Nasdaq, Inc. (NDAQ) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hello again. Next up, we have Nasdaq. I'm Alex Kramm, I cover the exchanges and business services. Excited to have Adena Friedman here today, Chairman and CEO. Last year, you missed this event because you were gearing up for the exciting Investor Day at that time.

Right, yes.

But now that we have learned much, much more in the last year about these new assets. I'm excited we can talk about them quickly today.

So in the interest of time, I'm going to start very, very, very big picture. So obviously, Nasdaq has been a company in transition for quite some time now. And quite frankly, I feel like we talked to people already 10 years ago about how you shouldn't really be viewed as an exchange anymore. But quite frankly, I still run into people who haven't fully gotten that memo or understand it. So -- so why don't you tell us then briefly where the company is today and what the vision is for the next decade?

Great. Well, thanks. Thanks, Alex. Yes, it has been a big journey that we've been on. I've been the CEO now for a little over 8 years. And we really thought -- when I got back to Nasdaq almost 11 years ago, I can't believe it's been that long. It really was already moving in the direction of being a more, as you said, technology provider to the industry. But I think that what we've been able to do over the last 8 years is really transform the business into a leading technology provider for the financial services industry, world-class exchange operator and then a great provider of data analytics, including our index business that really helps drive and create more connection between corporates and investors. So we've organized ourselves in those 3 key divisions and we really think about the themes of being an exchange operator. What the critical nature of an exchange is to provide liquidity, transparency and integrity. And we've really geared all of our solutions in those 3 vectors. So our market services business obviously is there to drive liquidity. That's our exchange trading business. But we also have fintech solutions in terms of trade infrastructure, core infrastructure for exchanges now with Calypso trade infrastructure, end-to-end trading technology to support the brokerage community. And then -- and all of that is really to drive liquidity across the system. And the second is transparency in terms of our index business, our data analytics business and the way that we serve our corporates and helping them connect better through information with investors. And then the third is our integrity suite, which is really around regulatory reporting, anti-fincrime and surveillance. So really helping the banks manage their biggest risk areas. And we feel like if we can do all of those things successfully, we're going to grow really nicely and provide a great outcome for our shareholders. So it's very exciting.

So why don't we dig deeper into this then. So the focus for investors here in the last year or so has been on that new fintech segment, which is the combination of the Adenza acquisition, Verafin that you had acquired a couple of years before that. And then you also have some legacy technology business in there. So why -- or tell us why it made sense to bring all this businesses together and why they're going to be positioned even stronger now under the NASDAQ umbrella?

Yes. So actually, it's been really fantastic to see how the clients have reacted to us bringing all of these businesses together into one fintech division. And when you think about our clients, we have the largest banks in the world, and then we have small community banks that we serve with anti-fin crime. So we really -- and we're very global. We have clientele all over the world in every geography. And some of the recent areas of growth have been in Latin America and Southeast Asia. So we really are quite global. And the relationships that we've had with our banking clients over the years has been one of trust and I would say, long-term relationships. We have provided the core technology that has powered markets around the world now for almost 25 years. And so that has built a very trusting relationship with the center of the capital markets in countries around the world. We now also have 20 central banks who we provide critical technology to trading and risk management technology, too. And then we also -- and we also have had the surveillance suite, which is really helping banks manage the risk of anti-fincrime but in the trading sector, right, market manipulation, insider trading, things like that. So as we've expanded now to be a much more scaled provider, we now can help banks manage their biggest areas of risk, right? Managing the capital markets, all of their activities in the capital markets and the risk around that, managing the regulators and being very successful around regulatory reporting, managing the anti-fincrime and rooting criminals out of their system. And then at the center of all that, we provide that critical infrastructure that powers those capital markets around the world. And the relationship -- the conversations we have at the top of the house, we now have an enterprise sales team instead of just point solutions sales teams that makes it so they have a very strategic conversation with the bank CEOs and CFOs and COOs around how we can keep them on the field as they're managing their lives in the markets around the world. And I think it just changes everything. So I think we've shown that in terms of the growth that we've been able to exhibit so far in the fintech division. And then certainly, the opportunities that we have in front of us now are really tremendous.

So let's unpack a little bit more, in particular, on the cross-selling side between those different businesses. You have a few initiatives running at the moment. So what are the results you can talk about so far? What has surprised you positively, maybe negatively as well as you're still learning? And hopefully, for 2025, what should we be expecting? How important is cross-selling?

Yes. Yes. Well, cross-selling is a big part of the strategy, and we talked about the fact that we have a target out there to have essentially $100 million of run rate revenue by the end of 2027 coming from cross-sells. And what we also said in the fourth quarter is that we have in the range of 15% of our current pipeline is cross-sell opportunities. But when we look at kind of -- it's going to go in and out because obviously, once we sell a client, that comes out of the pipeline. So I would -- what we are looking for is to try to maintain in the range of around 10% pipeline -- 10% of our pipeline being in cross-sells and that we think we'll achieve that $100 million. And what we've seen so far has been, number one, certainly, the opportunity for us to leverage our fintech sales organization to support upselling Verafin into Tier 1s and Tier 2s and particularly in Europe. I think that's where we've just launched in Europe. We've had a lot of doors being opened by our enterprise sales organization there as we've been engaging with European corporates -- European banks, but also -- in upselling to the Tier 1s and Tier 2s. And then the second is actually taking some of the Calypso capabilities like treasury risk management and applying them to midsized banks that Verafin has trusting relationships with. Also taking Calypso into the, what we call FMIs, which are financial market intermediaries. Those are the exchanges and regulators and central banks and just driving more use of risk management, technology, collateral management, treasury risk management technology across that sector. All of those things have actually been quite -- are good showing early signs of success. But as you know, sales cycles are not 2 months or anything in the space. So they do take time for those types of strategies to play out. We've done -- we put commission plans in place around them. We've definitely educated our sales organization and people are highly motivated to work with our clients around that.

Good. So being a little bit more specific because I got to ask about near-term numbers, you just reported fourth quarter results and the initial take when I look at what we wrote and then also what the -- how the market reacted initially was ARR and the fintech business had slowed a decent amount, both year-over-year and quarter-over-quarter. I know ARR is not a perfect metric, and -- but it's a good metric, a pretty good metric. So why should we now have confidence that things will actually accelerate again to meet your outlook that you said at the Investor Day last year.

And we did provide you that view that we expect for the ARR in the Adenza businesses to maintain their medium-term outlook in the mid-teens. So -- and that's the disclosure we've already given. In general, our view is that ARR is kind of -- it is a good -- I think it is a good general view. I mean quarter-over-quarter, it's a little bit -- there's going to be a little bit more chunkiness to it. And the reason is that we're sometimes signing very large-scale deals. Some of those deals have ramp in them. When we sign a deal, we can't actually start counting it towards ARR until we've implemented and that sometimes can take time, number one. Number two, some of the contracts, and this is, I think, more geared towards the AxiomSL and Calypso have ramp involved, meaning that the first year of the contract is going to be less than the second, third and fourth. And so as the ARR ramps up, that will show up in the ramp, but we can't like reflect that. We can't reflect it until we're getting it. So I think those 2 things kind of make it to -- you're going to see some variability in ARR quarter-over-quarter, but our general view is that we're extremely excited about this year. We had very, very successful sales here last year. We have a lot of great clients that we're implementing this year. That will also play well to the implementation revenue and the professional services revenue we got in addition to the fact that we feel very good about the overall prospects for the business in 2025 and beyond.

Okay. Good. You mentioned Verafin already just a second ago, but I'm going to go into it again because that's been on a pretty impressive trajectory. It's also expected to be the fastest-growing business in the mid-20s. Now when you talk to some investors, some are even more bullish and think with all these events that we've had, financial crime events, not to name any particular banks, but some of them may be here they -- that could lead to an actual acceleration. Maybe it's a 30% plus grower. So maybe just on that, do you think that's a reasonable assumption? And then outside of that, how have the conversations changed with Tier 1s, Tier 2s and yes, how excited should we be about international as well?

Yes. Yes. So I mean, first of all, we have a medium term outlook of mid-20s in terms of the overall growth of the business, and we believe in that. I think that it will have some variability from year-over-year just in terms of how we're doing in terms of moving up market. So let me talk about the move up market. So we have kind of 3 pillars of growth that will help us sustain that type of growth rate overall. The first is in the SMB space, the small to medium banks, where we continue to have a lot of opportunity to sell and upsell and also to make it so that we're just adding a lot more value, getting -- giving them a much better return as we add capabilities, particularly around AI that we think will continue to accrue our benefit in terms of demonstrating a very differentiated product to that segment. As I mentioned -- actually, I did mention here, but in general, so we now have $10 trillion of assets represented within the clientele that we serve. And that -- and what we do is we have a consortia data lake that the banks kind of choose to participate in that allows us to be able to look at data across banks. And if you think about it, criminals don't bank in one bank, they bank across banks. They're incredibly -- I call them clever. I don't like to call them smart, but I do call them clever. They're very, very -- they're very creative. So we have to make sure that our -- the data that we are able to evaluate allows us to look across banks to understand patterns and practices of behavior. We have very advanced AI algorithms that help us root out criminal behavior, and then we're leveraging GenAI to help automate the workflows and all of the hard work that the banks have to do to find those actors and then report -- do their regulatory reporting. So we do feel like we have a very differentiated product, as we're moving upmarket, and we're now implementing Tier 1 and Tier 2 banks, that's actually benefiting those SMB banks because that data now is part of the consortia. And as we move up market, we get to show the Tier 1 banks that an on-prem solution just isn't going to do it for them. anymore. Having the benefit of having the consortia data is a huge differentiator for them as well. And we've been able to show 20% to 40% reductions in false positives as well as improvements in fraud found, quite significant ones for certain banks. So we do feel great about our prospects. So SMB is strong, getting stronger, and we feel very good about that being a pillar of growth. The Tier 1s and Tier 2s, we're still breaking into the space. We now have 5 Tier 1s signed up. And there -- and we're implementing now, so they're really starting to see the benefits of the product. People in that space move around. But half of the TAM in the world is in the Tier 1s and Tier 2s, and we're just breaking into that space. And then you have the global expansion in terms of going into Europe. But what keeps us at the mid-20s is the fact that we want all 3 of those pillars to create durable growth, but it takes time. It takes time to kind of build up the momentum within a segment of the population or segment of banks. And certainly, as you move upmarket, the contract periods are longer, too. I mean the contract negotiation periods are longer. So it just is one of those things where we have to build the momentum and get it going into a cadence that we feel great about.

Fair enough. One more, I think, on the fintech side. And this has come up a little bit already on the earnings call, but obviously, a lot of stuff happening since the election and how that may impact the financial services industry. And when the things that come up when I speak about Nasdaq, are financial deregulation, which I'm sure we're hearing about a lot at this conference and then bank M&A potentially picking up, both of those things do look like a net negative on the surface because growing regulation has been cited as a driver of why you did the Adenza deal, for example. And then on the bank M&A, Calypso and Verafin, very important customer base. So why should investors worry or not worry about those, I guess, potential changes, we'll see what happens.

Yes. I mean I would look at it this way. If we are in a situation where banks can play more offense. They have more capital that they can then -- if they take down the regulatory obligations to some degree, and I still think there's going to be plenty of regulatory implications put on the banks. But if they kind of narrow down the scope a little bit, first, they're still going to need to do the regulatory reporting. It just might be in a narrow scope. The second, that might mean that they can free up some capital, which then allows them to grow. And if they're growing and expanding their business that then means that they might be going into new asset classes, new geographies. They're going to need trade infrastructure technology to support that. They're going to need regulatory reporting software to support that. We are completely global in how we support our clients, and we did mention on the earnings call that 69% of the revenue from the Adenza businesses it's from outside the United States, 31% inside the United States. So it's also -- we manage across lots of different regulatory cycles around the world and different changes in regulation and so the business itself is so big and so global and now also quite diversified against having the opportunity to support banks as they're playing offense, supporting them as they're having to increase their defense particularly around anti-fin crime and regulatory reporting. And then modernizing the core infrastructure that underpins markets is the third thing that we're really focusing on. And we did actually sign 9 new deals in 2025 with existing market tech clients to modernize their technology, and we have several that are going into full cloud. And so we're very, very excited about that as well as a growth driver.

Good. All right. I can spend all day on the Fintech segment, but we're moving on for now. So maybe going back to some of the legacy businesses that still obviously are very important, starting with listings. A lot of excitement here post the election again that there's so much pent-up demand for IPOs, and we're going to start seeing a lot more in 2025. So you're obviously engaging with a lot of prospective companies that may go public. So what are you seeing? What are you hearing? And then also maybe help us understand how more IPOs actually help your business because quite frankly, it takes a while until the flywheel really starts moving, if you say it like that.

Yes, it's good to understand that. So first of all, I'll start with the fact that in the second half of last year, we definitely started to feel that there are more and more companies really gearing up to go public in 2025. And that's really because of the monetary environment, right? So you had a resilient economy. You -- generally speaking, the markets were improving and the performance of the markets down market into the midsized companies is also starting to improve. You have a more known monetary situation, at least in terms of -- even though there might be some variability in interest rates, at least it was going on the right trajectory and it's stabilizing and inflation stabilizing. So if you're an investor, you're more ready to underwrite risk because the future looks a little bit more certain. Now I think that, obviously, going into 2025, we had a significant election and a change. And so I think everyone is absorbing that change. But if anything, we felt even more conversations with companies being more ready to go public this year, but most likely more, I would say, later in Q2 and then getting into the back half of the year as people get used to kind of understanding the core tenets of the new administration. And so we did not expect a very active Q1. And we have seen some, but we are definitely expecting a ramp-up starting in Q2. And so it's exciting. But in terms of how it impacts our business, there are 2 things to recognize. One is that we -- while we make money on initial listing fees, it's not a huge amount, but it also gets amortized over multiple years. And so we do not kind of reflect that initial listing fee in the year. We reflect over 3 to 6 years. And so that kind of creates a little bit of a lagging effect. And it also, though, makes it so that there's more stability in the revenue stream in that business. And then the second thing is that for our Corporate Solutions business, which has also had more headwinds, I would say, just because of the listing environment. Again, we're going to see a lagging effect there, too, because as companies come in, we do give them a starter package. But even if we -- when we upsell them as public companies, it just takes time for them to recognize what they need, frankly, in terms of helping them navigate the public market. So there will be a lagging effect on that as well.

Speaking, as you just mentioned, that part of the business, and that is part of Workflow and Insights, which probably is the biggest soft spot, I would say, at the moment. Your long-term targets there are high single to low double digits, you're fairly far away from that. So is there still a path to get there medium term? And yes, how do we get there?

Yes. So I think the first thing has been the biggest area that has really brought down the growth rate has been Corporate Solutions, which is somewhere in the range of around half the business. So -- and that's our IR intelligence, our Government Solutions and ESG solutions. And while ESG is a very small business, and it's growing nicely, but it's a very small -- has a small effect on the business. The larger effect has been in the IR Insight and the governance area. When you don't have new companies coming to market, that's definitely a way for us to sell services. So that's one. We've also had delistings, and we've had a larger number of delistings over the last couple of years. And so that's obviously created a headwind as well to retention. And then I think that in general, as I said, while the index performance has been quite stellar, I think that it is -- if you look further down the scope of the clientele, we have about 2,200 or so clients that use us just for IR intelligence alone. And that means you got a lot of small and medium-sized companies, they have actually had more struggles in terms of overall returns. And so they've been more cost conscious in making decisions around their IR activities. So I think that, that's also created it -- made it a little bit harder sales environment. We are starting to see the performance come down and be more broad-based. We're seeing the IPO environment improve. So we do at least anticipate that we'll see an improvement in growth there. And then in the analytics side, which is really the suite of solutions that serves investors, so our investment platform, our data link platform, we actually have a lot of great growth opportunities there. That business has been growing. I think we said high single digits in 2020 for the end of 2024. And we had a couple of years of investment in that business to integrate a bunch of data into the eVestment platform, and we now have that. And so we're much more on a sales trajectory now that we feel very good about. And we do see a lot of growth opportunity in that part of the business.

Good. You just mentioned index for a second, although you said it in terms of the market performance. But on to the index business, which has been a great growth story. A lot of it is beta. Let's not forget about that, but there is an alpha component here. So maybe you can talk about that a little bit more. What are you doing to drive new products, flows? How much can that add over time? And then maybe a quick topical question. There's been -- we saw biggest price cuts on ETFs from Vanguard a couple -- maybe a week ago. A lot of people think this is a new time for ETF price compression. So maybe touch on that as well. How are you immune against that? Or how are you exposed to potential ETF fee wars, if I can use that word.

Yes. So I think, first of all, the index business, we've been really, really proud of what we've been able to do to help drive the growth of the business, but it also benefits from the markets as well. And so what we do provide to our shareholders is a view of what we call alpha versus beta, and we provide you a view of that every quarter to kind of understand what percentage of the growth is really coming from alpha versus beta. And in the index business in 2024, we had 29% overall growth, but half of that was alpha. We had $80 billion of net inflows into the business. We had 1/3 of those inflows came from non-Nasdaq 100 indices. So it's a broader base, in terms of the inflows. We launched 113 new products in 2024, and that expands across the whole world in terms of global products, some institutionally oriented products in addition to new indexes, totally new themes and new index products. And we also have been expanding out the index partners that we have, who are we launching products with. And we had several, and I know I can't remember the exact number, but we had a lot of new products being launched with new partners around the world. So we have 3 pillars of growth that we're really focused on there. Historically, that business has been geared towards retail. The Nasdaq 100 and other indexes have been -- we've been -- and we've geared our sales towards retail. But we've built out an institutional team now. So we're going into institutional products, focusing first on insurance and insurance annuity products. And then we also have global expansion, and we're being much more intentional about taking the indexes around the world, and then continuing to drive new products and new themes. And so we are -- I think we've done a really nice job across all 3 vectors. In terms of from a fee perspective, our existing products are generally protected through our fee construct and our contracts. As we launch new products, we obviously are very thoughtful about how we launch new products, how much intellectual property are we bringing into the product, how much of our partnership is driving inflows into the product so that we price our services appropriately. But we're not -- I would say we're not all things to all people in index. We don't do custom indices. We don't do just -- we do it when we know that we can add value and then when our brand matters. And that, I think, is how we differentiate ourselves.

I'm actually going to go back to fintech for a second because there's one business we didn't talk about, which is the legacy business, the exchange technology. So you sell technology to a lot of exchanges around the world, other trading businesses. So the business seems fairly mature. It's long sales cycles, but there's certainly this megatrend of market modernization that's playing out. So maybe you can talk about some of the new opportunities you see there. Are there any upgrade cycles that we should be thinking about? And yes, anything near term that could surprise us in that business?

Yes. Yes. So I think, first of all, we've had a good year in 2024. 2020 and 2021 were difficult years for market tech from a sales perspective. And it's harder to implement that technology when you can't be in person with your clients. So we found that the COVID environment definitely put us -- kind of slowed down the clients sales, number one, they were just dealing with a lot of volume. They were dealing with a lot of upheaval in their own markets. They were just trying to figure out how to get through COVID. But number two, it's a trust business. It's a deep relationship and partnership business, and we tend to co-locate with our clients when we do larger scale implementations. So that kind of slowed down the sales cycle. I would say as we got into 2024, we're definitely seeing -- we saw a nice pickup in sales. As I mentioned, we had 9 clients to -- existing clients sign up for the new versions of our software to modernize their markets. We have several clients deploying post-trade infrastructure in cloud, which we're very excited about because our clearing solution is cloud native and cloud-ready. We have markets really focusing in on how do they drive, also how do they integrate their solutions more completely so we're able to cross-sell more successfully. And then there are certain parts of the world, Latin America being one, South Asia being another, where there's just a big -- I would say, a big focus on market infrastructure by the governments. And so that is helping us also. So we feel like going into 2025, we have a lot of good implementations to work on. We have a lot of additional sales opportunities. And then the last vector of growth is also in crypto. We signed 3 crypto clients in the fourth quarter for core infrastructure. And so we do see that also as a vector for growth for us, particularly as those markets are going to see a new regulatory environment around them, and that is probably going to give them, I would say, demand for more hardened and more mature technology.

Continuing with legacy businesses, we haven't spoken at all about your trading businesses, still very important, 20% -- a little bit over 20%, I think, of revenues and very high margin. So I'm going to ask this as a very open question because there's so many different businesses in there. So different dynamics, volumes, market share pricing. So -- but if I ask you very, very big picture, what are you very excited about as you look at your trading business? Anything that could surprise us positively or negatively? And then yes, what should we be paying more attention to within those businesses?

Yes. So we actually look at it in 3 key areas. One is U.S. cash equities and then U.S. options and then Nordic cash equities and derivatives. So I just want to make sure we all understand those kind of the 3 major businesses we have. And they each have their own dynamics. But I would just say that, first, in the equity space, cash equity space, we are very fortunate to be a listing market because it allows us to have a lot more ways that we can engage our clients in value-added order types. We're bringing AI order types into the market like our Midpoint Extended Life Order. That actually -- by putting -- making that a dynamic timer, it's doubled the volume that's in that one order type, which is great. So we're doing more around bringing more AI capabilities into the markets. And we're modernizing the technology, and we're going to continue to do that. So the second is in our U.S. options where we've been focusing on the modernization. We have 6 markets there. Both modernization is helping us because it's just making us, I would say, more scalable, faster. We do a lot also in strike optimization and other things. And then we also have our proprietary index products and options. And that's one of the big growers and a very, very exciting part of our business. So really, really excited about that. And then in the Nordics, actually, it's been interesting. That has a little bit more beta because we get paid on value traded, but there's an upswing also. We're seeing an upswing going into 2025 on volumes. And it just feels like it's becoming more active again. So we see that as being a potential benefit to us because the Nordics is in Europe, particularly Sweden, is really known as being one of the best markets in Europe. It's the one area where we've had -- actually, this is a good stat that I thought was interesting. Since 2019, so that does cover the COVID period, we've had 931 new listings in the Nordics, raising like $95 billion. So it's actually a pretty active market in what most people consider a more mature economy. So it's pretty exciting there. And we feel very good about our business there.

And then maybe lastly, it looks like we have time for Q&A. So get ready, people. I'm going to call on people.

He would too, by the way.

Yes. lastly, you're still in deleveraging mode, but you should be getting there faster to your targets that you originally anticipated. So the obvious question is, what's next? You have this fintech segment now. And quite frankly, it looks like you have a right now to add more capabilities that you can cross-sell as you're showing that you can do that organically and through deals. So yes, what's next? What is Nasdaq most interested to when it comes to adding capabilities that firms like us are interested in?

Well, I would just say, first and foremost, we continue to be very focused on delevering and very focused on executing on the Adenza acquisition. And that -- we gave ourselves 2 years to complete that integration, and we are largely done with the official integration. But there's still a lot of opportunity and work to do to really drive what we call One Nasdaq culture inside of Nasdaq and really kind of think about sales and client success and client management as a One Nasdaq exercise. We have a lot of work that we're doing to continue to bring new capabilities into the products. We have a huge growth runway organically for the products. And when we look at our platform across fintech, we have -- we're really covering the key risk vectors that the banks and brokers have to stay -- to get themselves on the field and stay on the field successfully. So we feel very good about our organic growth rate. I think that over time, we will continue to make sure that we listen to our clients. We understand how they're looking to expand their businesses, how can we help them do that more successfully. But I can honestly say we are super focused on organic growth and also delevering and managing our balance sheet basically ahead of schedule, but very consistently with what we've told to the shareholders.

Okay. I promise that we have time for Q&A. I don't know if we have mics, but...

Any questions?

Shy group right after lunch.

Either shy or tired.

There we go.

I have 2 quick ones. Can you talk about the delistings and what has driven that over time? And is that improving or not? And then just in terms of IPOs, you said Q2 is probably really the opportunity to look forward to. Did you think that Q1 would be better than it actually is?

I'll answer the second one first. I was not expecting an active Q1. So I just didn't -- we didn't have high expectations at all for this quarter. I think that -- and again, going into Q2, you've got this quiet period that's now hitting people because they're having to do their year-end stuff. And so they really don't have an opportunity even to consider going until April now. And so I really do see it as more picking up as we go through the second quarter, just say now. In terms of delistings, delistings, I mean, we have 5,000 companies overall listed on Nasdaq across the U.S. and Nordics. And so we are always going to have companies delist. And I think that a normalized, I would call it a normal environment would probably be in like the 200 to 250 range of delistings in any given year. Equities is a risk business. And not every company -- they might get merged, they might get bought, they might decide they don't want to list anymore, they can't list anymore. And so that's normal. We've been up above 400, though, the last couple of years. And so I think that the environment was -- to go from truly like a zero interest rate environment to a 5.5% interest rate environment in 1 year, which is such a huge shock to the system that I think it drew a lot of companies out of the market. We are seeing about -- I think going out of '24 into '25, I want to say 20% reduction in delistings, somewhere in that range, and so we're starting to see it get better. But I think that we're hoping to get back down to what I just said before soon enough hopefully.

Anything else?

So one of your competitors has seen quite a lot of international listing, so delisting in Europe, for example, and listing here in the U.S. What are your thoughts on that as a trend? And if you see more of it and how is that evolving?

Yes. So I would say that -- I don't know -- I wouldn't call it a lot, but because out of a base of 5,000. But I would say that we definitely are seeing more interest coming from Europe than we've seen in the past for sure. There are companies that are either considering a dual list or they actually are considering switching their listing. The spaces where we've seen -- we've had the most action have been in health care, biotech, I think there's just a very unique investor ecosystem that exists in the United States for biotech. It just draws in companies from all over the world. And so we definitely have seen the most activity in European or certainly Asian biotechs seeking capital in the United States and coming and doing a primary listing here. In terms of companies who are already public in Europe, thinking that they're going to come to the U.S. to gain on their valuation, very good conversations are underway, but I think it's -- those are big decisions that companies have to make. They take it a long time. So we're not anticipating it being like a boon, but there will be some that are likely to make that move.

I will offer 1 or 2 more since we have time and...

Here I am.

You are. But look, what we haven't talked about is AI because clearly, and this is where I started, you're more of a tech company now than maybe an old exchange. So 2025 seems to be a year that AI could become really all over ubiquitous to use a bigger word, and more integrated and visible. So yes, what are you doing and both maybe on the revenue and the cost side and anything that could be a needle mover?

Yes. So I think there are a couple of things. One, we're very fortunate because we have moved the vast majority of our software solutions to cloud over the last 10 years. And if we haven't completed that yet, we're in process. And so I think we feel very good about the fact that we have a modern infrastructure that underpins our markets and underpins our software solutions, and that puts you in a position where you play offense much faster. So the second is we have a very good relationship with the cloud providers, and we've got early access to the models. And so we were very early in putting out capabilities in our products. So we are focused on AI in the product and on the business. And in the product, we've already put out new capabilities in our anti-fin crime to automate the research and report writing for the -- those that are like looking at rooting out criminals and then writing up the regulatory reports. We're implementing that now for our surveillance solution. We're also implementing a piece of that into AxiomSL. So the idea of being able to automate workflows is a huge ROI for our clients, and that obviously accrues to the benefit and the value of our solution. But it's not something where we price it directly. We're going to put it into the product and then work with our clients to demonstrate the ROI. I think that's very important for -- as companies are getting used to using it and trusting it. The second is in our Corporate Solutions business, where we've actually been using AI pretty extensively to help us with natural language processing and writing reports to clients, but also now we have board summarization capabilities inside of Boardvantage, which is pretty cool, hundreds and hundreds of pages of board reports, you get to distill down and actually know what's important. And then the second is in our IR intelligence suite. And we're also introducing it to do board summarization in eVestment as well. So we've got that there, and that's all gone into production. Some of that is new, like we have a new module that we are selling outright, but a lot of that is embedded. So it's really a matter of you being able to show the return to your clients over time to say, does that support a price increase or a change in contract. But on the business, that's both a big opportunity and harder, right? Because it's -- when you're a development organization and you think I'm going to go put AI into this product, it's super cool, right? And I talked about like the Midpoint Extended Life Order, that was a super fun project. But then you say, okay, now let's change everything on how you develop software. And let's give you some new tools and make it so that you develop software very differently and you're driving massive efficiencies. It's a huge opportunity, but it's a much bigger change management exercise. So we said 2023 was the year of exploration. 2024 was a year of experimentation. So we did a lot of POCs and hackathons across the organization. 2025 has to be the first year of impact. And so we are starting to drive -- take those POCs and drive them into production use across our development organization, client success and in our marketing teams as well for content creation to really start to drive efficiency. And that's part of the reason, not all, but part of the reason why we've expanded our efficiency program this year.

I'm looking, we have one minute. Can I do -- oh, there he is.

Could you talk a little bit about stablecoins and how you're engaging with blockchain technology, less from an IPO perspective in terms of companies coming public, but more just how you're thinking about potentially working with them in the context of a technology that Nasdaq could use to make the business grow faster, be more efficient?

Yes. So I think the first thing is we've been engaged with the blockchain, I would say, broader blockchain and digital asset ecosystem for quite some time. We, in fact, wrote our Puro.earth, which is our carbon removal marketplace and registry, we rewrote that registry, and it's all blockchain -- it's a blockchain-based registry now, and we deployed that in 2023. And it's actually great because it allows you -- it's much more efficient, effective and many ways to track and trace all of the credits. And we have that as a core technology. We now sell to other registry platforms. So that's an example where we're using it and walking our talk on it. But also an area that we're really focused on is working on, stablecoin potentially has a different regulatory infrastructure that supports it, it's real potential for that, that -- what does that mean for collateral management and the ability to move collateral. So looking at that in our crypto platform and helping understand how to make some improvements or changes, enhancements to our collateral management platform and other risk management, could also be really, really interesting as that industry matures. And then, of course, we also provide technology to crypto markets as well as surveillance and core trading and clearing technology to the crypto exchanges so that they can have more, I would say, mainstream technology to support their business.

I see the mean red light. So I think we actually have to cut it off.

Okay. I'll grab you after. Thanks.

All right. Thank you very much, and let me please thank Adena for making time today. Enjoyed the chat.

Thank you. Thank you very much.