Nasdaq Looks at Key Themes and Opportunities as the New Year Begins

What changed in your business over the last year and what was your biggest achievement? 

Over the past year, Nasdaq achieved several major milestones on our journey to becoming a trusted partner to the financial system. When we embarked on our transformation, we centered our business around three core themes that are foundational to markets, where we have deep expertise, and where we believe we can expand the role we play for more clients:

Liquidity: Providing technology and solutions to power the world’s most robust markets.

Transparency: Providing a robust data and analytics environment to connect companies and investors with what they need to make decisions.

Integrity: Providing the wider financial system with the technology and solutions to manage risk, regulation, compliance and crime.

In 2024, we established our Financial Technology business, integrating the platforms Calypso and AxiomSL, following the acquisition of Adenza. This comprehensive portfolio of solutions supports more than 3,500 banks, brokers, regulators, financial infrastructure operators and buy-side firms to navigate operational complexity and capitalise on growth opportunities across global capital markets. Our technology powers more than 130 markets in more than 50 countries, minimises complexity and simplifies the operations at 97% of Global Systematically Important Banks and supports over 2,500 banks and credits unions in their efforts to fight financial crime.

The creation of the Financial Technology business has accelerated Nasdaq’s transformation into a global technology company and empowered us to partner with clients in a way that is truly unique in the industry, helping to solve their most complex operational challenges.

In the U.S., we continued our listings leadership and were proud to maintain our position as the leading exchange by number of IPOs and proceeds raised for the sixth-consecutive year. With 171 IPOs raising $22.7 billion in proceeds, listings activity in the U.S. was at its highest volume since 2021, as we saw marquee listings from across industries come to market. Further, we continued to accelerate the growth of Index franchise, both in the U.S. and internationally, achieving records in Index ETP AUM throughout the year while launching innovative new products with our partners.

Meanwhile in Europe, we had a record year for the corporate bond market, with 41% year-over-year growth in the number of listings and 20% year-over-year growth in listed volume in Stockholm. We also continued to see several marquee IPOs, with 15 operating companies listing on our European markets in 2024, including one of the largest IPOs of the year in Apotea.

What are you most excited about in 2025?

2025 comes on the heels of an extraordinary year for national elections around the globe, where citizens of more than 70 countries went to the polls. There is a significant opportunity for the exchange community to come together and collaborate directly with newly elected policymakers and regulators.

Capital markets form the backbone of the global financial system, connecting investors and issuers across a diverse range of asset classes, geographies and sectors, while fostering innovation and entrepreneurship. There is a major opportunity for capital markets to drive growth around the world, but strengthening the competitiveness of global capital markets will require close partnership between the public and private sectors.

We are looking forward to demonstrating the benefits of the exchange model, particularly its contribution to economic resilience and innovation. We plan to collaborate closely with these leaders to ensure that they understand how exchanges can support their economic goals through capital formation, market integrity and investor protection.

There is a delicate balance to strike, and we want to work closely with regulators and elected officials to create vibrant and resilient capital market environments around the world.

What are your biggest opportunities?

In our Listings business, we look forward to carrying the momentum from 2024 into the new year. Nasdaq’s IPO Pulse Index, which forecasts the direction of IPO activity in the U.S., hit a recent three-year high, and we expect to see increased activity in early 2025 as deals come to market. We have a healthy pipeline of companies waiting in the wings that have filed to go public on Nasdaq and we look forward to helping them evaluate the right time to access the public markets. Further, we are hopeful that stabilising economic conditions will help more companies gain confidence in entering public markets around the world.

Among market operators, there is still a pressing need to modernise the underlying architecture of their systems. The transformation of capital markets with next generation and cloud-enabled infrastructure will help build a more resilient, scalable, and accessible financial ecosystem. We want to continue advancing global markets beyond our marketplaces, using the learnings from our own journey to create a modernisation blueprint for our marketplace technology clients around the globe.

And finally, I couldn’t talk about opportunities without mentioning artificial intelligence. At Nasdaq, our AI strategy has a two-pronged approach, with a focus on leveraging AI “on the business” and “in our products” to help make both our employees and our products more efficient and effective.

We were proud to achieve our goal of getting generative AI tools in the hands of 100% of our employees last fall with the launch of our internal Gen AI platform, which features custom-built skills designed to enhance productivity and efficiencies for our employees. To better support client needs, we launched several new AI-powered solutions throughout the year, including Dynamic M-ELO, the first AI-powered order type, and a generative AI copilot to help banks fight financial crime more effectively.

As we move forward, Nasdaq continues to explore additional ways to scale the impact of AI across our organisation, whether that is by identifying new internal use cases and resources that improve the efficiency and effectiveness of our teams, or identifying new ways to bring AI into our products to help our clients better solve their most pressing challenges.

What do you see as the key themes and trends for exchanges and market infrastructure in 2025?

I think we will continue to see exchange operators advancing market modernisation efforts around the globe. The first major wave of AI being deployed across global capital markets has sparked widespread interest in how operators can ensure they have access to those capabilities and will remain a major focus. However, putting yourself in a position to embrace innovative new technologies raises a far more fundamental question about having the correct operating model in place, and the right technology partners to support them on that journey.

Global capital markets are on a path towards becoming a global fabric of interconnected markets with a common data lake architecture and advanced cloud-enabled tools. Those that aren’t investing in their data strategy and modernisation journey today risk being left behind.