Resilience and the Latitude to Grow

I have been on the road for several weeks visiting with Nasdaq team members, clients, and partners across the world. I concluded my trip with visits to our Stockholm, Paris, and London offices which are incredibly vibrant hubs supporting our European markets and powering our financial and regulatory technology capabilities.

What’s consistent across the continent is how deeply focused our clients and teams are on driving the evolution of the capital markets and supporting economic growth in an environment that is changing more quickly than ever. In a world that is increasingly complicated, our teams are focused on simplifying complexity, making it easier for clients to navigate the wider financial ecosystem.

We have a critical role to play in this ecosystem as a leader and as a convener – a role we embrace during our Technology of the Future Conference, a summit we host that brings together top executives from leading firms across the world's capital market infrastructure. For the conference this year, we gathered clients to engage in a series of fireside chats, roundtables, and peer group discussions to have candid conversations about how we address our collective opportunities, particularly focused on the role that technology can play to unlock potential and manage risk.

The central theme of the conference was resilient growth: how we create a system fit for change and transformation, while accelerating investments in our collective future. Market operators play a central role in doing this, driving economies forward while maintaining high integrity markets, but it takes a commitment to investing in both resilience and growth to maintain the vibrant markets they power.

It’s a key reason why security emerged as a top issue attendees raised throughout the conference. Across every area of the financial system, the threat landscape is growing in its scale and sophistication as the ecosystem deals with many forces of change across regulation, information security, and the rising expectations of market participants. Cloud adoption for market operators has moved from a future aspiration to a pressing priority with its scalability-on-demand, increased security benefits, and modern tooling that enables more modularity and data management benefits. As expected, the excitement about AI’s potential was pervasive with a steady optimism that AI can drive more trust and integrity in our system despite its risks. To embrace this potential, we are seeing the capital markets ecosystem lead the adoption of high-performance computing and look beyond latency as a core priority, to focus on inference and deep learning as competitive differentiators.

These evolving investment areas are part of a collective need to consider market modernization as an ongoing initiative and ultimately a core competency for companies who want to win. It’s also a reminder that as we navigate the evolving landscape, our strength lies in our collective efforts to evolve constantly.  If it is underpinned by investment in technology and innovation, this collaboration – among financial institutions, operators, regulators, and market participants – can create a strong foundation for growth and provide us the latitude to drive prosperity across the global financial system.