, of course, has been a massive grower. So we're now sitting at around $600 billion of assets under management, and we have three key lanes of growth going forward. One is continuing to launch new products, and we are continuously launching new products, both on the Nasdaq 100, but also other thematics, other strategies. The second is to move up more into the institutional audience. We have historically been much more retail-driven in terms of the demand for our indexes, and frankly, our organization has been more focused on the retail audience.
But we definitely see opportunity to move more into institutional audience, and we're starting that by really focusing on the insurance space and the annuity space there. And then the third is to continue to grow globally, you know, kind of expand our index penetration across the world, and we have a lot of work we're doing across Europe and Asia to bring new products into those markets. So that's how we're looking to expand going forward.
Got it. So I think we are almost time, but at the end, do you have any final words for us?
No. Well, first of all, thanks so much, Owen. I—you know, we have been doing a lot to make sure that we advance the business in terms of really solving our clients' biggest challenges as they navigate the public markets, as they navigate the financial system, you know, and as they. You know, we work with them to really enhance the liquidity, transparency, and integrity of the system. We're really, really excited about what we have in front of us, the level of engagement we have with our clients, and frankly, the diversity of our platform has allowed us to really deliver great results over a lot of different environments. So looking forward to continuing to drive the strategy forward.
Sounds great. Thank you for your time, Adena. Thank you, Nasdaq team, as well, and hope you all have a good day.
Great. Thanks a lot, Owen. See you later.
Thank you.
Bye.
See you. Bye-bye.