All right, our next section is with Nasdaq. Thank you everyone for joining today's session. 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 more well known to be an exchange operator, but it has been transforming to become more like a technology provider. Today we are very excited to have the Chair and CEO, Adena Friedman, joining us. Thank you, Adena, for your time.
Well, it's great to be here, Owen, thank you.
For the people who are listening to the webcast, please feel free to submit your questions online, and we'll do our best to address your questions. Without further delay, Adena, let's start off with a more macro question. How do you think about economy for the rest of this year, and maybe even going into 2024? Can you please talk about the pipeline of the IPO market, like many, many people ask these questions, and do you expect more companies to go public in the second half of 2023 compared to the first half?
I think, first of all, I, I think what, what we're seeing is the fact that the economy in the United States has remained remarkably resilient. The employment environment is strong, the overall consumer spending is strong, and we're seeing really continued resilience of an economic, you know, an economic activity. We've also been able to see through Q2 earnings, you know, which sectors of the economy are continuing to do well, which sectors may be recovering from a kind of a post-COVID lull. We're seeing just strength in many of the sectors that have been really emerged on the back of COVID.
As a result of that, what we're also seeing is this, this really interesting enthusiasm for how technology will continue to expand the economic outcome, expand the economic outlook, but also really kind of continue to define the economy going forward, particularly as we think about how AI could impact the economy. The markets have been strong, and the result of that has been a good recovery in our index values. Also, we're starting to see what we're calling light green shoots when it comes to more activity in the IPO market. We have had a relatively, as we all know, a very- I should say, not relatively, quite slow start into 2023 from a new issuance perspective. We're really proud of the fact that we continue to have the vast majority of companies choose Nasdaq.
We have had a 77% win rate so far this year. As we go into the second half of the year, we're starting to see some of the larger companies that we've been talking with for a long time really, preparing themselves to you know, to tap the public markets, if, of course, the environment stays receptive. There's always that "if" that we have to put in front of that. When we look at our overall pipeline, which is continues to be very strong at about 150 companies or so, the majority of them still are focused on 2024. You know, the first half of 2024, if the economy does, in fact, end up with a relatively soft landing or mild continued expansion, the employment environment remains solid.
Doesn't have to be as strong as it is now, but solid, and then the interest rate environment is known, then I think that we'll find that there are a lot of companies who are looking in the first half 2024 to go public.
Got it. Another kind of, common question is, I think Nasdaq also talk about, which is the elongated sales cycle. Many other company, tech companies talk about that. Like, given the kind of improving macro outlook, have you heard any change of tone from your clients? Do you see any, like, stabilization, in the sales cycle so far?
When we talk about the elongated sales cycle, we're really primarily focused on our Capital Access Platforms business because you know, we have three key divisions. We have Capital Access Platforms, which are the products we sell to corporates and investors. We have our Market Platforms, which are the products that are sold primarily to banks and brokers, with some, with some institutional investors as well. Then we have our Anti-Financial Crime technology business, which is really focused on the banks and brokerage community. The part of our business that we've seen the longer sales cycles has primarily been with some level of corporates, particularly with IR.
You know, if the, if the, if the markets aren't doing great, and they're looking at how they can manage their expense base in the context of the market's not being, you know, really, really strong, I think that it tends to fall on those organizations that have some control over that. Our IR tools have had some longer sales cycles. However, the advisory business, where we help companies unpack who's buying and selling, why are they buying and selling, who should they target, that's actually remained quite strong. I think on the other side, on the investor side, our analytics platforms that are primarily designed to serve the investor owner, the asset owner community, like pensions, sovereign wealth funds, and endowments, that, that part of our business has had longer sales cycles.
Those are bigger sales decisions to, to launch a portfolio management tool when they've been relying on Excel or something else for a long time. That is, that we've seen slow down there. But investment, which is the kind of what I would call an intelligence tool that connects asset owners and asset managers, we've seen a relatively stable environment there. We go over towards the banks and brokers community, and then the exchanges. We've actually had a pickup in sales, as we've got into the exchange world, but that's because COVID actually created more, more challenge in the sales cycles for our Marketplace Technology business, and we're starting to see a recovery there.
Whereas with our Anti-Financial Crime business, it's such essential technology, it's got such a strong return on investment, such a, an, a calculable time-to-value because we're saving them money, essentially. We actually haven't seen any slowness or any real significant changes in sales cycles there.
Got it. We'll, we'll dive into each business one by one later on, but let's start with the bigger deal, Adenza. You recently make the announcement, you're gonna acquire Adenza, which is a risk management and regulatory software provider. Again, like Nasdaq, it's more well-known to be an exchange, but you started to pivot back in 2017 when you took over as CEO. How does this fit with the first five years of this transformational pivot?
Sure. Well, as we've been going through and transforming Nasdaq to be a very scaled technology provider to, what I would say, the broad, I would call it, to finally, the broad industry, which are corporates as they're tackling the capital markets, which is investors when they're managing their exposure to capital markets, and then the banks and brokerage community and all of their dealings in the financial system. We've really decided to go down three key lanes, right? The first we call, I always like to call it the Transparency pillar, and that's our Capital Access Platforms business, where we really provide access for corporates and investors to find each other, to communicate better with data and analytics, to make sure that they're managing their strategies successfully, and then also for us to create some investment strategies with our index business.
We have our Liquidity pillar, which is really our markets and our Market Technology, where we provide markets and mar- technology that underpins those markets, and then we sell that technology to other markets. We've been broadening that out to start to work with the brokerage community and providing them critical trading technology and risk management technology as well. We have our Integrity pillar, which is our Anti-Financial Crime business, which really is, what I would say, more broadly, kind of a RegTech platform to help banks manage their compliance and also, of course, to root out criminals and get them out of the system.
If we kind of look at those three lanes, and then you put Adenza into that mix, I think what we've really found with Adenza is why it's so strategic to us, is that it really fits squarely in the, in the Liquidity pillar, and then also in the Integrity pillar, and then there's an element of transparency that they also provide. Adenza provides critical trading and risk management technology to a very broad set of banks and brokers around the world. It's a great complement to our Market Technology business. That's the Calypso platform. Then they also provide RegTech technology through AxiomSL to serve banks in terms of the regulatory compliance, and a huge part of Anti-Financial Crime is regulatory reporting.
There is a really good core line of sight and strategic alignment with the Axiom platform, with our Integrity pillar, with the Calypso platform, I mean, our Liquidity pillar. As we think about how we continue to evolve the technology that underpins Adenza, as they've been really executing their cloud strategy, there's a large opportunity for us to think about the transparency that we can provide as we make those systems smarter, when in more of a cloud format for those technologies going forward.
Got it. Let's talk about some numbers here. The ARR growth of Adenza was, I think, high teens in the first half.
That's correct.
How should investor think about the medium-term growth profile of Adenza? It's like 15% revenue CAGR, the right expectation over the next three to five years?
We haven't given a specific revenue in medium-term outlook specifically for Adenza, but we have said that it has been exhibiting a 15% growth rate in their, in the revenue profile. We did mention that the ARR in the first half of the year has been about 18%, that's exciting. As we look at how we fit Adenza into our Financial Technology platform, which is really gonna be a combination of our Marketplace Technology business and our Anti-Financial Crime business, we bring it all together with Adenza. Our medium-term outlook for that whole platform, which we're now calling our Financial Technology platform, is about a 10%-14% medium to long-term outlook on the growth rate there. You've got some very high growth areas of that business with our Verafin platform.
You've got some, you know, I would say, mid to high single-digit growth, parts of that business with our marketplace or market tech platform. Then you've got Adenza that's in those teams that, you know, we haven't defined specifically, but that kind of is what rounds it out, to think about that 10%-14% growth rate.
Got it. During the last earnings call, you talk about why you think growth rate of Adenza is sustainable. One of the reasons you talk about, it's the go-to market strategy. Adenza can go to the client with one module and then demonstrate the value, and then you can further penetrate and, and upsell some other modules. Could you please elaborate this point further for us so that we, we can appreciate the power of that further penetration?
Sure, yeah. Well, I think first let's start with what are the trends that are, that are really underpinning our growth expectations for the business? I think the first thing is that the overall total market opportunity for, for what Adenza provides, if we look at all the banks spend around those services that Adenza provides, it's about $18 billion, and it's growing at about a 6% growth rate. Then you look at the serviceable addressable market, which is just the vended spend, meaning they have internal build, and they also have services that are provided by vendors. So that's the serviceable addressable market that we provided. That, I think, is somewhere in the range of...
I actually don't have it in front of me, but it's somewhere in the range of 8-10, and that's growing at an 8% number. Just the fact that the market opportunity is growing quite nicely and that you're seeing a switch from internal build to vended spend, is obviously a good tailwind for the business. When you look at how both Calypso and Axiom are built. They're built as platforms with very flexible modules, and they have a lot of modules that they can deploy. They have a land-and-expand strategy, similar to how we work our architect business. It's a land-and-expand strategy. How we actually penetrated the banks and brokers with our surveillance platform was a land-and-expand strategy, where you go in with one module, one capability.
Maybe you provide regulatory reporting for the United States for a large-scale bank, and you say, "Here, you want to modernize your regulatory reporting for the Fed." Well, that's a module. Then you say, "Well, you know what? Actually, let's do the Fed and the OCC. Let's factor in the SEC. Let's actually look at other regulations that we have to comply with in the United States," and you're adding modules, you know, over time, and that's an incremental opportunity for, or, you know, a bigger opportunity for Axiom. Then they say, "Well, you know what? You've done such a good job for us in the United States, let's go to Europe." We have a plethora of regulatory regimes that we have to navigate in Europe. That's a group of modules that they would then go buy.
Then they say, "Gosh, you know, why don't we get everything on the same platform? Let's get all of our regulatory reporting across 100 different regulators in one place," and that's what Adenza can do. That then becomes an enterprise platform, right? It's a really. The same thing, by the way, on the capital market side. I go in with trading analytics. I then move to collateral management. I go with clearing. I want to do treasury risk management, liquidity risk management, and you just go across the business, and you're helping them manage their, their capital markets exposure and risk everywhere. The result of that platform and the flexibility of that is that about half of the growth comes from upselling clients. The benefit of that is that you've got a shorter time to market.
You know, you usually already have a master services agreement. It's basically so you have a shorter sales cycle, you have a faster implementation cycle, and so that's a very good sale, right? The second half of it is the is a combination of pricing and new client sales. We did give some stats on, you know, upselling and, and, and new sales within the first half of the year, just to give people a sense of what they're experiencing as they're managing through 2023.
Got it. Another reason I think you're optimistic about the growth, it's like the, the regulatory and complex environment, you just talk about. A driver of that was the banking crisis in March.
Mm-hmm
... but the other side of the argument is it could reduce the number of banks, in this universe. How do you think about the net effect of this?
I, I still think it's, it's just, it's an enormous opportunity. I'll start with there are a lot of new regulations coming around the world. So you've got Basel III end state, or endgame, I guess is what they call it, or Basel IV, whatever you wanna call it. You know, there's that whole implementation that's happening, and though some of those, some of those principles are now coming into the United States, and then you've got, on top of that, even, you know, even incremental, incrementally more regulation that's coming on the back of the challenge that everyone saw in March. That means that more mid-sized banks are gonna be subject to a higher regulatory standard.
I think that that obviously is a great opportunity, and one of the banks that, that, Adenza signed in the first half of the year was probably one of the shorter sales cycles they've they've experienced with a super-regional U.S. bank, who recognized the fact that they're entering in their, their, their AUM is, their assets, I should say, are just going above $100 billion, and they wanna get ahead of the regulatory obligation. They basically bought the platform. That was a, a really interesting, I think, test case in terms of the power that the, the platform has to help the banks, manage through this new regulatory regime.
You're asking also, "Okay, well, that's great, but Adena, there might be bank consolidation." I think I wanna talk about that, both in terms of Adenza, but also in terms of our Anti-Financial Crime business. Adenza has hundreds of banks and brokers around the world. Consolidation of banks in the United States actually could be quite beneficial to them because if two small banks decide to merge and become larger, they then might also be subject to a higher regulatory standard. They may not have been a client before, and they become one. All right? I think, in the U.S., that actually could be a significant opportunity.
Also recognizing that, you can see we actually provided a kind of a breakdown of this of the clientele across Axiom and Calypso, and they tend to skew towards, you know, I would say, the top 500 banks in the world, right. But now they're actually starting to see more and more opportunity to go into smaller, you know, kind of the mid-sized bank space, both on Axiom, on regulatory reporting, and Calypso. They also see more and more opportunity to go to the investment management sector, as they're getting subjected to more regulatory obligations and scrutiny as well. All of that kind of creates a great tailwind. With Verafin and the Anti-Financial Crime business, that's where we're penetrated across 2,500 banks.
One of the things that Verafin does in their contracts, though, is that if there is a merger and their asset base goes higher, they get a higher contract value. Their contract will adjust to a higher asset base. That actually does protect them against mergers of the banks in the United States.
Got it. I think the third driver you mentioned on the deck, like you put out during earnings call, it's the migration to cloud. I think the number was 53% of the sales this year have been cloud-deployed modules. Could you please expand that point further? How can it help Adenza increase their share of wallet?
I think let's look at cloud in the context also of Nasdaq. I'll directly answer that question, then we'll kind of look at how do we then see that as an opportunity within Nasdaq. That's correct, that 53% of the sales in the first half were cloud, cloud-delivered modules. That means it's if you are an existing client, and you say, "Gosh, I need to actually I'm gonna go in and do treasury risk management with you now. You've been helping us on collateral management, and you've been helping us manage, you know, looking at trading analytics.
We wanna kind of bring all of that into our treasury function, and we wanna deploy our treasury, treasury management solution with you. Well, that's another module, and the cool thing is that, that all of the data that, you know, kind of, kind of, we can bring all that data together, but we can deliver that module as a cloud-based module. What that really means is it's a single-tenant implementation in a cloud environment where we're the managed service provider. So it's no longer deployed where you have to manage the technology, and the infrastructure, and the configuration anymore. We actually manage that for you. That, or I should say, Adenza manages that for you.
The result of that is that we get a higher contract value, because we're doing more for you to serve you in providing that service. They do see that as a way to amplify their share of wallet, because they're taking a burden off the client, and they're delivering it as more of a SaaS, a SaaS-oriented service. I do wanna be clear that these are still single-tenant implementations of cloud. What we see as an opportunity within Nasdaq, as you know, Owen, cloud has been something that we've been investing in for a really long time at Nasdaq. We've done a lot of work to optimize how we leverage cloud, and we have a very deep partnership with AWS, as well as a really strong relationship with Microsoft and Google.
When we look at the opportunity for us to help really amplify and accelerate the Adenza in the cloud, I think it's because we know how to deploy it in a very, very efficient way. We can look at how do you start to create a platform layer that maybe allows us to be even more modern in how it's delivered? Even if the modules themselves are single-tenant, you know, how can you make a data management layer that might be more comprehensive for them, and that allows us to even kind of continue that journey and maybe accelerate that journey, but also make sure that we're delivering it in a hyper-efficient way?
We're pretty excited about what we can do with Adenza as we work with them on that strategy, but it is, it is a big opportunity for them.
Got it. Adenza itself, I think it has a pretty high margin. I think it's 58% adjusted EBITDA margin. How should we think about the CapEx and maybe incremental margin from here? How high the margin can go?
We actually, I think, have said that the CapEx is around $20 million-$30 million a year within Adenza. When we look at their EBIT, so their EBITDA is 58%, their EBIT is 56%, so it's not a huge delta between EBIT and, I mean, EBITDA and EBIT, which is great. And actually, Nasdaq, you know, Nasdaq's quite capital light as well. We have about, you know, $150 million-$200 million of CapEx every year across everything we do, whether that's our buildings, our technology, hardware, software, everything. I think that, you know, we know how to be efficient, they know how to be efficient.
When we think about the opportunity for margin expansion, we think about the synergies that we've discussed with the shareholders, I think there's a few, few opportunities for margin expansion. First, is the fact we will achieve our synergies. We've, we've announced that there's $80 million of net expense synergies that we expect to see. Second, their platform and ours. I think as we move... That, by the way, those synergies are gonna come from us bringing our teams together. It's not just gonna come out of Adenza, it's coming out of Nasdaq and Adenza, creating a single operating model, single team, single structure, to go to market and manage our clients. So we see that for Marketplace Technology, for surveillance, and for Adenza together, becoming a really great leverageable platform.
That then allows us then, with growth, for us, we will always invest in our platform, we'll always invest in the technology. They already, they've been doing a great job of investing in our platform. At the same time, you know, if we have good growth like we expect to have, that becomes, you know, over time, that's margin expansion. Because they have a very high gross margin of about, I think it's around 80%, or it's like 70%-80%. They have a high gross margin and a leverageable platform, and then with cloud also, we also then, that can become margin expansive over time as well. That's a, that's a journey, though. The last thing, of course, is cross-sells, right?
We have a great ability to cross-sell our products across our franchise, across our platform now, and with them. As we look at that, that also obviously amplifies the growth rate of the combined business, that if you assume it's margin accretive, which we see it as a margin accretive activity, with that high, higher gross margin, then I think that we see that also as margin accretive in general.
Got it. In terms of maybe some strength in Adenza, how do you think about maybe importing some of the strength from Adenza to Nasdaq? Like, such as, I, I think I remember some go-to-market strategy you can utilize from Adenza. Do you think it's applicable to, to Nasdaq, or it's too early to, to tell?
Yeah, no, that's that is part of our synergy expectation. They've done, they've done a really nice job of creating a kind of an enterprise sales layer, then with a very specific product strategy team, product specialists, then going to client service, and managing it through that technology development group. While we have that within each of our franchises, they're not all- it's not all one, right? It's different groups, and so we can obviously bring that into a singular, singular group. That enterprise sales layer is not something we've had at Nasdaq either. I think that that also allows us to think more holistically about the sales opportunities within these very large clients, and that's not just within Financial Technology. That will also span across to Capital Access Platforms as well.
We also think that this go-to-market, The way that they do the handoffs and the go-to-market approach is something we've been working to get to a state of maturity on within Marketplace Technology. We have a little bit more of a state of maturity and surveillance, Verafin is this is an organization with a very mature process there. We actually think that that will benefit a lot from maturing that go-to-market approach within the Nasdaq products that then complement the Adenza products.
Got it. I, I think we can talk about Adenza for, for, for, for, for a long time, let's switch gear a little bit to, to other topic, which is digital assets. On the last earnings call, Nasdaq announced that it will halt the launch of digital assets custodian business, I think which created some headlines. Nasdaq still provides some other services to the crypto industry, such as surveillance and also IPO and, and stuff like that. How do you think about the future of digital assets in the United States?
Yeah, sure. Well, digital assets in the United States, I mean, I think that we just have to recognize, and I was saying to someone earlier today, you know, you start a strategy of, for instance, for us to launch a custodian business in the United States, and you're kind of thinking of yourself as probably on a country road that's winding. I mean, you know, 'cause it's, you know, it's not exactly a clear road in front of us, and it wasn't a year and a half ago. Then you start to see some very significant roadblocks start to come in front of you, and that can be in the form of what happened with FTX, the regulatory...
the, you know, kind of the regulatory discussions and, and area, you know, uncertainty that's been, that's been thrown into the mix, the court decisions that have been thrown into the mix, the fact that there are conflicting court decisions. That then creates these roadblocks, and you have to start to, you know, always reevaluate, are you going down a path that you continue to believe that will be an accretive activity for shareholders, and that you will actually provide a unique value that you believe that you have a right to win at? I think that as we started to look at the custodian business, and let me be clear, we provide already a very good technology for trading crypto, for surveilling crypto, and now for custodying crypto. We have...
We've built a great, I mean, a really good next-gen technology for custody capabilities in crypto. We also have Anti-Financial Crime capabilities for crypto. We have a very good technology strategy to continue to continue to serve the crypto markets around the world. As us, as an operator of a custodian in the United States, given the regulatory changes, and the overlay, and the, and the challenges that have been put in front of the market in the United States, our decision was just now is not the right time to launch that. We decided to halt the, the launch.
We were working towards the end of getting our regulatory approval, and we just looked at the business opportunity, and we said, "It's really changed." As we continue to evaluate us as an operator in the United States, we'll continue to look at the regulatory landscape and say: Are there avenues and ways that we think we can launch as an operator in a way that allows us to have a right to win? But the fact is, we might choose to really focus in on that, our technology role as kind of the first and foremost role that we have going forward.
Got it. Nasdaq also filed an application to list the BlackRock spot Bitcoin ETF. I don't know how much you wanna comment on that, but how much confidence do you have, and when do you think you can get the approval from the SEC?
Um
with the inclusion of the surveillance sharing agreement?
Yeah. So, it's not for us to get the approval, it's actually for BlackRock to get the approval. We've been really, we, we so appreciate the partnership we have with BlackRock and also with Coinbase, because the way that it's gonna work is Coinbase will serve as the underpinning of the price, the price discovery for the ETF. They will also have other exchanges over time, or if there are others that they wanna add, but Coinbase is the, is the exchange of choice for, for their launch.
So we've entered into an information sharing agreement with Coinbase on surveillance-related information, so that we and BlackRock know that as an ETF issuer and as the ETF listing agent, that we'll have access to the information we need to understand the trading activity in the ETF and as it relates to the trading activity in the underlying that sits on Coinbase. That's an important relationship. We have that in other instances with other asset classes, but we've done a nice job with Coinbase and with BlackRock of working through that. With that, it actually gives us confidence also to be the listing exchange for this, because we know we'll have access to information we need to do a proper job of surveilling the activity of the ETF.
I don't have a view on a CEO in terms of the approval process. That's, that's for BlackRock to work on with the SEC.
That's fine. I'm looking forward to, like, a 2023 or 2024 answer anyway.
Mm.
All right. Another hot topic is AI, artificial intelligence. Can you please talk about some of the key Gen AI initiatives in Nasdaq? How can these projects create kind of like the incremental revenue and cost savings opportunity for Nasdaq?
Yeah. Well, it's one of my favorite topics. So, so well, we actually already are a, a good, a very solid user of AI in, in... not, so let's- like, we'll put Generative AI here. We've been actually, deploying AI, other, other forms of AI within Nasdaq now for some time, and I'll give you a couple examples, and then we'll talk about Gen AI and, and its impact on the business. Within the Anti-Financial Crime business, we use Bayesian models, deep learning, and other, other AI techniques to be smarter in, in identifying potential criminal activity. They do things through pattern recognition and, and, and self-learning techniques that are really, really interesting. I mean, really fascinating, actually. One example is with human trafficking, we start with, you know, we look at every transaction.
We have consortium data models, so the, the, the data across the 2,500 banks can be pooled. We then look at all the transactions that have occurred. We have certain patterns that we understand are likely patterns of human traffickers, and we get that. By talking to experts, and one of the experts we have is a woman who was a victim of human trafficking long ago, and she formed an organization that helps law enforcement build cases to be able to put these terrible people in prison. So she's actually been working with Verafin for quite some time to help them really think through the patterns of behaviors in terms of how, how the human traffickers use the banking system, how they kind of.
What kind of footprint did they leave online, and things like that, to help us make sure we have the right models. We then use AI learning to make those models smarter and smarter, and that's what makes our engine better than our competitors, because we can eliminate lots of false positives and get much, much more accurate depictions of this criminal behavior. That's an example. The second one is we have our first AI-driven order type that we're asking the SEC to approve, where we're just taking about 125 different market characteristics in every stock, each stock, every 30 seconds, to put a variable timer on our Midpoint Extended Life Order, so we're calling that Dynamic M-ELO, that allows us to help institutional investors get a better fill rate based on the characteristics of the market at any given moment.
That's another example. Now we move to Generative AI, and that's where you're talking about content, and that's where you have this wild- I mean, like, this very wide and exciting and varied way of leveraging AI across the across the franchise, and we talk about it in the business and on the business. Kind of in the products, we can automate some of the workflows in AFC, in Anti-Financial Crime, in the surveillance business. We can do, like, summaries of board reports in our, in our, our Nasdaq board avantage platform. We can do things in the products that make the workflows a lot more, a lot more efficient for the users. Super excited about that. We're already working on deploying our first kind of workflow co-pilot within the Verafin platform. Hopefully, you know, soon.
We'll, we'll talk more about that when we, when we launch it. The second, the second use case is on the business. The coding co-pilot is the most obvious opportunity for us. We have a very, you know, we have a very scaled technology organization. We're growing fast. We want to get better at testing. We want to get better at, you know, faster in delivering code. We wanna make it so that we have and amplify the capabilities of our development organization, and we definitely see a lot of potential there. That obviously will amplify even further with Adenza. You know, we're really excited about that. We have different proofs of concepts that we're deploying across Nasdaq now within our development organizations to see what drives the most efficiency, and therefore, what should we build and scale to?
The last thing is, of course, on just content creation and, and working with the legal teams and the marketing teams and others to become more efficient in managing that kind of content. Sorry, long answer, but it's a really exciting part of what we're looking at right now.
No problem. I think we, we have about seven minutes left, so maybe let's switch gear a little bit to another bigger segment or the larger segment, eventually the Financial Technology segment. Under this Financial Technology segment, I think you, you have Anti-Financial Crime, you have the surveillance, and you, you have Adenza going forward. Maybe can you please talk about the potential cross-sell opportunity between your Verafin and Adenza business? You touched a little bit earlier, but can you add more detail on that?
Yeah, sure. Yeah, so I think that when we think about the user universe, and we've been really focused on looking at decision-makers within the banking, banks and brokers, 'cause it's important to recognize that these are very large organizations, and so you have to know that you're kind of walking in a similar door, you know, as you're looking at different services. We look at key decision-makers. You've got the head of trading, kind of the front office head of trading, capital markets, and that's where the Calypso platform, in some cases, the market surveillance platform is sold into that channel, as well as trading and other capital markets technology that Nasdaq already provides, and that's a good cross-sell as we think about the front office.
There's trading analytics and other risk management capabilities that Calypso provides. You look at the CFO, sometimes in the banks, the CFO also has a risk management role, and sometimes they don't. The CFO, we've got treasury analytics. You know, a lot of them are public companies, so they need IR and other things that support them, governance platforms. Then they also will look at, from the CFO's perspective, as I mentioned, the treasury risk management and other tools that Adenza provides. You look at head of risk management. I mean, that's where you've got, you've got AFC, you've got the Verafin platform, the surveillance platform, the Axiom platform, in many respects also, elements of the Calypso platform around risk management.
That's a critical door that allows us to cross-sell an enormous amount of what we offer within the Financial Technology business. I think that that's where we have to develop, though, the muscles and the capabilities with this, as I mentioned, the go-to-market and the enterprise sales approach, to be able to think about how we solve their problems holistically, leveraging these solutions, and what can we do to make it easier for them to use them? Over a longer period of time, we'll have a great... I mean, this is gonna be super creative in how we can continue to develop these products to make them even more useful and more integrated.
Got it. Adena, you just talked about the Capital Access Platforms, which is another big part of your business other than Financial Technology, and within that, I think the index business has been doing quite well recently. I think the growth rate was about 22% CAGR over the past five years, based on my math, and we saw a substantial recovery in AUM in the Q2 . Could you please talk about the growth driver of the index business going forward? Is it mainly driven by market appreciation, or there's a demand for your index from new funds?
Yeah, it's actually been a good combination of both. When we look at the, the last year, so even with all the market turmoil, the downturn in the markets and the downturn in market cap of the listed companies that, that sit in our index products, we still actually had $25 billion of inflows over the last year and $10 billion of inflows just in the, in the second quarter. We have indexes that are what I say capturing the imagination of the investor universe and continuing to, to show that they can grow quite substantially just in terms of investor interest. The reason for that is that we have a, we have a range.
We have obviously our benchmark index, the Nasdaq-100, which has been just a juggernaut of an index product, and obviously we had a dip in performance in the Q4 , Q1 as the markets, you know, on a, on, on a year-over-year basis, as the markets had a face of tougher times, but we've seen a good recovery of that. We also have other thematic indexes that are really tied to the future of technology, and that obviously has a big investor universe of interest. Those, those technologies, whether it's cloud, it could be cyber, it could be AI and other things, those types of technologies are obviously very important. Green energy, you know, those types of of index, thematic indexes. The last thing is smart beta.
We have more what I'll call strategic outcome indexes in terms of whether you want a dividend focus, a buyback focus, a momentum focus, a value focus. We do have indexes that really serve the different strategies that investors have. I think the result of that is that. Also, I would say the last thing is, we're not a supermarket of indexes. We've been very discreet and focused on indexes that we can create in partnership with these large asset managers that allow them to capture the interest of their investors, and that we partner on the IP. That's really been the cornerstone of our index business, and I think that's why we've had really good growth and really good focus. We have a great business. I mean, it really is a great business, so.
Got it. I think we have one or two minutes left. Maybe, Adena, I just want to give you some time. Do you have any final thoughts for us? Do you want to summarize our conversation today?
Yeah.
Anything else you want to talk about?
Yeah, thanks, Owen. Well, first of all, great questions. As you can tell, we have a lot of opportunity within the organization, and it's been an interesting time in the markets. I definitely think we've been able to demonstrate a lot of resilience as a platform, and then we still continue to have these really interesting growth drivers that underpin the business. As we kind of go forward, I do want to point to the three lanes again. We have three different growth paths that we're really focused on at Nasdaq. The first being the Transparency, Transparency pillar with our corporates and investors. ESG, and particularly the environmental side of ESG, continues to be a major focus area, where we're maturing our capabilities, providing more data-oriented products to our clients, more workflow tools. The second is the, is the Liquidity pillar.
Our markets have continued to perform really well, and it's funny, Owen, that we spent the whole time, we didn't talk about the markets. The markets have really performed, you know, quite well with really interesting liquidity characteristics, particularly in options in the U.S. Then, and then we also have our Market Technology business, which I said has had a good recovery from COVID, and we're seeing really interesting new sales there. Then we have our third pillar, which is our Integrity pillar, and that's really our Anti-Financial Crime business. Great grower, great product base, both of the surveillance and, and, and the broader Anti-Financial Crime, and, and really good growth drivers there. We're, we're excited about our future. We're excited about our future with Adenza. Thank you very much, Owen, for letting me spend some time with you.
Sounds great. Thank you very much. I think we're running out of time. Again, thanks, Adena, for your time today, and thank you all for joining us.
Great.
Have a good day.
Thank you.
Thank you. Bye-bye.