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Let's turn out to the latest earnings news. The NASDAQ saw its best first half for listing since twenty twenty one, despite the volatility around trade and policy. The exchange also beating profit estimates in its second quarter. Let's get details now with Adena Friedman, NASDAK chair and CEO, and Adena, great having you here. I have been talking about this all morning long because I think it's such an amazing sign for markets. Tell us how you navigated this first half.
Yeah, well, first of all, we're really proud of the overall performance of the business. So we had twelve percent revenue growth, twenty four percent EPs growth, and it really was growth across all of our divisions. So as you know, we have our financial Technology division ten percent growth. They're really great momentum with our clients and the strategic capabilities
we offer around risk management, antifin crime, CREDE, infrastructure. And then we also had nine percent growth in capital access plums, which includes our index business seventeen percent growth there as well as our listings and data and analytics businesses, and so the listing's business has definitely improved as we've gone through the year. As you mentioned, we had eighty three IPOs in the first half of the year and three of the top five, so we're really unexpected.
I mean, we have been i think talking down to some extent the potential for exits and IPOs in general, and it's really beaten the street. Well.
I think that first of all, the companies that have come out, and particularly a little large calf companies have done well so far this year, which is of course giving investors more confidence and underwriting that risk capital, giving companies more confidence that now maybe the time to come out. We're having a lot more conversations around putting dates on calendars, really focusing on post Labor Day, but with some companies
coming out over the summer as well. But that post labor day period, if the economy stays healthy as it is, if the markets stay healthy as they are, and we obviously see a lot of volumes in the second quarter as well, that driver results. But we I think we could see a very active second half of the year.
Also curious about the limitations because really strangely, you've seen a lot of the companies that came out, like Circle just Soar, a lot of crypto companies, a lot of bitcoins backs that are making it to market now, So what does this mean for the types of companies that will do well in the future. A little earlier, I was talking to John Gray about Medline, which was supposed to be one of the year's biggest IPOs, yet we
haven't seen it yet. So what's still being impacted that can't make it out yet.
Well, I think yeah, it is. You're right that it is sector specific. So if you think about the companies that have come out and done well, biotech is starting to really come back. We're having more companies. We had Caris life Cycle, life Science come out in the quarter. Really excited about that, but also tech, you know, software, AI, infrastructure like a core weave, as well as areas in the crypto space. So those are all what I would
say more digital oriented companies. Companies that where tariffs may still have an impact, are taking a little bit longer to understand the nature of the mar markets and how to allow investors to have predictability in their earnings. And I think that those types of companies that have more and more dependence on what I would call the physical economy, they're taking a little bit longer to get out the door.
Meme stocks have come back in a fairly interesting way, and I guess retail trading is just driving this higher. Do you feel that as well?
I think retail has been very active in the markets. Definitely. You saw a lot of.
Retail drove us back from the April second drop, right, But is it even further accelerating with this new meme style?
Can it keep going?
Yeah? I mean I can only say retail has been an active participant in the market now for five years. Ever, you know, COVID really brought a new generation of retail investors into the market. Those investors have been very sustainable. You know, they've been very resilient. They're very active in the markets as well, driving up index you know, interest and indexes and index products as well as the fact
that they're very active in the markets. And we did see an increase in retail volumes second quarter this year versus last year, so we're definitely seeing a very active retail engagement. We're also selling our data around the world, so it's global retail. So our data business was up seven percent in the quarter, and that is really driven by international demand for our data to have their interest in US stocks as continue to grow and we're going all over the world without data today.
Speaking of data, the sister is AI, right, And so when it comes to AI, I know you're rolling out more products to banks and financial institutions later this year AI agents that could help them with a lot of the parts of your growing business in financial technology and to financial crime. What does this do ultimately to save costs for others at the end of the day, does it mean that headcount can be reduced by any means.
Or for you?
Yeah, So basically we do we evaluate our products and look at how do we create new capabilities to make our clients more efficient. AI is one of the biggest unlocks we've seen in many years. I mean, so first, we've moved our product base into cloud, We've modernized the data management that underpins our product base, and particularly with Verifin,
which is our anti financial crime suite. We've leveraged ANAI for many years to root out criminals and now with a gentic AI to make the workflows a lot more efficient. So the new thing we've launched for these digital workers, they're agents really that come in and basically take it. They do all the assessment of the alerts, they do the write ups and they do this submissions so that you're taking down the actual workload of the humans within
the group by eighty percent. So that is a huge efficiency opportunity for the banks to be able to solve this problem more successfully and more efficiently. And then we're also doing in ANXMSL, we're starting to bring in work basically augentic capabilities to make it so that we can do the veritory reporting their surveillance. There's a lot of places where efficiency can be gained here.
I wonder about the tokenization that we've seen at robin Hood. You know, they're allowing Europeans to trade US security through tokenization.
Without having the underlying cash flow. I think that's an important part of this too.
How do you view that and what can that do for the industry?
Well, so, to me, tokenization is a technology, it's a way to you know, so the technology itself can be used to do a lot of new things. But when we're looking at how it's being used right now in public securities, I think that it's really kind of a very similar construct to contracts for difference, which has existed in Europe for many years, where you own a financial interest in the company, but not the underlying shares themselves. We also have things like fractionalized shares in the United
States and owning fractional shares. It's the same kind of idea. So so far what we see in terms of toganization is really just a new technology to deliver a similar thing where you can have a financial interest without actually owning the underlying equity. At the end of the day, that underlying equity ultimately does need to block bill and owned and that then of course slows into the market. So to us, it's just another way to use that technology to open up access.
So will you use it too?
So we are we provide the foundational infrastructure that allows retail brokers to offer things like that, to allow the data. The data is super important to that. We have obviously our own index products where we'd love for them to be able to offer those out through this new technology. But we so we're very excited to work with the industry on this as an enabler and as the core infrastructure.
Very interesting that is a nasakchre and CEO Adina Friedman