Great. We're gonna go ahead and get started. For important disclosures, please see the Morgan Stanley Research Disclosure website at morganstanley.com/researchdisclosures. If you have any questions, please reach out to your Morgan Stanley sales representative. Good morning, everyone. I'm Michael Cyprys, Lead analyst covering brokers, asset managers, and exchanges for Morgan Stanley Research, and it's my pleasure to welcome Sarah Youngwood, the CFO of Nasdaq. Thanks for having me. Many of you know, may know Nasdaq to be a global exchange operator. In recent years, Nasdaq has been transforming the business through a series of acquisitions to become a technology and platform provider to serve corporates, investment managers, and financial institutions as they navigate and interact with the global capital markets and the broader financial system. We're thrilled to have Sarah with us here today to discuss the transformation and to dig in. Welcome. Thanks for joining us. Happy to be here. Great. Let's kick off with your Investor Day. Yeah. Last week, spent over four hours digging in to all different parts of the business. AI was a major theme, a dominant theme. Just curious what takeaways you walked away with, Sarah, why raise your bar for the medium-term solutions revenue guide and create a higher bar? Why raise your guide? I'll start with the key messages. We are a leading technology company that is a trusted fabric of the financial system, and we architect the world's most modern markets. We power the innovation economy. We build trust in the system. What we've established at Investor Day is how we're positioned in this world, which is our position for transformation with AI, which is positioned for transformation in the financial system for being our clients' trusted financial partner. It's very important, too, that we have now realized the scale and the relevance to be that trusted financial partner because they'll need to choose how to go GenAI, and we believe their solution is gonna be very much us. That was the first point. The second point that we've made is that that transformation has also generated a very strong profile of durable growth. We'll come back to that outlook that you're referring to. In addition to that, durable growth that is established with cycles, that is well-positioned for growth vectors, we actually also have financial discipline, and that is expense, capital allocation, free cash flow. With those in place, we have the ability to add value for shareholders on a very sustainable basis. Those were some of the key messages. To your question on why raise the bar, the first answer is because we've been doing that for the last five years. You've seen us increase our medium-term outlook, and we have operated, of course, within our medium-term outlook for the last five years. In addition, we've actually operated within this new medium-term outlook of 9%-12% for four out of the last five years. We looked at the market opportunity, and we talked about a $38 billion sum going at 9%. We did a small retrospective to show that actually we've outperformed based on organic growth what we had said two years ago, so hopefully we have some credibility there. That gives us an anchor, that 9% at the bottom of that 9%-12% range. Lastly, we think we're very well-positioned as mission-critical, with additional growth opportunities in cross-sales as well as digital assets and GenAI. With all that, we feel that we're just getting started, and we definitely were very comfortable raising that medium-term outlook. The guidance raise was notable 'cause I think it was the fourth time. Yep four years that you have Fourth time in. raised your guidance. That's right. Fourth time in five years, but still really good. The market has been a bit volatile to start. Yeah the year, maybe a bit more than many had expected with AI disruption risk across markets taking up a lot of mind share, yet Nasdaq continues to deliver with- Yep accelerating top-line growth. What do you see as some of the biggest misconceptions that you may wanna correct? Yeah. In the last few weeks, we've seen GenAI taking on a very generalized view on the sector. We spent a lot of time at Investor Day establishing the difference and how we think about the differentiation. First of all, gold standard data. We spent a lot of time talking about data and everything that makes most of our products at the level of gold standard data. We didn't use those words lightly. We really detailed what that meant. The second piece is being mission-critical. Very important to how our clients effectively do the most important things through us and also connect to the financial system through us. The third one is hyper-resilient. The regulated institutions turn to us as a regulated institution ourself to understand what we are doing. And what they want is really for us to understand, which we do, that the cost of error is extraordinarily important. That hyper-resiliency is incredibly important. Then we have tremendous innovation, and we embed that, we engineer that into our system. It's domain expertise and innovation, both things coming into our systems, and 450 patents, just like one example of that. The connectivity, very important we talked about. Lastly, we have the return to our clients. At some point, if you have all of those things, it becomes really difficult to want to do something about it. If in addition, it's not worth it financially, then why would you? Those were some of the elements that differentiate us. We spent a lot of time with that. The last one being the enhanced ROI for the clients. Exactly. We have a 2 x ROIC to our clients, which is very, very strong if you think about the in-investment you have to make and whether it's a great investment, it's a tremendous investment. In addition to that, when you think about do I want to renew, we have also a 2 x net benefit versus net cost on an ongoing basis, which again, makes every year that decision a very ea sy decision. Nasdaq has been on a journey for a number of years now transforming the business. Can you talk about maybe two or three of the biggest strategic choices that Nasdaq is making today to accelerate growth and the evolution as you look out? Yeah. I was thinking through that, the reality is that we are extraordinarily well-positioned thanks to decisions we made more than a decade ago. Actually, we're talking about GenAI today, if we were making the decisions today, we would be late. 12 years ago, we decided to go to the cloud. 12 years ago, Adena Friedman, our CEO, became the CEO of the Data Business and realized the importance of data both offensively and defensively. 10 years ago, we got started on AI and all of the nomenclature and organization of the data, all of that skill set positions us extremely well for GenAI. Now of course, we are not sitting on those decisions from 10 years ago. In addition, we have a narrow IC framework to prioritize internal organic investments. We have talked at Investor Day about how we are doing things through a new growth framework, which is expand within our TAM, our SAM. Evolve as we really evolve the technologies and the delivery to our clients within our SAM. That's taking from the TAM and going into the SAM. Lastly, transform. There are some important changes to the financial industry with tokenization, with 23x5, private markets, and of course transforming the client experience through GenAI for our clients. The great news is that we are able to do that today, which is really growth-oriented because we have the foundation we laid 10 or more years ago. Let's dig in a bit on that growth framework. We'll come back to the latter points on transform. Yeah. Look, a key component of your strategy across the fintech business is to land and expand. Yeah. Can we talk about where are you having some of the most success there? Without maybe getting overly granular, can you frame cross-sell in terms of the pipeline, attach rates, conversion timing? Yeah. One of the thing you'll get always like stats. We started with telling you 20% is the land, that's new clients, this for fintech, 80% is the expand, that would be upsells, cross-sells, and everything else. When you're thinking about that, we actually had 460+ upsells just last year in 2025. If I start with upsells, that upsell can be very powerful, like two examples. One would be in India, where Tal described that a large bank was taking us for one single implementation, we were able to give them the full coverage for an Indian bank. That was a 3x on the ACV. Upsell can be very powerful. A second example would be Verafin. We talk with enterprise very much about lending with Wirecard. In two cases already, we've been able to expand with ACH, and that multiplied the ACH by two. That's the upsell. On cross-sell, to your question, first of all, we've got this $100 million+ target, which we're very well positioned to achieve. That's the year-end 2027 run- rate. We have already 42 of them, $45 million of the target is already signed. We have seen an acceleration. We have a nice graph in our Investor Day that shows really an exponential graph showing how we've delivered those 42 cross-sells. In addition, we have a great pipeline. As we have een talking for a while, it's important to maintain that pipeline. It's growing at 20%, and it represents 15% of our fintech pip eline. When you have all of that, you also think through, okay, what's my baseline? Well, we've got, you know, top 300 clients, which are the ones that really actually need more than one client. Only half of them have more than one product. Again, just a lot of opportunities to deepen, t o cross-sell, to penetrate further. Maybe we could dig in a bit on the sales initiative, sales team here. Maybe talk about how you're aligning incentives across the sales organization to avoid. Single product selling seems like there's a big opportunity if only half of your top 300 clients have more than onr product. More broadly, what adjustments have you made to the sales team and the approach over the last couple of years, and where might there be scope for further tweaks as you look out from here? Yeah. As soon as we did the AxiomSL and Calypso acquisition, we said one sales team. We started literally in that January with one sales team. That was very important. It's also one incentive framework. That is very important because that incentive framework does give credit to the cross-sell and to driving that motion. The other thing we've done is on the top accounts, which doesn't go as deep as the 300, but on the top accounts, we've done a one Nasdaq representative. We've got the ability to look at it as one firm and to make sure we're hyper-coordinated. To complement that, you've got the C-suite relationships on both sides at Nasdaq as well as, at the client, to make sure that we are very much listening to our client and continue to do things that are important to our client to drive that cross-sell as that transformation partner that I talked about, which is really critical at this time because they are looking at the world out. Everybody needs to do something. We feel, and we're hearing from our clients, that we're very well-positioned to be that transformation partner, and that means taking more from us. In the fourth quarter, your Verafin business launched two agentic workers. Yeah. Let's talk about that. Can you speak to some of the learnings you've had and what the client take-up has been on that? More broadly, can you speak to some of your ambitions and aspirations for agentic AI at Nasdaq in the next 12 months versus as you look out over the next couple of years? Yeah. If you're looking at Verafin, we launched in the fourth quarter our first agentic worker. We followed it within two months with our second one. Today, we have six that are already planned in the roadmap. That is really working with our clients, looking at the areas where efficiency can be most importantly achieved, and actually starting to build that fleet of workers. We already have 350 clients that are working on a daily basis with our two workers that are available. That's a very, very fast adoption for something that is pretty much brand new. That helps to create for our clients the ROI case for them to be able at some point when they are past the free volume period to actually pay additional upsell fees to be able to continue to have those workers. That has worked very well. We think it's very important for all the clientele, and that's also very powerful. The small and medium-sized banks are the ones that are the majority of those 350 that are currently engaging with it. It applies also to medium-sized banks. We're hearing very much from the large enterprise banks that this could be very interesting as an upsell for them. You know that they are the ones who have the largest population that could be very much in target for those efficiency gains. Great. What would you say is one of the most compelling AI initiatives that maybe you're most excited about that investors may be underappreciating today? That's always the hard question. Which of my children do I prefer? In real life, I have three. But in this life, I have a lot of children. I'm gonna pick one that is in fact not Verafin because that's one that is quite appreciated by the market. That also addresses fraud. In this case, Surveillance is addressing the trading fraud. What's really interesting about Surveillance is the scale of what it processes. 1 trillion daily messages across 215 marketplaces or data sources, including our clients' input. You take that and you normalize it, you consolidate it across our proprietary way of doing it, which we've established for a very long time. You add technology, including more recently AI. That's where AI comes in. Suddenly you are able to deliver on a daily basis 250,000 alerts. You've got the collective intelligence that starts working for you, where our clients actually give us feedback on those alerts, which then inform back the process. What we are very fortunate is that we have the rights contractually to evolve our understanding, to improve the product and to train the alerting system with the data of our clients on an aggregated and anonymized basis. When you have all of that, you end up with something that's very valuable, especially because this is a principle-based type of regulation. If you think about rules-based, tells you do this very specifically. Principle base, it's like you shouldn't do that kind of things, but it doesn't give you exactly the time, it doesn't give you the specifics. It's very important to look through the learned experience of not just one client, but all of the clients, and then apply GenAI to those signals to be able to actually derive conclusions and feed that feedback loop. That's what we're doing with GenAI right now. That's what you couldn't do with one client's data set. We've become the standard of doing it and adding detection through all of the things I've described. Lastly, we also are positioned to start doing some agentic workflows to then process those alerts even more efficiently. That's an example, and again, I could spend less on all of our examples, but I have a lot of passion for this one, and we speak a bit about it a bit less. Very helpful. Why don't we move on and talk about some of your other businesses and get to the transform element of the strategy. First, let's talk about Index. Mm-hmm. Nasdaq has an incredible brand and set of listed companies, including many that are here. Yeah at our TMT conference. Just curious how you're thinking about some of the biggest opportunities to broaden monetization of y our Index business and how you're attacking this. Yeah. This has been something which we've been continuing to do since our last Investor Day. Just for scale, 2025, we grew at 20%. Last five years, we grew at 21%. We had in 2025, $99 billion of inflows, and that's on $882 billion of AUM in 2025. It has become qui te an important part of what we do. We have three pillars of growth. The first one is adding products, new capabilities, for our clients. We have added over 200 products in the last two years, which is 50% faster than the previ ous two years. If you think about that $99 billion of inflows that I have given you, those new products are 36% of the $99 billion. That new product capability is a very important part of how we are generating alpha. The second pillar is International. Here we've been growing even faster than the 21% in the last five years. We've been growing at 34% in international, and it's not a small base anymore. Now it's $163 billion at the end of 2025, in international AUM, in the ETP AUMs. This is very significant, and it's really across the world in terms of geographies where we are operating. You're looking at institutional, and again, you're recognizing those themes from not just this Investor Day, but two years ago. This has been something that we've been evolving in a very steady and very productive manner. Institutional is a $700 billion opportunity where we've been gaining market share. We've been growing at 20%, and it's now $66 billion. Again, it's starting to become an important part of what we have. While we're on Capital Access Platforms. Yeah which the Index business is part of, let's talk about listings. You previously noted some optimism around a strong IPO pipeline for this year. Question is, what needs to happen for that to translate into a sustained multi-year listing cycle? What implications might there be to IPO activity over time should tokenization of private companies gain traction? Got it. Maybe a step back, in 2025 was the 7th year, where we were the leading exchange in terms of proceeds raised. We also had the largest IPO once again, and we also had the largest transfer, Walmart, to our exchange. We're very well-positioned. The pipeline is very much there. Last year we had 180 companies in the pipeline at this time of the year, 210 this year. What's gonna be important is, of course, to have an environment, which is windows, pockets, of stability where people can have confidence in actually going public. There is tremendous appetite both from the companies and their owners, for that to happen. We believe that with a little bit of stability, which, you know, today might be a difficult day to say that, we should be extremely well positioned, what's also very attractive about the pipeline that I referred to is that how broad it is. It's not one sector. It's AI, it's space. It's like in many different types. It's also different sizes of companies, including some of a very, very large scale, which we are very much ready for, should they come to market. Those are the elements. Now, in terms of, like, multi-year cycle, it's already difficult enough to talk about one year. What really makes a difference to investors, and I think you would certainly agree with that as investors, is to have the performance of those who go. Continue to show that there is interest in the following ones. This is very much a virtuous cycle and so, we certainly, along with banks like Morgan Stanley, work to make sure that we strike the right balance, to make sure that there is a great experience for both the sellers and the buyers in those processes. In terms of tokenization, when you try to think about the liquidity, the depth, the transparency, the nanoseconds at which we operate, there's nothing today that matches the depth of the public market. You're talking about $127 trillion versus $15 trillion for the private markets. Tokenization, it can be additive to being a public company, but it's not a replacement. We're not seeing it as being a replacement for that. You don't see cause for if tokenization gains traction, private companies could stay private for longer and may not need to raise capital and go public? What you need is the scale that I talked about, the $127 trillion, with the integrity, with the price discovery, with the transparency. We actually are working on tokenization ourself, and we talked about that at Investor Day, too, because we want to be part of it and we think it's a very, very good technology that can be additive, but it can be additive if you're making it part of the process of being a public company rather than not accessing this massive pool of liquidity through being a public company. Great. Speaking of market structure innovations, one of the other things that we have seen gain a lot of traction of late is short-dated options that continue to grow across the Index space. You recently got regulatory approval and launched a set of short-dated options in select single name stocks with Monday and Wednesday expiries that complement the Friday expiry. Questions here, what do we need to see for Tuesday, Thursday expiries to come online? What do we need to see for this to expand beyond, I think, the initial eight symbols? What are the considerations that you're taking into an account here? What may come first, and what's been the feedback and action that you've seen? This is a space where we're being very intentional. We're being actually quite slow, but intentionally. We are being very resilient in the way we want to structure it. We're starting with, as you said, eight securities, the Mag S even plus Broadcom, plus IBIT, which is the Bitcoin BlackRock ETF that is on our market, Nasdaq. If you take those, they're very, very liquid, and they're a very good place where you can actually have 0DTE. We're watching it. What we've observed for the approximately one month that it has been in place is actually that the volume, the net volume has been additive. That's one of the things that's very important to watch. The second thing is we are listening to the market participants' feedback, whether it's retail, whether it's the SEC, whether it's other participants. It's all right now very, very well received. To see a need for Tuesday or Thursday or for additional securities, we would give it a bit more time to continue to see those additional volume. By the way, our market share has also been really interesting. You know, we have a very large market share. We have a 5 percentage point versus the number two in options. In those 0 DTE over the short period we've been observing it, we've actually had that or more in market share also. Seeing that everything is operating as we intended, that we're seeing net additions and that we are in volumes and that we're seeing a very orderly and good feedback from the market, it's gonna be important to want to do more. Again, we would do it in this very slow, intentional, measured way. Fair enough. One of the pillars under your, transform- Mm-hmm agenda, if you will, in terms of the growth initiatives, is to, expand market hours. Yep. 23x5, you've outlined plans to enable 23x 5 equity trading in the second half of this year, pending regulatory approval and industry alignment. Where are you seeing demand to offer such extended hours? How might you size the volume opportunity compared to what you already do today in the pre-trade and as well as the after-trade, after-hour sessions? Talk about what the path looks like here. Yeah. We think 23x5 is very much an exciting opportunity. You are seeing in our data already that there is great appetite coming from international players to participate in the U.S. markets. If I go back to that stat of $127 trillion that I gave you, half of that is in the U.S. It's a really and the rest of the world is sharing in, you know, 16%, 16%, 3%, 4%, small numbers. The rest of the world would like to operate in their trading hours. We're very fortunate to have that. Now what we need to do is to see the volumes come in, is to make sure that we have the right liquidity during that session, in other people's trading hours, and also the right operational framework. We're working with the industry to make sure that we put in place the guardrails to have all of that. We expect the volumes to start probably slow, because I think everybody is gonna want to go in it, in a measured way. It could accelerate over time. It's 23, not 24. 23. We like 23x5. that's- That doesn't mean that over time it couldn't go to further than that with. Again, back to as you do it, you want to do it with enough liquidity, and you want to do it with enough operational maturity. We think 23x5 is a very good place. Of course, we need to have regulatory approval and the other infrastructure market participants ready. We're gonna be ready in the second half of this year. Right. it's the operational resilience systems- That's right. need a little bit of downtime, I suppose, for updates and other sort of things. Yeah. Also, I mean, so far we are not seeing that much demand for the weekends, and so we want to make sure that that liquidity is there when it is open. Fair enough. With the remaining couple of minutes we have left, when we bring it all together across market solutions, fintech, capital allocation, how should investors think about Nasdaq's long-term growth algorithm, the scope for margin expansion as the business continues to become more software data-centric and a platform company? Yeah. If you start with this medium-term outlook, solutions medium-term outlook that we started with, that 9%-12% is very much founded in the macro topics that I talked about at the beginning. If you go in it by division, we took Capital Access Platforms from 5%-8% to 6%-10%, and we just talked about 23x 5 as a driver for data. That's certainly one of the accelerants. Data in general has very strong structural growth associated. We also talked about Index. Index has a lot of alpha drivers, which are continuing to drive the Capital Access Platforms growth rate. In fintech, we talked about the upsell and cross-sell motions, which are extremely important. We talked about GenAI. We touched on tokenization. There was more than what we touched upon. When you take all of that and the critical nature of our solutions, we see the possibility over time to continue to grow within our 10%-14% range. Market Services, we've got a tremendous share. We've got a tremendous capture. We're balancing those two things. We have leadership versus the next competitor in both of those. With that position, we are able to then create new areas of growth. We talked about 0DTE being one of the examples, but Index option is a very important driver too. We're not just growing our pie. We have structural trends that are favoring that. We have new opportunities to create alpha even in Market Services. With that you've got durable growth, and that is profitable growth. You add 400 basis points of efficiencies. When I say 400 basis points, I'm talking about the last two years since Investor Day, from 52% to 56% operating margin. Now you have us at a ROE of 70. There are only 18 companies that are in S&P 500 and that are actually above the ROE of 60. That is ROE of 60 with scale of $5 billion of revenue or $2 billion of free cash flow and 8% growth. We're one of 18 that belong to that very good group. We are at 70%, 12% and 58%. 12% revenue growth and 58%. You take all of that and you add free cash flow. Free cash flow conversion is at 109% with the absolute basis and relative basis extraordinary. That enables us to do a lot with our capital allocation. We shared how much we've done, for example, in share repurchases, $500 million since the beginning of the year, the focus on organic growth, and the possibility to add bolt-ons to the extent that it augmented organic growth. Suddenly you have a mix of growth investments, capital return to add sustainable value to shareholders. Great. Well, I'm afraid we're out of time. This was very helpful. Appreciate your time, Sarah. Thank you. Please join me in thanking Sarah Youngwood.