Chief Executive Officer & Chairman, Nasdaq Inc
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
At the All-In Summit 2025, Nasdaq CEO Adena Friedman announced that the exchange would begin offering tokenized securities, integrating tokenization into its core markets rather than as a separate product. She described this move as a way to bring crypto assets and tokenization into the mainstream securities ecosystem. Friedman also discussed the potential for changes to the IPO process to allow companies to go public more quickly. Friedman commented on the state of the markets, stating that while risks exist in areas like commercial real estate and private credit, she believes banks have been managing these issues well and that lower interest rates could ease pressure. She also expressed support for Federal Reserve independence, stating that the Fed benefits from being able to think long term and remain data dependent, separate from political cycles.
Transcript (16 segments)
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Host0:00
Nasdaq reporting fourth quarter earnings of 96 cents a share. It's 5 cents better than estimates. It's on revenue of $1.39 billion. That would not be enough. Also ahead of expectations. Joining us right now is Nasdaq CEO and Chair Adena Friedman. Good morning. I'm all over the place this morning. How are you?
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Adena Friedman0:21
It's okay. It's great to see you.
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Host0:22
It's great to see you back from Davos.
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Adena Friedman0:24
Exactly. Back in our hometown.
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Host0:25
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 Friedman0:39
Yes. Well, first of all, we are really, 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 just across the year. So, 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 witch in December. And we had the largest switch ever in the history of markets with the Walmart switch. But we also in total 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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Host1:44
Everybody's super excited about SpaceX and all of these massive IPOs that are coming.
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Adena Friedman1:49
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. 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, really nicely. And that partnership we have around the world we think has just been really, we're really, really proud of that.
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Host2:26
Question for you. It's really an AI question. I don't know if you heard Mark Zuckerberg last night was talking about just 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 Friedman3:07
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 people into, you know, the young people who actually are much more I would say AI native in the way that they understand work. That's something that we're really actually really focused on is 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 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, you know, 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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Host4:22
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 and a half billion dollars 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 Friedman5:12
Yeah, one thing we are always doing is making sure we are listening to our clients and transforming our business to meet the client's 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 market. So whether it's anti-financial crime, risk management and collateral management, dealing with trade infrastructure, regulatory reporting, which is remarkably complex and everchanging, 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 talked about, is bringing AI into those products. 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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Host6:18
And that's what people I don't think 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 billion.
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Adena Friedman6:29
Just one billion short. One billion short.
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Host6:31
But the business itself of the Nasdaq is so much bigger than what we just see here.
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Adena Friedman6:37
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 platform that really tries to drive the entire, we say that we are the fabric to the world's financial system and I believe that we really have built a platform that we can make that claim today.