Nasdaq Marks One Year of Transformational Progress Following Adenza Acquisition

In a milestone for its evolution, Nasdaq is celebrating the one-year anniversary of its transformative acquisition of Adenza. Over the course of the last year Nasdaq has evolved the way it supports clients, helping them navigate their most complex challenges across risk management, regulatory obligations, and trade infrastructure. 

“The integration continues seamlessly. Through our One Nasdaq strategy we are deepening our partnerships with clients across the financial system and unlocking opportunities for sustained and scalable growth." said Nasdaq Chair and CEO Adena Friedman on Nasdaq’s third quarter 2024 earnings call. 

As a result of the integration’s progress, the company’s Financial Technology division recently reported strong revenue growth, which reflects the mission-critical nature of the division’s solutions suite and the sustained demand across Nasdaq’s expanded client base. 

A key tenet in the thesis underpinning the acquisition was the understanding that clients across the financial industry are looking for fewer, more strategic partners that can help solve their challenges more holistically. 

“The addition of AxiomSL and Calypso has significantly elevated the dialogue we have with our clients as a strategic partner. There's no better evidence of that than the early traction we're seeing in our cross-sell efforts,” remarked Friedman.  

Since the Adenza acquisition, through the third quarter of 2024 there have been 13 cross-sells across the division, and Nasdaq remains on track to exceed $100 million in cross sell revenue by the end of 2027. 

In a testament to the combined benefits of the platform, Nasdaq was also recently ranked number 5 in Chartis' 2025 RiskTech100® report, widely regarded as the most comprehensive independent study of the world’s major players in risk and compliance technology.  This is an early validation of the thesis underpinning the acquisition as Adenza and Nasdaq placed 10th and 18th respectively in the 2024 rankings. 

Nasdaq is strengthening its offering all while delivering ahead of plan on net expense synergies and its deleveraging targets.

A Successful Integration

From a cultural perspective, Nasdaq has made considerable progress integrating the two businesses, bringing offices together around the world and partnering to capture new growth opportunities. A consistent culture and complimentary client segments across the two businesses has been a key component of the success to date.  

“The acquisition and integration of Adenza combined two industry-leading teams, equally passionate about serving our clients and a shared commitment to innovation that has strengthened our collective capability,” said Tal Cohen, Nasdaq President. 

The acquisition of Adenza – made up of AxiomSL and Calypso - brought mission-critical risk management, regulatory reporting, and capital markets capabilities to Nasdaq and has helped elevate Nasdaq’s dialogue with clients as a strategic partner. 

Nasdaq now offers combined solutions that can help clients manage the growing complexity of their regulatory obligations more effectively, while also complying with heightened liquidity and capital requirements.  

“Our customers consistently tell us that they value the opportunity to partner with brands that they trust, that are highly regulated themselves and can offer insight and expertise beyond the platforms they provide,” added Cohen. 

The addition of Calypso and AxiomSL has significantly elevated the dialogue Nasdaq has with clients acting as a strategic partner and offering more holistic solutions. 

“Our clients want to partner with us, they want to do more with us, and we can help solve more of their most important challenges,” said Valerie Bannert-Thurner (Ph.D.), Executive Vice President and Chief Revenue Officer of the Financial Technology division. 

"When I look at the depth of expertise and experience, the new ideas that have come in from those at Adenza, it’s undoubtedly made us stronger as an organization," added Bannert-Thurner. 

This impact is particularly evident in emerging economies such as Latin America, where Nasdaq is helping modernize the region’s financial services industry. The combined offering now supports banks with AxiomSL regulatory reporting tools, provides Calypso platform support for treasury operations and capital markets access, and integrates these with existing Nasdaq market infrastructure platforms. 

Delivering On Nasdaq’s Strategic Priorities

With many initiatives executed over the past year, Nasdaq continues its focus on delivering on its strategic priorities of Integrate, Innovate, and Accelerate. Through its Innovate priority, Nasdaq recently reached a major milestone having rolled out AI Copilot tools to 100% of its developers. It’s also embracing AI within its Financial Technology products, as demonstrated by a GenAI-enabled copilot for Nasdaq Verafin, which seeks to shorten analyst investigation times.  

In October, Nasdaq also announced a new methodology to conduct investment portfolio risk calculations and produce predictive analytics using an AI-based machine learning capability in its Calypso platform. This technology allows financial institutions to improve the efficiency of conducting the most complex trading and regulatory risk calculations with up to 100 times faster processing speeds.  

And finally, through its Accelerate priority, the company continues to make progress on its One Nasdaq strategy, identifying opportunities to expand cross-sell efforts to existing Financial Technology clients.  

The pipeline spans across regions, client segments, and product lines, and the company expects to build on this in the coming quarters. 

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 “plans,” "can,” “expects” 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 statements regarding (i) the AxiomSL and Calypso solutions and product offerings, (ii) projections relating to our future financial results, growth, products and services, and achievement of synergy targets, including deleveraging targets and (iii) 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, 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.