NASDAQ CEO Adena Friedman: "Data first approach to running business..we'll see more of that. Thing that’s most important to us"

Video Transcript

Adena Friedman: The financial services industry has always been a data-first industry, right? Every decision that happens in the markets is on the back of data. So, we've been in that business, the data-first approach to running our business for a long time. But what's really happening now is a complete digitization of the trade lifecycle. There's still a lot of elements, particularly post-trade, that are on either old tech or done in a more manual format. So, you're going to see more digitization of that. But the thing that's most exciting to us, as a provider of technology to over 130 other markets around the world then we also provide advanced surveillance technology to the broker-dealer community, is leveraging the cloud.

So can we bring markets into the cloud? Could we operate NASDAQ as a cloud-enabled marketplace? And I think that we're getting closer to that reality as we've been working with the cloud providers and as we've been re-architecting our own systems to be cloud-enabled and a micro service architecture. So, as we think about the future going into the cloud, that then gives you a much more of a data first approach to running markets. Which then, you get better access to machine learning, machine intelligence capabilities, which can then provide even better surveillance and better, what I'll say, defensive capabilities in the markets, as well as more alpha generating opportunities for investors and for the broker-dealers. So to us, I think that-- think about it, moving the infrastructure into the cloud, leveraging all of the capabilities that the cloud have in terms of data management and machine learning, and then continue to advance those markets to be able to make it so that we become ever more efficient and ever more global.