Nasdaq Investor Day: Q&A with Ato Garrett, SVP and Investor Relations Officer

Ato Garrett, Nasdaq’s Senior Vice President, Investor Relations Officer, at Nasdaq's 2026 Investor Day

On February 25, Nasdaq hosted its 2026 Investor Day, highlighting its dynamic growth trajectory as it continues to serve as the trusted fabric of the world’s financial system. The presentations focused on how Nasdaq has transformed into a leading technology platform that powers the world’s markets, the innovation economy, and safeguards trust in the financial system.

Following Investor Day, Ato Garrett, Nasdaq’s Senior Vice President, Investor Relations Officer, sat down with the Nasdaq Newsroom to discuss the day and Nasdaq’s outlook for the future.

What is the most important message that Nasdaq conveyed to investors?

Ato Garrett: Throughout Investor Day, we highlighted opportunities across our expand, evolve, and transform growth pillars.

These pillars are the connective tissue that underpin our organic growth opportunity across our divisions, and how Nasdaq is going to execute on its market opportunity as the trusted fabric of the global financial system.

We shared a lot of detail across our subdivisions and their strategies — how they’re aligning around execution within our serviceable market and how they are capturing more of our total addressable market.

Overall, it’s important to recognize that technology is at the core of these strategies. That’s true for the enhancements that we're putting into our products through artificial intelligence or generative AI, and that’s true for our new horizon opportunities around private markets, digital assets, and Always-On markets.

What has the past five years looked like for Nasdaq?

Ato Garrett: Nasdaq had $2.9 billion in revenue in 2020, and in 2025, we had more than that amount in operating income. Not only are we growing, but we're delivering profitable growth and we're doing so at scale.

We can see that if you look back at our medium-term outlook, how that's changed over the last five years, this is now the fourth increase in five years. When we go back to 2020, we had a medium-term revenue outlook for our Solutions businesses to be between 5% and 7%; today, we've updated that to 9% to 12%.

Nasdaq’s platform has evolved from our foundation as an owner and operator of stock exchanges to truly being a trusted transformation partner to the global financial system, and we've done that through organic growth and thoughtful M&A.

We have a strong track record of driving growth organically and as well as through our investments in our Solutions businesses.

For example, Verafin has been a home run for us with revenue growth compounding at 25% annually from 2020 through 2025. We've grown Verafin’s client base 38% over that same five-year period and that's what's underpinned Verafin's differentiation and value proposition to its customers. Now, the banks that are participating in Verafin's data consortium represent more than $11 trillion in assets.

We’re tracking similar levels of success when it comes to the integrations of AxiomSL and Calypso. We accelerated their journeys to the cloud with a more than 11 percentage point increase in the mix of signed annualized run rate revenue from cloud clients, leveraging Nasdaq’s infrastructure and connectivity of deploying workloads to the cloud and delivering cloud-based Solutions to its customers.

All that taken together, I believe it's been a great execution in delivering scale, driving the journey to the cloud, and driving product enhancements across both AxiomSL and Calypso.

What are investors looking for when they look at Nasdaq?

Ato Garrett: Consistency, durability, growth, and most importantly, execution.

I believe that when we're looking at the consistency of our results, Nasdaq has a diversified business platform that is able to deliver strong revenue growth across a variety of market backdrops. With our foundations as an exchange, we have a benefit from market-based volatility that drives incremental trading volumes in cash equities and derivatives. We also have our Solutions businesses that will provide higher levels of growth as we continue to expand our position as a trusted transformation partner to the global financial system.

I believe that the strong growth opportunities are reflected in the accelerating medium-term revenue growth outlook that we've provided for our Solutions business.

We've been investing in that business — and not only growing the business but growing the business faster as we go across time. That's in opposition to the law of large numbers. That gives you an indication of the strength of our execution and our ability to deliver top-line growth and to do so while growing profitability.

Our non-GAAP operating income margin has expanded 500 basis points since 2020, and that reflects our ability to deliver growth at scale and with strong profitability. If we just look at our growth of net income over the same time, you can see Nasdaq is a great compounder of earnings power.

What are investors discussing with you?

Ato Garrett: One of the biggest areas that investors are looking at is how the advances in artificial intelligence impact the growth prospects of companies in the information services and software industries.

As Nasdaq has evolved into those spaces, investors want to know not only how AI might affect the buying decisions of customers, but how are we leveraging these new technologies to power our own innovation engine and deliver even more value to our customers.

We've highlighted very compelling stories across our business of the various products that are well-positioned relative to the capabilities of generative AI, as well as how we're deploying that across our product portfolio.

Beyond that, there's the evolution of markets. As we modernize markets and move towards Always-On, we have submitted a proposal to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to allow us to run our markets 23 hours a day, 5 days a week, extending beyond our extended market hours that we operate today from 4 a.m. to 8 p.m Eastern.

Extending that further to provide greater connectivity to investors around the world is a key growth opportunity for Nasdaq in the near term and over time.

What do you hope investors walked away from Investor Day thinking about Nasdaq?

Ato Garrett: Nasdaq’s 2026 Investor Day highlighted our strategy across our expand, evolve, and transform strategic pillars, and demonstrated how we are well positioned to expand our role as the transformation partner of the global financial system.

We're leveraging new technologies, including generative AI, to identify growth opportunities within our existing portfolio, as well as expanding into new areas such as digital assets and Always-On markets with a great growth opportunity ahead.

Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements

Information set forth in this communication contains forward-looking statements that involve a number of risks and uncertainties. Nasdaq cautions readers that any forward-looking information is not a guarantee of future performance and that actual results could differ materially from those contained in the forward-looking information. When used in this communication, words such as “believe,” “will,” "outlook" and similar expressions and any other statements that are not historical facts are intended to identify forward-looking statements.

Such forward-looking statements include, but are not limited to (i) management’s vision for the future of Nasdaq; projections relating to our future financial results, growth, products and services; and ability to transition to new business models or implement new business initiatives, (ii) statements about the benefits of strategic, technology and artificial intelligence commitments and initiatives, (iii) our medium-term growth outlook, and (iv) other statements that are not historical facts. Forward-looking statements involve a number of risks, uncertainties or other factors beyond Nasdaq’s control. These factors include, but are not limited to, Nasdaq’s ability to implement its strategic initiatives, economic, political and market conditions and fluctuations, geopolitical instability, government and industry regulation, interest rate risk and U.S. and global competition. Further information on these and other factors are detailed in Nasdaq’s filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, including its annual reports on Form 10-K and quarterly reports on Form 10-Q which are available on Nasdaq’s investor relations website at http://ir.nasdaq.com and the SEC’s website at www.sec.gov. Nasdaq undertakes no obligation to publicly update any forward-looking statement, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. The forward-looking statements in this communication do not include the potential impact of any acquisitions or divestitures that may be announced and/or completed after the date hereof.