All right. Good afternoon, everyone. Thanks so much for joining us for this next session. If you don't know me, I'm Ben Budish. I cover the U.S. brokers, asset managers, and exchanges. For this fireside chat, really pleased to have Sarah Youngwood, CFO of Nasdaq. Sarah, thank you so much for being here. Thanks for having me. Maybe just to start, can you talk a bit about how you see the current macro backdrop, coming out of a period of heightened volatility early in the year? How does the environment look across capital markets, IPOs, the broader fintech business? I think investors are particularly interested in your expectations for IPO activity over the next 6- 12 months. I'll start with macro. Macro, we would say that the environment is constructive. You still have very good, investment, especially in AI and digital. You also have a consumer that remains very resilient and earnings that are really supporting the valuations that we are seeing. When you take those together, we would say constructive. When you translate that into IPO, to your question, we've seen a very robust IPO environment. The first thing is, pipeline is absolutely there. We have had the best half year we have ever had with $111 billion raised. Of course, that includes $86 billion with SpaceX. That really tells you that the market is looking for scale, mature opportunities, but there is also a broad array of what is in the pipeline. We are seeing a pipeline, of course, in the whole AI infrastructure, whether you are talking about semi or data centers or AI models themselves. Then you have defense, which remains here. We have a little bit in insurance and real estate, and even biotech, which had been a little bit quiet for a while, is starting to come back. We are quite excited to see the breadth of what we are seeing in the IPO market. Then if I then take that to our fintech space, we had an excellent performance in the second quarter, 15% revenue growth, 16% ARR growth. What that tells you about the environment is really a tremendous engagement with our clients. We are viewed as a core infrastructure for them. We are viewed as an AI forward transformation partner, which enables us to be really in the dialogue. Whether you are looking at pipelines, whether you are looking at the tenure of our deals, the booking mix, we are seeing just really good stats with our clients and with how they are behaving with us. Great. Maybe just quickly staying on the topic of IPOs, can you talk a little bit about Nasdaq's win rate? I think last quarter you were home to the seven of the 10 largest operating company IPOs. What is driving that track record? How do you continue to win today? Yeah. We like to win, and we have a wonderful 73% win rate, as you said, seven out of 10. What that is really representing is the fact that whether you are talking about switches like Walmart or people coming to market like SpaceX, but also like many, many others, people are looking for the association with Nasdaq, the quality of trading of course, but also the innovation and trust that is represented in our brand as well as, at this point, we have the top 10 companies that are all listed on Nasdaq. The association with us creates a flywheel because that creates relevance and the index is a beneficiary from it and also, of course, benefits our listed companies. The data that we get out of those great companies as well as the trading is all a wonderful ecosystem that we have been able to derive. Great. We feel great about our position in the market. Fantastic. Let's talk about your Market Services business. I feel like usually this is the one we stick at the end. Yeah There's so many interesting things going on. So a number of initiatives you've got underway on the trading side. Maybe tell us a little bit more about Nasdaq Digital Liquidity Networks, the LeveL Markets acquisition. Any updates on the tokenization pilot, token design, the progress being made with the Canton Network? I know there's a lot in there, but Yeah. There is a lot. If you go back to 50 years ago, we were created to actually connect capital to innovation in a totally different way using technology. That has resonated. Over the last 50 years, and never more so than right now, we are continuing to evolve what markets are doing to grow markets, to make sure that we do that respecting the principles that we have put forward, integrity, transparency, liquidity, and also the intelligence that comes with all of that. Our role today is to continue to do that as the markets evolve. At the intersection of digital ledger and AI, we are seeing those trends converging into a great transformation, and we're particularly well-positioned. We've organized ourself around Digital Liquidity Networks. That's the first one. That is really our effort to drive all of the trends that reflect the investor demand for always on, and to make sure that this is done in a way that is, again, respecting this liquidity, transparency, integrity principle, and putting both the investors and the issuers at the core of that. Then you go to the next piece, LeveL ATS. We just acquired the third-largest ATS, and that's very important because this is a foray into off-market, off-exchange. That gives us the ability to continue to give different pools of liquidity to our investors so that they can operate, whether in the fiat world or outside of the fiat world, in the way they want to operate and with us at the center of that. This LeveL ATS is also a connectivity gateway in some ways that gives you access to 2,500 buy-side and sell-side. Quite important as we think about continuing to remain in the middle of the flow of capital. If we actually go backwards to last year, we had announced that with the DTCC, we wanted to make sure that we had the settlement, either fiat or token. That got approved, and this is on its way for a launch. Again, continuing to make progress. Then, with now Payward, or Kraken, we did two things, both an investment of $100 million in Payward, the parent company of Kraken, but also a strategic investment. The idea here is that together, we can help to bridge between fiat and token and making sure that we maintain the depth of the liquidity pools and also putting the Nasdaq issuer in the center. We have this Nasdaq Equity Token. They're also taking our surveillance. That's an interesting thing because we're talking about market services, but that transformation of market is also incredibly productive for us in terms of core infrastructure provider to markets and market participants as they transform. That gives you a lot. Then just to round it up with the last one, collateral management. We have also put forward for Nasdaq Calypso the topic of using Nasdaq Calypso as a central point in the collateral management, but also moving collateral between tokens and fiat. Very interesting. To the CFO, I am going to ask you the P&L question. When you put all these initiatives together, how do you think about the ultimate opportunity for Nasdaq, whether it is market share gains, increased trading volumes as liquidity improves across global trading hours, or any other potential benefits to share volumes, P&L? How do we think about all that? I would say yes to all, but it goes broader than that. The way you think about it is not only when you have always on, when you create potentially additional demand for the U.S. markets, and we are very well-positioned for that, you will create, by being able to navigate between on-market and off-market, additional liquidity pools that we are able to participate into. But you will also create with all of those new products. I should have mentioned one more thing, which is the ability to have new products that are getting approved right now. You create the ability for us to do the hedging, again, additional volumes, additional market shares, but also for us to be the infrastructure provider. That now is the Market Technology and Nasdaq Calypso side of the equation. We think we are particularly well-positioned for this moment because we are AI-forward. We have a very strong digital effort that is now extremely robust, well-organized, and that enables us to be both on the market services front as well as on the foundational front. Great. Maybe one last question on the topic of trading and innovation. What are Nasdaq's latest thoughts on prediction markets/event contracts and perpetual futures? Can you talk about where opportunities may exist for Nasdaq if these products continue to gain traction? How do you think about all that? Yeah. We really believe in the evolution of markets and in the role that we have had and will continue to have in the middle of all of that. If you take event contracts, for example, first of all, we were able to get an off-exchange event contract approved with the SEC, and that is part of those new products that I mentioned. That should launch shortly, probably at the end of this year. If you are looking at that is basically Nasdaq-100 and doing binary contracts, binary events on that. Continuing to add to that, we could certainly be interested in KPI-related events, but again, all within the constructs of being approved by our regulator. Probably not focused right now or in general beyond right now on sports or politics, but we stay within the financial realms where we think that all of those, if they are done well and if they are satisfying an investor demand, if they are well-structured, if they are bringing investor trust to the markets, can be incredibly additive. We think we have an important role to fall here because we have been able to support the formation of markets, which today the U.S. is more than half of the markets in the world, and Nasdaq is the largest market. Bringing all of that demand from the rest of the world into the U.S. and continuing to evolve the U.S. markets with the principles that we stand for. Okay. Maybe we will switch. Perpetual, if you want. Risk. Oh, I am sorry. To finish the answer. Please. What was talked about at earnings last quarter is that perpetual is itself is probably representing less than 1% of revenue overlap for us, which is probably what you were moving on. That is probably the right thing to do. To the extent that there is a version of perpetual that is interesting and resilient, with appropriate leverage, we are certainly open-minded to it. Again, in the meanwhile, we can provide additional capabilities to those who participate in those markets in terms of providing to them core infrastructure. Again, whether you are talking about trading, whether you are talking about surveillance, we have a lot of tools which the new players in this world are interested in turning towards us for because we can help to do things in a very good way. Great. All right, moving to your index business. This one has been extremely successful for you. I think ETP AUM is now over $1 trillion, index options revenues are growing very rapidly. You have noted that a meaningful portion of inflows recently have come from products launched over the past 3-5 years. Yeah. So maybe can you talk a bit about what's working particularly well outside of the core Nasdaq-100 franchise? I will say we're thrilled with that franchise. It now represents 15% of what we do, $1 trillion of ETP AUM. We had $109 billion of inflows over the last 12 months, and we had 35% growth last quarter. Where do I start? It has been just incredible. What's great is really the alpha generation, and that's what you're talking about, which is that we've got the Nasdaq-100, which has been then complemented in addition to the distribution from Invesco, which is a fantastic partner. We also have now State Street and BlackRock that are behind it. So that continues to give us lots of legs of growth for Nasdaq-100 and continuing to create the ecosystem around it. Whether you're talking about options or futures, this is an index that continues to have a lot of opportunities. Then, if you look at the $109 billion I talked about, 38% comes from products that were actually launched in the last five years. So that's the point you were making, which is the innovation of the last five years is not just core, it's actually creating 38% of $100 billion of inflows. Then those create the next legs of growth as they grow with market performance in addition to additional inflows that come into those indexes because those ETP AUMs accumulate really over time, and at five-year mark, you're just getting started. So in the themes that we're seeing, you have everything from option strategies to, for example, data center has been a big theme. So whatever is investable as a trend, and right now there has been a lot around AI infrastructure, can create opportunities. Then the last thing that I would add is that 50% of our inflows were coming from outside of the U.S. So the Nasdaq-100 is really a way for the rest of the world to participate in innovation in general because a lot of it sits in Nasdaq-100. But beyond Nasdaq-100, we also are spending a lot of time on other products with asset managers around the world. Great. Let's talk about your fintech business a little bit. Maybe starting with Verafin, one of the key narratives here has been the push into tier 1 and tier 2 banks. Can we talk about what demand looks like across that client segment? To what extent are you seeing adoption of point solutions versus the broader Verafin platform? This has been another one you've talked about quite a bit. Yeah. This year we had 11 enterprise deals that we have signed, and this is so far as of the second quarter, which is more than what we had done in all of last year. Clearly accelerating. In general, when we get started with an enterprise client, they're really interested in our consortium, which represents 2,800 banks, $13 trillion of assets. They usually will take fraud protection through that. That would be the way they enter. What's really interesting is that we're starting to see them do additional products once they have landed. What we're also seeing is that whereas we have a 6- 12 months, usually closer to 12, in the time to close an enterprise, we actually are towards 50% of that timeline when we're doing an add-on. We are seeing momentum, and we're also seeing the enterprise clients interested in our agent tech platform that we have in Verafin. It's a very broad demand for what we're doing. The great work that we've done now since we've owned Verafin over the last five years is not just establishing a brand, but establishing the data that you can't purchase. We are now presenting ourselves with a lot more capabilities. We also have nice partnerships that we add so that we can continue to catch the fraud earlier in a way that is incredibly additive to all of our clients. Now all of the enterprise clients are recognizing this. Right. I think Verafin is also one of the businesses where you've been particularly proactive in deploying agentic AI and other AI-powered technologies. You alluded to that a little bit. Can you maybe unpack that a little bit more? What are you seeing in terms of AI-powered solutions, specifically client adoption, improvements in fraud detection, workflow efficiencies, things like that? Yeah. What's really exciting about Verafin is that they have really moved towards agentic. We don't use that word lightly. Agentic is really those agents which are able to not just be a good coworker, but be a good worker. Those workers are able to generate efficiencies, both in terms of when you time the catching of the fraud, but also on the efficiencies that they can represent for the financial institutions. We were seeing about four times our productivity when you use those agents. We have two that have been in place since December. They are used by 800 of our clients. This is not something that's in beta. This is something that's used by 800 clients out of our 2,800 clients. Mostly, I would say, in our small and medium-tier clients, but also interest from the larger enterprise clients, as I just mentioned. We're seeing that as continuing to add to productivity and to timelines. In fraud, timeline is very important. If you think about what's happening, where everything is going faster and potentially you are introducing in payments additional risks related to that, having developing solutions becomes even more important than it has ever been to small institutions and to large institutions. If the majority of people start having Verafin, then you can't afford not to have access to that additional protection. Everybody is realizing that. Interesting. Maybe just one follow-up there. I know you've kind of been asked this on some of the earnings calls over the past year or two, but maybe could you just remind us, what does this mean for the financial impact? Does it mean you have more pricing power? Does it mean the product becomes stickier? You kind of suggested that the depth of moat, especially from the size of the data that's being pulled in from the consortium is itself a source of that moat. So how do we think about that translating into, I don't know, faster revenue growth, stickier revenue growth, anything like that? Yeah. So we were at 22% last quarter for that business, and we have a medium-term outlook of the mid-20s. So we definitely have good revenue growth. We have a net retention that is above 110. So we have, I would say, benefited and will continue to benefit from an ability to price for the very strong service that we deliver. In addition, we are pricing this agentic workforce as a separate add-on. Right now, we're still, I would say, mostly in what we call the free period. So we give a certain amount of volumes to our clients really to let them adopt. If you're a financial institution and you want to adopt something, the first thing you want to do is go through compliance and get through your AI governance committees. If in addition you need to pay, that's probably too many things. But now that there is adoption, and we've been very clear with the clients that that would be a paying product we are starting to convert. We're starting to convert. We haven't disclosed the numbers, but it's a contributor to our future expected growth. It's still a very small number for today, but the pipeline is very robust. Got it. That's very helpful. Maybe shifting some other parts of the fintech portfolio. Earlier we talked about the opportunities created by developments like always-on markets, tokenization. So beyond the trading ecosystem, where else do these changes create opportunities for Nasdaq? How are you thinking about the implications for Calypso, your post-trade solutions, surveillance? Yeah. We were talking about that a little bit earlier. What is exciting about our positioning is you think about us as markets, you think about us as index. With the credibility of those, we have been able to develop a core infrastructure for solutions that we test ourselves and we use ourselves and therefore can sell to the very best. I would say that we participate in bringing integrity, as well as efficiency to the financial system. We do not say it lightly when we say that we are the fabric of the financial system, the trusted fabric of the financial system. But equipping this transformation of our market services with the right surveillance, with the right data, with the right collateral management is exactly where we sit. Nasdaq Calypso is participating in the collateral management and pre-trade, trade, post-trade. We are seeing AxiomSL continuing to play their role in regulation, and if others become regulated, that can open opportunities. We are seeing the importance of connectivity as being higher now than ever with very strong demand, as you know, in trade management services. Our Market Technology, which serves 120 marketplaces, including the 20 we serve ourselves, but 100 others, is also serving new tech, I would say, and new markets so that we can be there. I would not forget data because as the world moves towards always on, we also power the world and if you are going to trade in the U.S., you need to have the data to trade in the U.S., and as the index becomes a broader index, you are creating again that flywheel that I was referring to before. Okay, great. Moving through the segment, and I think you alluded to AxiomSL a little bit. We talked about Verafin moving upmarket to tier 1 and 2s. I know with AxiomSL, that is sort of been the historical bread and butter. Yeah You are working to move farther downmarket. Can you give an update on that effort, and maybe in particular, talk about how existing Calypso and Verafin customer bases have contributed to the Axiom opportunity? Yeah. One of the key things we have done with Axiom itself is we have taken it to the cloud. When you have a cloud solution, you have the solution that is a bit simpler to implement, and that is more suited towards smaller clients. We went from being this really amazing partner to all of the G-SIBs minus one, and to all of the largest banks beyond the G-SIBs to actually now having the credibility that comes from being able to say that we have all of the G-SIBs, and having served them and understood them and serving, I want to say, 114 regulators across the world in 64 countries, and my team will correct me with the exact numbers, but it is a tremendous credibility that we have and that we can then bring to the smaller banks, but also buy sides are starting to look at that. Again, we are prepared to serve anybody who needs regulation and to bring the rigor and the techniques that we have had to do that. Maybe sticking with Axiom, you talked about the cloud journey. Maybe sticking on that sort of theme, you talked a bit about increased use of AI, again, the cloud. How do these developments affect the addressable market monetization opportunities, client demand? I think there has always been a perception that since there is an accessing of a lot of bank data, that banks may be hesitant to allow AI that kind of access. I am sure there are a lot of efficiencies that can be gained and whatever else. Curious if you could talk about a little bit more about that tech journey. Yeah. What is really interesting is that we are already touching their data. The magic of Nasdaq really is that we are already the partner to the largest financial institutions. It took us, and you see it with Verafin, years to be in the position of having the banks review our cyber review, our infrastructure review, how we do things, to the point where they are already letting us touch data. Then we have enterprise contracts, which means that we are online if our services get integrated through their agents or through their people. In fact, we are helping them become more efficient. When I am looking at some of the migrations to the cloud or additional sales in AI, because usually we need to be in the cloud, although we have some solutions to do it differently, but that is the simplest way to do it. The clients have a very easy business case to do more with us, give us more value, and they generate a great business case for their own shareholders, and that has really worked. The hard work has been done. We are already, I would say, a safe partner, a trusted transformation partner. Our solutions are really excellent, and they are forward, and they enable us both to sell, to maintain the credibility, to move towards the higher ACV that comes with the cloud. Then in some cases, to sell separately on AI. I would say, in general, it is in the first three buckets that we have been for AxiomSL itself, right now. Maybe stepping back, thinking about the broader cross-sell and relationship-deepening opportunities across the fintech portfolio, I am curious if you could talk about any examples, any metrics you can share around product adoption, client penetration. It is funny, from the sell side analyst perspective, it feels like there are all these different revenue lines, but there is obviously this top-down logic around exchange, data, information, and everything else. So curious if you could give us examples, anecdotes about how things are coming together again, cross-sell penetration, things like that. Yeah. The cross-sell metric that we have been sharing is that over 15% of our fintech pipeline is in the cross-sell. We are very much seeing that our one Nasdaq efforts are paying fruits. We are elevating within the financial institutions where we are, where we have C-suite relationships, which are covered by our management committee in general. Whereas those remain separate solutions, we have a real plus our motion that is driven, I would say, with the machinery that you would expect from a very strong revenue organization. You also have in complement to that, and for some of the largest clients, the C-suite to C-suite relationships. Great. Maybe a few questions now on just on the cost side and capital allocation. We talked about AI as a revenue driver. Curious how you think about that opportunity internally. How much runway is there for incremental efficiency gains through deployment of AI across the organization? I often start by saying to all that we think that it's a massive capture the sum opportunity. There's a revenue opportunity that is really important, helping us to move in adjacent sum in an organic basis is incredibly important. I want to start with that, even though you asked me the question in the context of efficiencies. There are efficiencies, too. We will capture them. You know that we have put forth at Investor Day $100 million of AI efficiencies, which we are executing upon. We are incredibly organized, I will say, as a leadership team. We spend tons of time on both the revenue opportunity and on the efficiencies. The efficiencies, by the way, give you the power to generate additional investments, additional revenue growth. We are providing our team with a lot of support, training, engagement as well as just great tooling, great opportunity to have the best tools available. Then we are measuring. You know me enough by now, I can't have a fireside chat without talking about return on invested capital. We're looking at the returns on what we are doing, both in terms of the revenue and in terms of the efficiencies. We're seeing a great equation associated with both with AI. Great. Maybe on the capital side, a little bit of an update on your capital allocation priorities, the current M&A pipeline, types of assets that are most attractive to Nasdaq today. Then, of course, I have to ask thoughts on the potential for larger or more transformative acquisitions over time. I know the messaging there has been pretty consistent the last year or two, but worth asking all the same. Of course. Let's start with over $2 billion of free cash flow. That's a great place to start because it enables you to do more than one thing. We have always had a progressive dividend. When I say always, for the recent times we have a progressive dividend, and that will continue. No surprise expected there. That has been a very nice contributor to some of our investors. The second part is share repurchase. You have seen us very engaged in share repurchases recently. That's in the context of we have a great organic strategy. We fully fund our investments. We are, I would say, pretty thorough in actually dedicating dollars towards organic growth, and that is the priority. But after the dividend, we still have a lot that is available. We believe that our price is undervalued. To be honest, we have been very consistent at buying that stock. We've done, as of the second quarter, about $900 million, which is a lot more than what we had done last year altogether. We launched at the entering of the third quarter an additional $200 million- $250 million variable ASR program. So the sign that we are continuing to buy despite being already way over what we had done last year. That's share repurchase. The deleveraging that we had done a fair bit since the Adenza transaction, I would say we don't need to do proactive deleveraging. We have a leverage target range of 2.5- 3, and we are, as of the second quarter, at 2.6 gross leverage. At this point, you should not expect, I would say, anything particular in terms of deleveraging other than potential natural deleveraging since we have a very nice growth of EBITDA which contributes to that. When you go towards M&A, we have a focus on organic growth that really leverages a lot. There could still be M&A that could become interesting. But I wouldn't expect anything in what you described as a transformative category. But could there be tuck-ins? We've done a few. Verafin or LeveL were two of them. Could there be even bolt-ons? Absolutely, if they made sense in the context of the other opportunities that we have. Great. We'll go back and revisit one or two topics I think that are also of interest. We didn't spend much time talking about your data and data sales business, and I'm curious if there's a tie-in to the retail trading angle, which has been obviously a huge growth driver for equities, particularly options. Now maybe a big driver of prediction markets. Your data sales have also been quite strong. I'm curious if you could give a breakdown of where those are coming from. Is there a read to like the broader retail trading environment? Any color there could be helpful. Yeah. We don't sell directly to retail, but we sell to people who sell to retail. We have very strong relationships with brokerage houses around the world. I will say with the advent of Rule 15c3-5, at the end of this year in December, people are equipping themselves to have data. It's not like a December 6th and on. This is a trend that started some time ago and that we would expect is going to continue for years thereafter because this is really equipping the world in trading in the U.S. is a continued journey. We're very much at the center of that. We have solutions which are not only very thorough but very easy to implement, very real-time. We've had very great success, as you mentioned, in growing that business. We think that this continues to have lots of legs of growth. This is something also where there is an advantage to real-time data, which is that by definition it's protected because it is real-time. We're very good at monitoring the use of our data and at making sure that we generate the revenue associated with the value of what we provide. We've got very strong interest coming from Asia and the rest of the world. We don't give breakdowns as to exactly where it's coming from, but the U.S. is of course a contributor. The rest of the world is also a contributor to the additional work that we have. Okay. With that, we're nearly out of time, Sarah, so I think we'll leave it there. What a pleasure to have you. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you very much.