Inside Nasdaq's Best-Ever Chartis RiskTech100 Result

Nasdaq's strongest result to date reflects years of deliberate investment, integration, and innovation to help clients address their biggest challenges with confidence.  

Nasdaq achieved its best-ever result in the widely followed Chartis RiskTech100, climbing to #2 overall in the 2027 ranking — up from #5 last year — and receiving 14 category awards, compared with five a year ago.

More than an industry milestone, Nasdaq leadership said that behind the ranking is a strategy years in the making, and one that builds on Nasdaq’s long history as a technology leader: the deliberate transformation of a set of independently built and acquired businesses into a connected platform approach to the solutions portfolio that spans risk management, financial crime prevention, regulatory reporting, trade surveillance, and corporate governance. Those capabilities are increasingly underpinned by investments in the technology foundation — including cloud, machine learning, AI, DLT, data management, modern APIs, and connectors — designed to help clients modernize critical workflows with resilience, transparency, and control.

The result comes as financial institutions navigate an increasingly consequential period of change. Advances in AI, the convergence of digital and mainstream financial infrastructure, evolving regulatory requirements, and changing market structures are creating new opportunities alongside new complexity. Organizations are being asked to make critical decisions even when the full path forward is not yet known. 

Against that backdrop, the value of trusted technology extends beyond functionality alone. Institutions increasingly need partners with the capabilities to help solve their toughest problems and the experience to give them confidence to move forward while maintaining resilience, governance, and control.

Recognition Across the Portfolio

The portfolio-wide ranking evaluates Nasdaq's products and capabilities together against the leading risk technology providers in the market. This year, more of that recognition than ever before is landing at the platform level for Nasdaq.

Nasdaq's 14 category wins span four areas:

• Company-level portfolio awards for Customer Satisfaction and Market Presence.
• Markets and infrastructure awards for Trading and Capital Markets, Mid-Tier Banking, Securities, Market Infrastructure, and Clearing House Risk.
• Financial crime, compliance, and control awards for AML for Regional Banks, Financial Crime Risk Management, Regulatory Reporting, Trade Surveillance, and Managed Services for Financial Crime.
• Technology and Risk Analytics awards for AI and Technology Innovation and Real-Time Risk Management.

Nasdaq leaders attributed the result to the work they do helping clients create value, modernize critical workflows, and transform their businesses with greater confidence by bringing together Nasdaq’s technology, expertise, and trusted platforms into a more connected proposition. They also highlighted their efforts to deploy innovation responsibly in mission-critical and highly-regulated environments.

"It's a really good testament to a lot of hard work that has gone into building and uniting the FinTech division," said Valerie Bannert-Thurner, Executive Vice President, Nasdaq's Financial Technology division. "Nasdaq has been in the FinTech space for almost 20 years, and we’ve paired our organic innovation with the thoughtful incorporation of the Verafin business, as well as Calypso, AxiomSL, and more. I think these awards are recognition not just of individual product lines, but of the platform as a whole."

Importantly, Bannert-Thurner added, the ranking position is secondary to what it represents.

"This has been so much effort from the thousands of Nasdaq employees working in tech-focused roles across the organization," she said. "It's a huge team effort, and everybody came together phenomenally to get to this award."

Three Megatrends, Converging at Once

Bannert-Thurner pointed to three forces reshaping what clients need from Nasdaq right now — and all three are accelerating at the same time.

The first is the "agentic transformation" of the financial ecosystem.

"They all want and need to become a truly agentic-native organization, and they're on that journey," she said of Nasdaq's clients. "They need a transformation partner, someone who helps them go on that journey and partners with them.”

According to Bannert-Thurner, that trend also changes how Nasdaq interacts with its clients, shifting Nasdaq's role from delivering software features to delivering business outcomes.

The second is digitization — the convergence of digital and pre-existing financial infrastructure.

"It's not all going crypto and it's not all staying as it was; a new ecosystem is emerging," she said, pointing to capabilities like digital collateral mobilization now being built into Nasdaq's platforms.

Digitization is also an important enabler of the third force: the move toward always-on markets. The shift toward near-continuous trading that is behind Nasdaq's 23/5 initiative to enable U.S. equities trading 23 hours a day, five days a week, is a major force at play and one which Bannert-Thurner has personally seen up close on a recent trip through Asia.

"It's the biggest topic in terms of enabling the retail community around the world to access U.S. liquidity and trade U.S. stocks with healthy spreads, proper liquidity, and a fair price," she said.

"It sounds small in terms of 'overnight,' but in terms of the infrastructure that needs to change, it has a profound impact on our customers — operationally, from a risk management perspective, and in how they think about their business."

Trust, Earned Over Time

With more than 3,800 clients globally, Nasdaq's Financial Technology business draws heavily on long-standing relationships to shape its roadmap — and Bannert-Thurner argued that trust, not technology alone, is what the Chartis recognition ultimately reflects.

"Trust isn't something you can buy; it's something you earn, and I believe we've been working for it for many years," she said. That trust is built on Nasdaq’s long history of investing purposefully in technology and innovation with an eye towards helping clients solve increasingly complex challenges.

Bannert-Thurner said that as AI reshapes how firms operate, the challenge is bigger than simply identifying what new technologies can do. It is determining how to adopt them responsibly inside environments where resilience, transparency, governance, and control are essential, so clients can have the confidence to use them. 

"Everybody wants to drive efficiency and unlock value through agentic capabilities, yet everybody also wants, at the end of the day, someone they can look in the eye and trust to make the right decision with the right mindset."

In that sense, Bannert-Thurner said, trust is not a brake on innovation. It is what gives institutions the confidence and operating latitude to modernize, pursue new opportunities, and act when the path forward is not fully defined. 

Evolving AI, Governance, and Compliance

The portfolio-wide recognition also reflects how Nasdaq is applying trusted technology across distinct decision environments, from financial crime and market infrastructure to governance, disclosure, sustainability, and enterprise risk. The same dynamic is playing out on the governance and compliance side of Nasdaq's business. Nasdaq Boardvantage®, board portal software for boards and governance teams, and Nasdaq Lens™, an AI‑native platform for finance, legal, sustainability, and risk teams, contributed to this year's portfolio-wide wins.

"The governance landscape has changed dramatically over the past decade," Gabriella Halasz-Clarke, VP of Governance Solutions at Nasdaq said, pointing to a convergence of its own: rising regulatory complexity, heightened cybersecurity threats, rapid AI adoption, and growing demands for transparency and accountability from boards and stakeholders alike.

In response, Nasdaq's tools have evolved from standalone tools into a connected ecosystem that helps organizations strengthen oversight, improve decision-making, and manage risk more effectively.

Nasdaq Lens reflects that shift as well, applying AI to help teams work through complex regulatory, compliance, and disclosure questions more efficiently. The goal is not simply to add AI into the workflow, but to help users surface relevant insights, move faster, and maintain greater confidence in the information behind their decisions.

The throughline, Gabriella Halasz-Clarke said, is the same one Bannert-Thurner described on the FinTech side: trusted technology, embedded in critical workflows, that helps clients respond to complexity with greater speed and confidence.

"Rather than simply responding to today's megatrends, Nasdaq is focused on helping clients build the infrastructure, insight, and resilience needed to anticipate what comes next."

From System of Record to Platform of Action

Looking ahead, Bannert-Thurner described Nasdaq Financial Technology’s next chapter as building on its role in mission-critical client environments to become a more active partner in helping institutions act, adapt, and transform.

She pointed to early proof points already in production: Nasdaq Verafin's Agentic AI workforce, which she says is "helping financial institutions automate fraud and AML workflows, accelerate investigations, and do their jobs better and smarter."

"Our North Star is evolving from being a system of record, mission-critical and core to the operations of a bank, exchange, or broker-dealer toward being a platform of action," she said. "With the incorporation of our agentic capabilities to expand our software functionality, we're able to deliver much more value to our customers, focus more on business outcomes, and become a partner of action."

"Our role is to help clients move forward and make tough decisions with confidence," said Gabriella Halasz-Clarke. “By combining trusted technology, deep expertise, and purposeful innovation, we can help them navigate complexity, pursue growth, and prepare for what comes next.”

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. Forward-looking statements can be identified by words such as “could,” “may,” “expects,” “likely,” “potential,” and other words and terms of similar meaning. Such forward-looking statements include, but are not limited to, statements regarding the potential economic impact and commercial applications of agentic transformation, digitization, always-on markets, Nasdaq’s 23/5 initiative, and the addition of artificial intelligence to products and workflows. Forward-looking statements involve a number of risks, uncertainties or other factors beyond Nasdaq’s control. These risks and uncertainties 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.