The CEO of Nasdaq wants you to know the company isn’t just about stocks

By Carol Massar and Jason Kelly

The CEO of Nasdaq wants you to know the company is more than a stock exchange, even if it’s where about 20 per cent of US equity trades are made. “Complacency is the killer of every great company,” she tells Carol Massar and Jason Kelly.

Nasdaq has recently gotten into sports betting. How so?
We are providing technology to a company called the Football Index. It’s a UK-based firm, so “football” means soccer. It allows people to bet on certain players—it’s almost like fantasy football in a betting context. They’ve created a marketplace that allows people to essentially buy interest in a player, watch that player’s performance, and understand the returns. We already are in the horse-racing business. We have three racing authorities that use our pari-mutuel betting platform.

Are you moving away from the core business of trading?
It’s about 25 per cent or 30 per cent of overall revenue depending on the quarter. The rest can come from data and analytics, corporate services, and market technology. Think of us as almost like Switzerland: We can provide that technology to other exchanges. We can provide technology to some of our competitors. And it is the fastest-growing part of our business.

People talk about companies staying private for much longer. How is that impacting you?
We have something called Nasdaq Private Market that helps private companies manage their liquidity. But of course we’d much rather see companies tap the public markets as soon as they’re ready. The right thing over time is for the average investor to be able to invest in these companies, too.

You were once an intern at Nasdaq. What are the biggest market changes you’ve seen over your career?
I started in 1993, in the trading business. I was able to look at the trading as a technology. But at the time, we were just a US equities market. Today we’re a global technology company that serves 130 other markets, and we’re also a European equities, options, and futures market.