Chair and CEO, Nasdaq, Inc. (parent of Adenza), Adenza (now part of Nasdaq, Inc. — Financial Technology division)
Nasdaq CEO Adena Friedman on Q4 results: See a lot of momentum going into 2026
Nasdaq CEO and Chair Adena Friedman joins 'Squawk Box' to discuss the company's quarterly earnings results, impact of AI, ...
About Adena Friedman
Adena Friedman, Chair and CEO of Nasdaq, appeared at the All-In Summit 2025, where she discussed the company's expansion beyond its traditional stock exchange business. She announced that Nasdaq will offer tokenized securities and move toward a 24/5 trading schedule, describing the integration of crypto assets into securities markets as a way to "bring them to the mainstream." Friedman also addressed the IPO market, suggesting changes to help companies go public faster, and commented on the state of the stock market and data issues at the Federal Reserve. In her remarks, Friedman stated, "We are here to advance economic progress for all." She also expressed confidence in the U.S. dollar, saying, "I am a huge believer in dollar as a reserve currency and the in fact we will be persistent as a reserve currency over a long period of time," citing the strength of the U.S. economy, rule of law, and stability.
Transcript (15 segments)
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Host0:08
Welcome back to Squawk Box. Nasdaq reporting fourth quarter earnings of $0.96 a share. It's $0.05 better than estimates on revenue of $1.39 billion. Also ahead of expectations. Joining us right now is Nasdaq CEO, Chair, I should say, Adena Friedman. Good morning. Good morning. How are you? It's okay. It's great to see you. It's great to see you back from Davos.
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Adena Friedman0:34
Exactly.
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Host0:35
Back in our hometown.
So when you look at this report, obviously better than expected. I think the bigger question is sort of what you think the rest of the year looks like at this point. Not that we're not going to talk about the last quarter, but everyone's going to want to know the next sort of chapter of this.
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Adena Friedman0:51
Yes. Well, first of all, we are really pleased with the results and the performance of the business because it came from every part of the business. Overall, our revenue grew 12% for the year, 13% in the quarter, and our solutions businesses, which is everything other than our markets business, grew 12% for the quarter and 11% for the year. So it's just been a great performance, and it comes from every part of the business. And we had some really interesting milestones across the year. In the fourth quarter, we did hit $99 billion of inflows into our index business for the year. We also had the largest closing cross in notional value ever at Nasdaq, with $233 billion traded on the triple in December. And we had the largest switch ever in the history of markets with the Walmart switch. But we also overall switched $1.2 trillion of market cap to Nasdaq, and we had a 72% win rate for IPOs. So it's just been a tremendous performance of the team and also the way that we work with our clients. Going into 2026, we see a lot of momentum across our business.
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Host1:53
Everybody is super excited about space and all of these massive IPOs that are coming.
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Adena Friedman1:58
Yeah. So we have definitely a very active IPO outlook. We have had already a lot of meetings with companies that are ready to come into the markets. We have a very healthy pipeline of companies. And you're seeing that already coming in even this month, which is actually not always the case. January isn't always as active as it is right now. So very excited about that. But also, you know, our fintech business and all of the work that we're doing with our clients on market modernization, as well as protecting them against criminal actors, has continued to grow really nicely. And we are really proud of that partnership around the world.
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Host2:35
Question for you. It's really an AI question. I don't know if you heard Mark Zuckerberg last night was talking about, and Becky made the point how few people are now needed inside his own company to do certain things. And we also heard from Jay Powell yesterday about what's happening in terms of unemployment, younger people and the like. And I wonder underneath what seems like very good news for the marketplace right now. Right. We all everything still seems to be running and gunning. But underneath us all, I wonder what you think the rest of the year actually looks like, as sort of AI becomes more successful, and even how you're using AI, what that looks like for employment.
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Adena Friedman3:16
Yeah, well, first of all, we view ourselves as a growth company. So when you're trying to grow as fast as you possibly can and you want to serve your clients as well as you can, AI becomes a great superpower within the organization because it allows us to have our engineering team be more efficient and effective and deliver better code, and be able to put more into every sprint. So it's not so much that we're looking at it as how do we take away our team, but it's more how can we do more with our team so we can grow faster? We actually are excited to bring new engineers into our organization, to bring young people who are much more AI native in the way that they understand work. That's something that we are really focused on: bringing in more young people who bring those skills into the organization. But it is a reskilling. It is a change. It's a huge change management. We talked about that in Davos. This is not something that you can just click a switch and everything works. It requires an enormous amount of effort to bring it in an enterprise way. Security with all the security you need, all the resiliency. We provide mission critical technology. So we cannot do this in a way. We have to do it really well. And so that actually is requiring a lot of effort and a lot of focus.
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Host4:32
Adena, I wanted to talk to you just about the transformation of the company over the last several years. We go back to Adenza and the purchase that you made. And if we can take a look further back on this stock chart right now, you see, it's up 23%. The stock for the one year over five years. You look back to 22 when you first announced that you were buying Adenza. And there was some skepticism in the market. People thought you were going to be paying too much. I think it was $10.5 billion in cash and debt, but that has really changed the course of the company. And I think it's what you've seen over the last couple of years in the stock price, reflecting that pretty transformational what you've seen with fintech, how much broader it has made this company than just a listings company. What do you plan to do next? Is there another deal that might be coming in the works? Some other way that you plan to change it around the edges? Because one thing you never do is sit still.
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Adena Friedman5:23
Yeah. One thing we are always doing is making sure we are listening to our clients and transforming our business to meet the clients' needs. And so we're very focused on organic growth, very focused on this incredible platform that we now have to serve our clients across every element of the risk that they face in managing their lives in the financial markets. So whether it's anti-financial crime, risk management and collateral management, dealing with trade infrastructure, regulatory reporting, which is remarkably complex and ever changing, as well as making sure that they have the technology they need to operate markets and to be that critical infrastructure. It's a wonderful platform that we have now to serve our clients. But what we also are doing as we talk about is bringing AI into this product. Every product roadmap at Nasdaq has AI built into its plans so that we can continue to transform the client experience, and that's what we're focused on. It's really a maniacal focus, frankly, whether it's in our markets, across our fintech solutions, in our index business or in our solutions for asset managers and corporates, we just have to make sure that we're always upping our game to serve the clients in the future.
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Host6:28
And that's what people don't understand about the Nasdaq, is that your listings business is big, but there's so many other businesses. You mentioned indexing 99 billion. I don't know why you couldn't get to 100.
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Adena Friedman6:38
Just 1 billion short. 1 billion short.
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Host6:40
But the business itself of the Nasdaq is so much bigger than what we just see here.
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Adena Friedman6:46
Yeah, the listings business is so important to us. We always say everyone at Nasdaq works for listings, but the fact is that the business itself, that listings business is a catalyst to a lot of things. But now we are a much broader...