Nasdaq, Inc.

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to NASDAQ fourth quarter and full year 2024 results conference call. At this time, all participants are on the listen only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star one one on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star one one again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your first speaker, Atul Garrett, Senior Vice President and Investor Relations Officer. Please go ahead.

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today to discuss NASDAQ's fourth quarter and full year 2024 financial results. On the line are Adina Friedman, our Chair and Chief Executive Officer, Sarah Youngwood, our Chief Financial Officer, and other members of the management team. After prepared remarks, we'll open the line for Q&A. The press release and earnings presentation accompanying this call can be found on our investor relations website. I would like to remind you that we'll be making forward-looking statements on this call that involve risks. A summary of these risks is contained in our press release and a more complete description in our annual report on Form 10-K. We will discuss the financial performance on a non-GAAP basis and adjust it for the impact of acquisitions, FX, and the previously announced one-time revenue benefits and market services in the fourth quarter of 2023, and an index in the first quarter of 2024. Definitions and reconciliations of U.S. GAAP to non-GAAP plus adjustments can be found in our earnings presentation as well as in a file located in the financial section of our investor relations website at ir.nasdaq.com. The fourth quarter marks the one-year anniversary of the acquisition of Axiom SL and Calypso. Going forward, we will report the financial performance of these businesses within the consolidated results of the respective subdivisions and will no longer disclose these revenues in an organic revenue growth reconciliation. And with that, I will now turn the call over to Adina.

Thank you, Otto, and good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us. On the call this morning, I'll start with an overview of our 2024 financial and operational performance. I'll then discuss our strategic priorities and outlook for 2025 before handing the call to Sarah to walk through the financial results and outlook in more detail. Reflecting on the last year, I'm extremely proud of Nasdaq's progress towards becoming a scalable platform company and delivering on our vision to be the trusted fabric of the world's financial system. Throughout 2024, we substantially completed the integration of Calypso and ActiumSL, further showcased the value of our solutions, delivered on our growth objectives, and achieved our initial expense synergies in deleveraging goals ahead of schedule. The NASDAQ team's ability to execute our strategy and create value for our clients provides us with confidence entering 2025 as evidenced by the strengthening of our competitive position and significant traction we are gaining with us through new client wins, upsells, and cross-sells. Moving to our financial results for the year, NASDAQ's net revenues of $4.7 billion increased 9% from 2023. Solutions delivered 10% revenue growth for the full year, with growth in each quarter within or above the range of our medium-term outlook. ARR ended the year at $2.8 billion, an increase of 7.5% year-over-year. For the fourth quarter, we delivered net revenue growth of 10% year-over-year to $1.2 billion, and solutions revenue grew 9%. Moving to the full-year performance of our divisions, Capital access platforms generated 3% ARR growth and 10% revenue growth in 2024, driven by an outstanding year of index performance. Financial technology delivered 10% revenue growth for the year. We delivered 12% ARR growth overall for the division, which included 23% growth in financial crime management technology, 11% growth for regulatory technology, and 9% growth for capital markets technology. Market Services achieved record full-year revenue driven by higher volumes across the U.S. equity derivatives as well as U.S. and European cash equities. Turning to our operational highlights for 2024, the addition of Axiom SL and Calypso has greatly accelerated our journey as a platform company. In its first year, the Financial Technology Division delivered strong financial and operational accomplishments, which resulted from deep and meaningful engagements with our clients. Today, our financial technology division has emerged as a vital force of innovation, as our more than 3,800 clients now see us as a complete partner in helping to solve their most critical challenges across risk, regulation, and trade infrastructure. The financial system is at a point where transformation is technologically and culturally possible, with greater confidence in the banking and capital markets industry to implement cloud-based solutions. For example, according to NASDAQ and BCG's recent complexity reports, The level of comfort among global banks to deploy cloud-based solutions has increased from 57% just five years ago to 93% today. Additionally, today, only 22% of banks prefer in-house built solutions for their regulatory and compliance programs. The large majority understand that external solutions provide superior capabilities to solve common industry problems, and they are seeking strategic technology partners who can provide solutions across multiple disciplines. This sentiment is evident across the division, as NASDAQ's enhanced product portfolio has strengthened our client relationships, which materialized through the signing of 263 new clients, 424 upsells, and 11 cross-sells this year. Importantly, these collective wins represent our continued penetration across global financial institutions, and our cross-sells highlight our success in Tier 1 and Tier 2 banks. Notable examples include a major financial institution expanding from trade surveillance, Axiom SL, and Calypso to include a Nasdaq Verifin, and another Tier 1 bank adding Calypso to its existing Axiom SL solution. As the division continues to mature, we're confident that we will deepen our strategic relations with our clients even further while delivering broad-based growth. Now I'll turn to a review of our subdivisions within financial technology, beginning with Nasdaq Verifin, where a growing number of financial institutions recognize our unique and differentiated capabilities in helping them root out financial crime. NASDAQ's financial crime management technology business completed one new cross-sell with a Tier 1 bank for our wire fraud solution during the quarter. And today, NASDAQ Verifin serves over 2,600 financial institutions, representing nearly $10 trillion in assets, including five Tier 1 banks. Building on the strength of NASDAQ Verifin's industry-leading offerings, In North America, we've announced our launch in Europe, where we are engaging with clients across the region. Regulatory technology and capital markets technology are advancing the modernization of global markets, as well as our clients' ability to manage risk and compliance. In 2024, we had several marquee deals, which underscores our right to win across our serviceable, addressable markets. In the fourth quarter, Nasdaq signed a long-term agreement to provide a future-proof regulatory management solution through Axiom SL to Orup, a collaborative joint venture of banks and financial services providers in Austria. We look forward to providing additional details on these important partnerships in the coming weeks. AccuMSL also secured an upsell with Societe Generale to manage its domestic regulatory reporting needs. France, India, and the Philippines represent key regulatory technology international expansion opportunities that we've unlocked in 2024 and the strong progress that we've made positions as well to build momentum in these countries in 2025. Surveillance signed 24 new clients during the year, including three new market regulators and our first market surveillance client in Taiwan. During the fourth quarter, 100% of new trade surveillance clients were cloud customers. And as of the fourth quarter, 68% of our clients are leveraging cloud for our cloud-based, leveraging our cloud-based solution up from 53% a year ago. Capital markets technology advanced its international strategy, expanding our client base in key markets, including Latin America, with notable wins across Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia. Calypso signed its 20th central bank, a major milestone in a key client cohort, with additional momentum expected across 2025. Market Technology signed nine new commitments in 2024 with existing clients as they continue to modernize markets, and we expect this trend to continue this year. We also signed three new crypto clients in the fourth quarter. As we look ahead, our digital asset strategy continues to focus on helping the industry mature through infrastructure that enhances market liquidity, transparency, and integrity through the integration of the asset class within financial institutions. This is evident from the industry's adoption of our market technology surveillance and Calypso solutions. More broadly, Nasdaq is already active in this asset class with the iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF and options for this ETF, as well as other listed crypto ETFs in our U.S. and European markets. We see potential growth areas in digital assets, options products, and proprietary index options benchmarked to cryptocurrency indexes. we expect additional opportunities to arise as new regulatory frameworks provide clearer guidance, and NASDAQ will continue to strategically assess and pursue them in this dynamic space. Turning to our Capital Access Platforms division, we continued our strong success in attracting new listings to NASDAQ as the world's preeminent market operator, supporting corporate and investor decision-making through valuable data and workflow tools, and driving even more liquidity into the market through our leading index franchise. In 2024, NASDAQ extended our listings leadership to six consecutive years as the top U.S. exchange by number of IPOs and proceeds raised. For the year, NASDAQ had 180 IPOs, raising $23 billion in total proceeds. This included 130 operating company IPOs, headlined by Lineage, the largest IPO of the year. Overall, NASDAQ achieved an 80% win rate among eligible operating company IPOs in the U.S. for the year. In the third quarter, we celebrated the 500th listing transfer to NASDAQ, cumulatively representing nearly $3 trillion of market value measured as of the date of each transfer. We continued our momentum in the fourth quarter with 14 new transfers, including Palantir, the largest exchange transfer on a U.S. exchange in 2024, bringing the total market value of switches to NASDAQ to over $180 billion for the year. And to start 2025, we welcomed Domino's, which began on the NASDAQ Stock Exchange on January 2nd. 2024 was also an exceptional year for our index franchise, which delivered 31% revenue growth, ending the year with record AUM. Innovation remains at the heart of this franchise as we launched 116 new products in the year, with over half occurring outside the United States. Importantly, 27% of these products were in the insurance annuity space, and 30 were launched in partnership with new index clients, delivering on our expansion pillars across innovation, globalization, and the institutional space. Within Workflow and Insights, analytics saw continued demand from asset managers and asset owners for our data and workflow solutions. This demand across the client ecosystem resulted in strong year-over-year growth. In Corporate Solutions, we focus on strengthening our offerings while managing through beta challenges, as corporate buying cycles remain elongated throughout the year. We anticipate an improvement in this business as the IPO environment normalizes. Finally, in our market services division, we demonstrated leadership across our US and European markets. We experienced strong adoption of our index options and multi-listed options products as index options revenue more than doubled year over year. In addition, we delivered a record volume of shares and notional value traded in the closing cross this year, including a record fourth quarter in terms of volume of shares traded. We also made progress modernizing our markets with the migration of Nasdaq ISE to our next generation derivatives platform, Fusion, in September. In addition, as part of our ongoing assessment of our business units portfolio and their alignment with our strategy, we announced that Nasdaq has entered into an agreement with Euronext to sell our Nordic Power Futures business. This transaction will sharpen our focus on our strategic growth areas as we lead as we lead the European market. Moving forward, our European business is an integral part of our strategy as the combination of our U.S. and European footprint is critical to our ability to serve clients globally. Overall, NASDAQ delivered robust growth across our business while achieving significant strategic and operational milestones. At our investor day in March, we introduced three strategic priorities, integrate, innovate, and accelerate. to deliver resilient and scalable growth. We successfully execute on these priorities and are well positioned entering 2025. Through our relentless execution of our integrate priority, our financial technology division has a well-structured and highly functioning operating model, and we're deploying the one NASDAQ go-to-market approach to deliver holistically for our clients. In addition, our solid free cash flow enable NASDAQ to lower its gross leverage ratio from 4.3 times at the end of last year to 3.6 times at the end of 2024. NASDAQ exited 2024 having actioned over 100% of our net expense synergies target, and Sarah will discuss our incremental efforts to deliver additional cost synergies and efficiencies. Moving to our innovate priority, we amplified innovation across NASDAQ, introducing and incorporating new AI-powered solutions and product offerings across each of our divisions in 2024. We've seen solid client adoption to date, and our product managers continue to work on delivering new AI features in their product roadmaps. Looking ahead, we have a strong innovation pipeline with various product launches expected over the course of the year. Within our internal business operations, our focus with AI adoption has shifted from exploration and experimentation in 23 and 24 to driving impact entering 2025. Our team is engaged in scaling our use of AI to deliver efficiencies and productivity enhancements across the organization, which is also reflected in the expanded efficiency program that Sarah will describe. And with our Accelerate priority, we drove 17 cross-sells since the Adenta acquisition closed, including 11 in 2024 and four in the fourth quarter. Cross-sell opportunities now account for over 15% of Financial Technology Division's pipeline, with several deals at advanced stages as we execute organized sales campaigns that showcase the cross functionality of our solution suite and deepen relationships with senior decision makers across our clientele. Nasdaq remains on track to exceed $100 million in run rate revenue from cross-sells by the end of 2027. Looking ahead to 2025, Nasdaq is well positioned to build on our successful 24 and deliver durable revenue growth. As we continue our journey to become a platform company our transformation is built on four distinct strengths. A robust, interconnected client network, purpose-built modern solutions that directly address our client-specific challenges, a scalable build-once-deploy-to-many approach across our technology and operational platforms, and standardized architectural principles and frameworks that unify our business and technology operations. These factors, coupled with our deep industry expertise, have elevated our conversations with current and prospective clients. As our conversations continue to materialize into new client wins, upsells, and cross-sells, we're entering 2025 with strong momentum across our business. In addition, the solid economic backdrop bodes well for NASDAQ and our clients. In the U.S., consumer spending and relatively low unemployment continue to support GDP growth. Further, inflation and interest rates have settled into a more predictable state than we experienced between 2022 and 2024, giving investors more confidence in their ability to deploy capital. Overall, the global economy is expected to grow with help from strengths in the US and other parts of the world, including South Asia. These factors have contributed to creating a positive business environment to start the year. For example, after several years of muted IPO activity, we expect more companies to list on public markets, with an uptake beginning in the second quarter of 2025, setting up a strong half of the year. We continue to have a healthy pipeline of companies that have filed to go public on NASDAQ. As these companies become public, we look forward to helping them navigate the public markets from the initial listings process to corporate governance, IR, and sustainability reporting needs. Finally, financial institutions across the global economy face complex risks, changes in regulatory regimes, and new trading opportunities, which are driving strong demand for our Financial Technology Division's suite of solutions. Whether it is keeping up with rapid technological advancements, meeting the changing and divergent needs of regulators across the globe, or protecting the integrity of the financial institution systems against financial crime, Clients will continue to turn to trusted partners to help them navigate complexity through technology-first solutions, and we remain well-positioned to be that partner for them throughout any environment. The new administration enters the White House signaling a more business-friendly pro-growth agenda in the U.S. We believe this will unlock capital and liquidity to the benefit of companies, financial institutions, and markets. As it relates to the regulatory environment governing our clients, we're supportive of the traction that is gaining around smart, well-calibrated regulation. To wrap up, 2024 was a strong year in which we further advanced the evolution of NASDAQ as a leading partner to the global financial system. Across the organization, we executed our strategic priorities, delivered on our key growth objectives, and achieved our synergy and deleveraging goals ahead of target. As we enter 2025, we're delivering on our strategy and remain confident in our ability to achieve our medium-term outlook. And with that, I will now turn the call over to Sarah to provide more details on our financial results and outlook for 2025.