Sabadra . I cover information services companies here at RBC. We are really excited to have Sarah, CFO of Nasdaq. Sarah, thanks for giving us this opportunity. Thank you. So I'll start off with a broad question. Nasdaq has been on a big transformation journey over the last several years, and last year, you acquired Adenza. You've done several other strategic acquisitions over the last several years. Can you talk about where do you see the most strategic opportunities for Nasdaq going forward?
Yeah, so I'll do that across our pillars. And we have three pillars. The first one is liquidity, the second one is transparency, and the third one is the integrity of the capital market. So if you look at that in terms of liquidity, the first one is Market S ervices. Market Services is one of our divisions. And that's what you actually identify as Nasdaq. We create markets. We exchange 200 billion messages a day. And that has scaled up. We have 130 marketplaces where we see opportunities there. For example, is on index options. That's a very attractive space for us. And also applying AI to generate new order types that are particularly attractive, for example, Dynamic M-ELO or our Dynamic Strike Optimization. If I go to the second, which is our pillar of transparency, this is where Capital Access Platform happens.
So we connect the corporates to the issuers. And here, you have probably all noticed our index growth, which has been remarkable. Last quarter, we were at 26% year-on-year growth. And we're applying a lot of R&D and development into that space. For example, we had 35 new clients last year. And we are pushing both on institutional, on international, and also we are looking at new products, as I just mentioned, across verticals, NDX, obviously, but also not NDX, which is important. And then if I look at the third piece, which is the integrity, integrity is where we are helping on the integrity of the capital markets through our fintech division. And we have three subdivisions: financial crime, regulatory tech, and capital market tech. And again, there, we have a lot of options to continue to add on cloud and on AI.
So you have seen us do an XVA, GenAI piece on Calypso. You have seen us continue to move towards the cloud. And Financial Crime Management is probably the best example where we have 2,500 banks that give us consortium data. And with that, and being in the cloud for 10 years and in AI for 7 years, we've been able to deliver at scale an entirely new process on Entity Copilot as well as targeted typologies. So we're pretty excited to have strong opportunities across GenAI, AI, cloud, as well as continuing to grow across our three pillars. And that gives us the ability to support 8% growth in fintech across $31 billion AUM and low penetration of that AUM.
That's a great overview. And we'll drill down into all the topics that you mentioned. We definitely want to talk about cloud AI. But maybe we can start off with the first pillar, the integrity pillar. In fintech, particularly, you've had a really strong momentum with new wins, cross-sells, upsells. So I was just curious, what's driving that momentum and how do you think about that going forward?
So what has been really good about our products in fintech is that nobody is debating whether you need to fight $3.5 trillion of financial crime or whether you need to have some level of intelligent regulation for the banks that are done on an efficient basis, or whether you want to, in a world that accelerates, to do your asset and liability management by yourself in Excel or do it through a trade platform. Or if you want to reinvent trade, that would be very, very expensive for a middle-sized bank. And we provide products that accomplish that. So we help our clients both in our growth as well as in their sustainable growth. And so I would say across environments, those are needs that remain.
Where the need for technology is only increasing, the need for AI is only increasing, and the need for consortium data done in a very authorized way is only increasing.
That's very helpful color . Maybe if you can just talk about the pipeline, what do you see in the pipeline in terms of the demand environment going forward?
Yeah, so we have strong pipelines overall in our businesses in fintech. And whereas we don't disclose pipelines, what we are seeing is I'll go by divisions. In Financial Crime Management, you have a lot of POCs that are creating pipelines for us, both international. We had the first international Tier 1 last quarter. So we're opening a new chapter in the growth of Verafin. And you had seen us say we'll have some tier ones in 2023. And we delivered three of them. At this point, we also have one international that we have added. And if you add the POCs that we have, we have line of sight to continuing to have presence in more international as well as more formal financial crime for asset management. And then we are also able to put GenAI in our products. And so I mentioned that one.
But what's particularly interesting and creating a pipeline of upsells, if you want, even though we don't charge separately for it for Financial Crime Management, is that we were able to give to 2,000 out of 2,500 of our clients a new GenAI Entity Research Copilot, which actually enables them to reduce the time spent on alerts and the evaluation of those alerts by 90% versus not having the Verafin product. So that's obviously a very attractive product. And it also significantly improves your performance even if you were already a Verafin customer. And if you have that in 2,000 hands, it's used in 1,000 of our clients. So half the people who have it are actually using it consistently.
That's actually adoption that we are very, very proud to see, and gives us pipeline towards the net retention and continuing to have the net retention at a high level that we have. If I move on now to regtech in regulatory tech, we continue to have a journey that's towards the cloud, and there is a pipeline of international regulations that is non-ceasing, and so we deal with 110 regulators across 55 countries. We do thousands of updates every year, and so our pipeline is created by the advent of all of this, as well as by the fact that our clients are going international, and we can add either new verticals to support their growth or new geographies to support their growth, and then for Calypso, a little bit of that same upsell type of strategy for both Adenza and so for both Calypso and for AxiomSL.
You've got 50% of the revenue growth that is coming from upsells. And here also, we have the ability to follow our clients and continue to expand internationally, as well as, of course, cross-sell.
That's very helpful color . So it looks like a lot of growth drivers across all businesses. You emphasized GenAI a couple of times. I just wanted to drill down further on GenAI, and maybe this is more broader across your company. You talked about how it's helping drive better retention, and although you're giving, you're not necessarily charging for it. I was just curious, as you think about monetizing GenAI going forward over the midterm, how do you think about monetizing it, but also in the same vein, if you can talk about how you're using GenAI internally to drive improved efficiency.
Yeah, so we think about GenAI across two dimensions. The first one is what I think every company is doing or should be doing, which is on the business. Everybody can have a more efficient finance function, a more efficient legal function, a more efficient ability to code. All of those incremental process improvements are generating efficiencies. And we're doing that. I would say everybody can do that. In addition, and where Nasdaq is differentiated in its positioning is the ability to do it in the products. So if you can do GenAI for your clients in your products, you have the ability to generate real revenue growth associated with it. And that's very important.
What enables us to be already in markets, and I mentioned, for example, the Entity Copilot that we have with 2,000 clients, 1,000 have adopted it, is that we were in the cloud 10 years ago, and we were in AI seven years ago. So from the point of view of other clients, we need to move to the clients that need to start referencing the data to be able to use it in AI. And that's a very long journey versus we had done that journey seven years ago. And that's one of the great examples of us having been innovative early, doing the right amount of R&D when it looked early seven years ago. But today, this is horizon one that says exactly how we are generating the revenue that you're seeing in our numbers.
For example, for Financial Crime Management, you saw a net retention of 14%, net retention of 14%. That involves CPI plus, plus, plus. The way we generate that is by being able to go to our clients and showing them the ROIC that we add to them, not just through GenAI, but also through the base product, which is AI related as opposed to algorithmic AI as opposed to GenAI. That value is presented to them as a proof point of how we can actually justify the prices and the prices increase that we sell them. So it's very well received. It's very appropriate given the value that we add. If you go through the other products, it's the same idea where today we are embedding it in our products. We are delivering it to our clients.
And we believe that that enables us to support the upsells as well as the cross-sells that we are generating rather than separately charging for it. There's only one product which we charge separately for, which is a sustainability lens. But it's a very small amount of dollars.
That's great color . So you talked about retention, cross-sell, upsell, but also greater pricing power with GenAI. That's very helpful color . Maybe just switching around a bit, but within the fintech itself, there was a difference between the ARR growth and revenue growth in the quarter. So maybe if you can talk about what's driving that difference and how do we think about revenues catching up to ARR.
Yeah. So just for context, we had last quarter 10% revenue growth across the company, 10% also in solutions. And we had in fintech 14% of ARR and 10% of revenue growth. And so I'd say, first of all, I would say that 10% is a strong number to start with. But 14%, it's the very high end of our range in the ARR. And so the gap was very simple. It was due to the professional services fees as well as some of the timing of booking. And so when you look at the two factors, professional services fees was driven by one large capital market infrastructure implementation that happened in 2023, which generated a $27 million revenue. And that very strong 2023 implementation was a great client that converted into ARR for this year. But that still created a timing of revenue gap. So that's the first explanation.
And then the second one is on regulatory tech. We also had some of the timing of booking. As well as we move to the cloud, there is also a little bit of gap. Sometimes you can create between the revenue and the ARR.
Anything, any percent takes that we need to be cognizant of in the 4Q?
So we don't have any further color to give than what we gave in the third quarter. But you're going to continue to see a little bit of that professional services fees as well as the time to revenue and timing of booking that will have a little bit of influence. But there is absolutely nothing new versus what we said in the third quarter call.
That's very helpful color . Maybe if we can talk about the synergy, sorry, the expense synergies, so can you just help us understand where you are in terms of the expense synergies for the Adenza acquisition? And how should we think about the benefit to the margins this year, but also over the midterm?
Yeah. So we announced a net $80 million of synergies at the time of the acquisition. And we also said after that that we would accomplish the first 70% of that by year end 2024. So we were glad to report that we accomplished the 70% in the second quarter. We accomplished 80% in the third quarter. So we are very much ahead of expectation in terms of delivering the synergies that we told the market to expect. That is providing leverage to our operational expense. And so 2 percentage points of growth is what we told you to expect for the full year 2024. So that's to say that our expense would have been 2 percentage points higher if it was not for the benefit of the synergies. So it's a very meaningful impact.
What you have seen in the third quarter, and that was like an exceptional quarter in terms of operational leverage. So I wouldn't say that that's a rule of thumb. But 10% revenue was matched with 5% expense growth. So creating 2 percentage points of increase in both operating margin as well as EBITDA margin.
That's great color . And maybe taking a step back, like how should we think on a more normalized basis the spread between revenue growth and expense growth or margin expansion opportunities over the midterm?
Yeah, so what I love about the Nasdaq business model is that it kind of like does it all. It has the revenue growth, which we've talked about. It has the expense leverage, and I'll come back to the differential, and then it has a free cash flow conversion, so for me, those are the three pillars of a company that is very, very attractive and well managed because they are a virtuous circle. In fact, there are only 15 companies in the S&P 500 that has a Rule of 60, which is what we have at the scale of $4 billion of revenues and $1.6 billion of free cash flow and with growth above 5%, which we are significantly exceeding at this point, so we feel very good about that positioning.
The way we achieved that is, first of all, having great innovative products for our clients and having invested in technology for a long time. And that enables us to give you a medium-term outlook, which has for solutions, which is approximately 80%, just a little less than 80% of our revenue at 8%-11% medium-term outlook. So 8%-11%. And then we give you 300 basis points lower for the expense growth outlook. So that's 5%-8%. So immediately that creates an operating leverage, even though on the last close to 20% or just above that, you are going to have the growth of Market Services, which we don't give a medium-term outlook, but you would not expect that to be as high as the solutions revenue growth over time.
Yeah, that was very helpful color . And maybe one more question on fintech. The guidance was for $100 million of cross-sell opportunities by 2027. I was just wondering if you could?
100.
100, sorry. You obviously talked about a lot of strong momentum on new wins, upsell, cross-sell. But I was just wondering if you could talk about how should we think about this $100 million of synergies in terms of timing? Is it ratable or back-end loaded?
Yeah, so very much back-end loaded. The way we proceed with our clients is dialogue, which is going to be illustrated in the pipeline. From that dialogue, sometimes you have to do a POC, for example, for Financial Crime Management. Then you've got putting in place the MSA and finally implementation. That whole timeline is a fairly long timeline, which is why you are seeing the impact being back-ended. That being said, we already have 13 cross-sell to date, seven of which were this year, two last quarter. We are making progress. We also have more than 10% of our pipeline, which is coming from cross-sell, which is very much calibrated to what you would want to have to be able to achieve the $100+ million of cross-sell revenue that we have given to the street.
And what we're also seeing is like the campaigns that we're doing, the voice of clients that we're having are all working. So we are hearing from our clients that they want to do more with us, that they see us as a partner, that they want to consolidate vendors into significant partners, which was very much our thesis. So all of those qualitative are also supportive of the quantitative that I just mentioned.
That's great. That's great. Moving on to the second pillar and the Capital Access Platform, you mentioned a very strong growth profile in index business. I was just wondering, how do you see the opportunity to grow the index business going forward?
Yes, so index has been like a great story. For those who have not followed us for a long time, if you go back to 2017, which was the time when we said we want to be the trusted fabric of the financial system, we had $100 million of revenue in index. We were approximately $100 billion of AUM. Very, very small part. We were not speaking about it too much. We invested organically. That's a great story of organic growth where today in 2024, so seven years after, we have multiplied those numbers by six to seven. So six times in seven years. That's really good in terms of the investments that we have put in there with a very strong incremental margin associated with those products. So we are sitting at over $600 billion in AUM at this point in index.
And what's also interesting is we have greatly diversified. Everybody knows Nasdaq-100, and that has done very well. It is actually the index probably that has performed the best across cycles. You can look at it over a long cycle. You can look at it over short cycles. There is really very, very strong performance of that index. But in addition, we also are valued as Nasdaq as one of the top 100 global brands, which has enabled us to associate ourselves with other products, which constitute 20%, 25% of the inflows or the AUMs. So a significant diversification is accomplished. And we're doing that across new products, new geographies, and also going into institutional. And last quarter, for example, we had 35 new products. 20 were international. Seven were in insurance annuity-related. We also had some yield-oriented products.
We have some products that are related to innovation in different types, and so all of that suite of development enables us to sustain growth and also to have the maturing of the index options in the Market Services piece.
That's great color . Maybe switching gears a bit within the segment itself, can you comment on the IPO pipeline? What do you see there? And on a related note, there have been some very high-profile switches. What's driving those switches?
Yeah. So we were delighted with the switch last week and are delighted to welcome Palantir to Nasdaq. We also are delighted to sustain a 75% win rate, 85% last quarter, and to have just a continued ability to attract great companies to Nasdaq. And the reason for that is very simple. First of all, we have the most invested technology. Because we have 130 marketplaces and we own approximately 20 of them, that enables us to put in a lot more dollars in tech and to learn from a global franchise of marketplaces that we enable to really produce the best quality platform for ourselves. Second of all, it's really an ecosystem, a lot of dialogue fabric. And we add value to our clients in many ways.
We also have great products like IR Insight or Boardvantage, which are part of helping our public companies going public, including some that we include in the value proposition, and so overall, it's a very sustainable value, and then you, of course, add the ability for the large companies to be part of Nasdaq-100, so what we're seeing in terms of the environment is very constructive right now. When we talked at the third quarter at the eve of the election, we were seeing the green shoot. We were seeing the IPO pulse being towards the highest end of where it had been since 2021.
But there was still a looming uncertainty as to whether we would even have an election result at this point, which clearly we do, and whether the markets would have the ability to catch a window in the fourth quarter, in the first quarter, depending on the volatility in the market. I would say today there is a lot of activity around dialogue towards new IPOs. So we are expecting a pickup. We are not talking about 2021 levels, just so that we are very clear. And think about it in terms of how you translate that into our financial statements as being gradual. And the reason for that is because everything gets amortized, because you still have some of the delistings impact of this year and of the previous year. You still have the amortization of the cost of 2021.
As far as the environment, we are hearing many companies who are getting ready for 2026 accelerating their plans. But what you can't do is accelerate to the point of writing an S-1 in a week. And so the markets are open. A lot of people are gearing towards either primary issuance, i.e., IPO, or secondaries. It's a productive backdrop for our business. But it will take some time for the companies to ready themselves as well as for the financials to translate.
That's great color . So as the IPO picks up their data and listing revenues, as you mentioned, there are some headwinds from prior delisting and amortization. But as we start to see the pickup, that should be a tailwind over the midterm.
Over the midterm, yes, absolutely.
That's great, and maybe I was just wondering within the capital access if you could also address some of the weakness we've seen in corporate solution. How do we think about the inflection there?
Yeah. So the way to think about corporate solutions, it's a delayed impact to the IPO environment. So in an environment where you actually don't think that you are going to be accessing the capital markets, you're starving your IR function, you're not investing in it. And what we're seeing today is that, for example, there's tons of dialogue. I myself have a lot of dialogue with some of our companies that are public or that are going public that are really gearing towards investing in their corporate infrastructure to being a public company, which could include whether it's Boardvantage, whether it's some of the sustainability disclosure, which in Europe is required, whether it is some of the IR Insight. That becomes much more relevant in today's environment than it might have been.
But again, because part of those products are free for three years, it takes a very long time for that to translate. And so we're still in a slow cycle and experiencing the environment that we have experienced rather than the one that we are experiencing to have.
Okay. No, that's very helpful color . Maybe a quick question on Market Services. How do you think about these current macro environment, like the macro factors, election, rate volatility? How does that influence the Market Services business?
Yeah. So what's driving the Market Services business is really much more the volatility than the specifics of the macro factor. And so it's not about the direction of GDP or consumer. It's really about whether the market expects a shift in this. And so, for example, an election creates a potential shift in investor sentiment, which relates to repositioning of portfolios. And in that repositioning, you end up having volumes. And we have seen that the week of the election. But what has been interesting is that the volumes have remained sustained. And I think it's because what we are seeing today is a constructive volatility. And so new investors will be well positioned to know that people believe in being invested and in actually taking advantage of those market conditions to be productive in the markets as opposed to retrenching and waiting to see.
So that is what is driving our business in general. But obviously, that volatility can change over time.
Yeah. We are at top of 30 minutes. Again, really appreciate this opportunity. Thank you. Thanks, everyone.
Thank you.