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Joining us now is NASVAC chair and CEO Adina Friedman. Adina, thank you so much for joining. It's great to be here. So many highlights in this from IPOs, coming back to your other fintech businesses which are find fascinating, but for me to switching to the Nasdaq for certain companies like Walmart, coming over your numbers a record one point two trillion
dollars enlisting transfers. With everybody wanting to become a tech company, how many inbounds are you getting for more companies to make a Walmart move and become listed on the Nasdaq.
Well, first of all, thank you so much. It's great to be here. And we are really proud of the results that we delivered for the quarter and for the year with twelve percent growth overall and eleven percent growth in our solutions businesses, with every part of our business contributing, including our listening's business. And when it comes to transfers from the New York stocking change to NASSAC, we really
focus on several different key differentiators for US. First is we are the home to great innovative tech companies, but innovators across every sector, and I think that's what's really come to everyone's attention, is that everyone is becoming much more techl enabled technology is becoming an integral part of their innovation story. But you can innovate across industries, and these innovative growth companies gravitate to Nasdaq, including Walmart, which
we were so excited. It's such an amazing, amazing company with an amazing leadership. But we also have the index business. So we closed the year with eight hundred and eighty two billion dollars in our index business, ninety nine billion
dollars of inflos just in the year. And what that does is it allows us, through our partners, to become investors in these great companies through the NASOQ one hundred Index franchise, and in the case of some companies, we could be as much as a four percent owner of their shares, which creates a really nice long term passive ownership. In addition to the fact, we also have market quality.
We've invested so much in our technology to drive market modernization shows up in the quality of our markets and their level participation we have, which is actually become a real differentiator for US and particularly these megacap companies. And then of first last week, we have all these great marketing assets that we do to help promote their brand
as an innovative growth company. And so all of those things combined has really created a great opportunity for us to talk to Shopify talk and to Kimberly Clark and to Thompson Writers in addition to Walmart and bring them to NAZAC in twenty twenty five.
So your first time over five billion dollars in revenue. It's a record solutions sales growth, record index inflows. And the one part that I keep thinking about is the concentration. I've been thinking about it since I read your piece on LinkedIn. Actually more is that a risk that you're worried about that there's so much concentration risk and these aiivy companies.
Well, I think the first thing is what we have to actually seen is returns start to come be more broad based. With interest rates coming down, small cap companies over the last couple of years, they've had as much as forty percent of their data income have to be spent on interest expense. So as the interest rates are coming down, the cost of capitals coming down. It is allowing them to invest more in their business and deliver
more for their shareholders. And you are seeing a broader based return profile with large cap and small cup companies as we go into twenty twenty six, which we're encouraged by.
But we also do have these great megacap companies that are delivering the future of technology to every industry, and I think that as a result, the investment that they've been making is critically important, very large still though not even it's about you know, if you look at all of the hyperscalers and the semiconductor companies that I've really been investing heavily here, it represents about less than seventy percent of their annual cash flows and aggregate, so imagine
how cash arts of these companies are. So there's a huge ballast of cash capabilities in addition to having very large scale investors like Blackstone be an underwriter of these types of investments, and I do think the public capital markets are going to play a bigger role. This investment is a change in the infrastructure of our economy, and more and more of the industry experts are going to
be coming in and delivering against that opportunity. So we see the capital markets playing a bigger and bigger role going forward.
Can I just follow up on your LinkedIn piece, which I thought was fascinating. I think your core argument is that this is not some kind of flimsy stock bubble. This is a generational sea change like the railroads or the Internet. But with the Internet it was both, you know, an industrial shift and a bubble, right, Because I was looking at the Nasdaq high March of two thousand and
it took fifteen years to get back there. Okay, now we're six x that, But is it possible that we have the same kind of delayed, you know, revenue problem that we had then.
So first I would say I was at NASAK back then, and so I've actually lived through that experience. And a big difference here is that the companies that are underwriting the risk and the opportunity are very large scale, well capitalized companies. Number Two, when you look at certainly the Nasaka one hundred today, the minimum market cap on the Nazak one hundred today is about thirty to forty billion dollars, whereas back then it was like five billion dollars. And also,
as you said, the revenue generation. If you look at companies that are coming public, these are revenue generating, very strong companies that have strong business momentum. KPIs all of those things. And so as much as I do think that there's going to be a lot of investment here, I also think that they're going to be winners and
losers of course, or as these trends come through. I believe that the underpinning of this investment cycle has much more capital and much more ballast that underpins it as we move forward, and it's a long term trend. It's the future of our economy that we are underwriting right now.
One of the things that's also really transformed in markets. I think how much your index business has grown is also a testament to this. It's just a wider participation of investors, more retail investors, more.
Happy to jump in the market.
But a strange kind of like I don't know, step child has arisen with it, and that is the prediction markets. We had a guest on Amy We've Silverman of RBC who framed it as a threat that maybe prediction markets grow and people go into there unless into equity markets. How are you viewing kind of the booming. I guess asset class. I don't know what we want to call it. Of prediction markets.
Well, I think first of all, we are very clear that we view regulation as an important ballast and an important underpinning of markets really just for the purpose of investor protection and all the things that it comes with, the guardrails that are really necessary to make sure that investors have a sustainable, lasting experience. When you are putting your savings to work and you are a true investor, the equities markets are an amazing opportunity to find to
find returns. When you are looking at this more as a way to spend your afternoon, that's a different you know, it's a different investor type, it's a different use of capital. But also even then, the rules have to be clear, and I think that's where we've been engaging with regulators to understand, you know, how are they thinking about shaping
the rules. The safety c and the SEC are working together better than we've ever seen before, because a lot of these prediction markets te kind of in between, and so it's a really a matter of how do we make sure that the rules of a road are clear so.
That investors are protected Adeena, great having you with us on set today. Really appreciate you joining us Adena. Friedman there the CEO of the Nasdaq,