Bianca Lopes:

It's three o'clock in the morning in New York City. The trading floor is empty. The opening bell, still six hours away, but somewhere in Singapore, an investor is buying American stocks. In London, a compliance team is reviewing overnight alerts. And in a data center in Virginia, servers are processing transactions that won't settle for another 24 hours.

Valerie Bannert-Thurner:

I think what's changing now is the number of waves all coming at the same time and probably the speed of the waves.

Bianca Lopes:

The financial system was built for a world with office hours, and that world is disappearing. The plumbing underneath of it needs to be rebuilt.

Valerie Bannert-Thurner:

It's going to unleash a whole new wave of innovations, and I think people understand that we're putting in place a lot of good plumbing and it's going to ride an ecosystem of opportunity and nobody wants to mess out on it.

Bianca Lopes:

In this episode of Fintech Files from BCG Platinion, we're going inside Nasdaq, a name synonymous with stock markets for 50 years and its transformation into a global technology partner. Valerie Bannert-Thurner has been inside that transformation for 15 years, acting as an executive vice president and chief revenue officer of Nasdaq's Financial Technology division. Together, we'll explore how always on markets, tokenize assets and AI are all converging at once. And what in a world of automation and algorithms trust really comes down to.

You joined the Nasdaq 15 years ago, so take us back to that moment that you first joined. What was the company's technology business like when you first arrived?

Valerie Bannert-Thurner:

It's been a very quick 15 years, I have to say. I actually came in through an acquisition and it was an acquisition of a technology company. It wasn't called Fintech at the time, but basically Nasdaq was already expanding its footprint in Fintech at that time. The technology business at Nasdaq was already established. We were already servicing, especially the capital markets infrastructure community, so exchanges and clearinghouses with technology at that time. It was kind of a fledgling part of Nasdaq. It was somewhat buried in the organization. And definitely while I think everybody at Nasdaq is pretty much a techie at heart, everybody comes from an innovation and disruption kind of background. From a business perspective, we were just starting to really become a Fintech powerhouse. It was very much at the beginning of that journey.

Bianca Lopes:

When you take yourself back to that beginning, you serve a market that brings an inside information, but a dream to capital, a dream to global, a dream to access to liquidity and to markets and to being in the public eye. In technology that has been quite an evolution and a transformation. From the inside, what has it been like now looking back? You said 15 years went by so quickly.

Valerie Bannert-Thurner:

For me, at least it was one of the first waves of disruption because everything started to be electronic. So it was really kind of markets moving more electronic. The whole monitoring of markets moved more electronic. So it was kind of a first wave of disruption and of innovation that at that time we really grabbed and ran with. The whole high frequency trading space was very, very strong. That was actually the area I came from. So the whole speed game really started at that point in time.

What I've seen over the last 15 years is that these things definitely come in waves. I think what's changing now is the number of waves all coming at the same time and probably the speed of the waves. Also, Nasdaq took a big step in terms of how do we better service our customers, how we can add more value over time. And then already many, many years now, it's been kind of more algorithmic AI. And now obviously with the Agentic AI, it's yet another move. But I also feel like, again, there's more change now than ever all at the same time.

Bianca Lopes:

Valerie Bannert-Thurner:

Integrity is so fundamental because it really drives trust in the system. If you think about markets and what markets are supposed to do and really what this whole ecosystem centers around, it is kind of people coming together and transferring risk. The whole foundation of this ecosystem is trust. So without trust, the banks, the ecosystem can't do what they do and they can do a lot of good things. So building the trust is key. Keeping the trust, growing the trust is key. And we also see when trust falls away, what happens? Like you see whole markets crumble basically. It literally doesn't work. And integrity, driving integrity is really the underpinning to establish that trust.

I've always seen it as core to what Nasdaq does because if you think about Nasdaq it's very much known for its running its market. But if you think about it in the wider sense, making sure there's trust in the market and hence really our mandate, our obligation to drive to establish integrity is core to what we do. It's how do you manage sovereignty requirements and needs and still basically have a well-functioning, integrated ecosystem. For me, it's been quite an evolution and to some extent it is always in the end coming back to the same thing though. I think we've tried to create trust through technology and through data and through cloud and operating models. And that was more like a good and efficient way of working together, but it's not necessarily trust.

I'll meet our partners, our customers, the whole ecosystem we interact with, they actually all ask for more meetings in person. They ask for actually having a person you can meet in the flesh, look in the eye and actually say, "Okay, when things go wrong, I want to be able to call you." Because inevitably something is going to happen. So I think while we invest hugely in things like sovereign cloud, data residency, infrastructure, encryption capabilities that really help us to manage a global platform with sovereignty concerns, ultimately a lot of it is down to, "Do I trust you? Do I trust you as a person to work with? Are you the partner that I believe on a global scale can help me grow, help me innovate, compete for the long run?" And a lot of what we do is tied to that. We really invest a lot in making sure we have that trusted relationship and network and fabric because we think it's critical for our ecosystem for who we are, really.

Bianca Lopes:

Financial institutions spend over $200 billion a year on compliance. 95% of all anti-money laundering alerts are false positives, each requiring investigation. Meanwhile, markets are moving towards always on. Settlement is shrinking from days to hours and new asset classes keep arriving. Each shift is significant on its own, but when they collide, that's when things get interesting.

Valerie Bannert-Thurner:

One of the areas that are probably one of the best use cases early on where the convergence between the always on and the tokenization really comes to fruition in terms of let's reimagine what's possible. Without one of the two, this wouldn't be a topic, but only these things coming together make this a really, really interesting opportunity. So maybe let me frame it a little bit like the kind of how it used to be and where the world is going and what that means.

So in an always on economy, especially if you trade derivatives, things are moving all the time. You have risk that is changing all the time, which basically means your collateral or your open interest is changing. So you always have to pledge margin or kind of move your collateral. And traditionally, basically this was an activity you did the day before. So you kind of in the evening you posted your collateral, you always put in a little bit of buffer, you didn't know whether you would actually need it or not, or when or how. And then it was basically sitting there not being able to do much for you. It was kind of a safety buffer. And everybody always knew in the industry this wasn't great. This was not a really good way of doing it, but there was not enough pressure to kind of really change it. There was some attempts, but it wasn't really ... The forcing function wasn't there.

Now it's 24/5, it is. You cannot have an ecosystem that moves all the time and then basically say, "I need margin to kind of cover me and it's not available." You have to be able to move it instantaneously. But the good thing is this pressure now really gives you an opportunity to rethink it from the ground up. And we did some surveys. We looked at how much of the collateral is truly effectively used and how much is basically not interest bearing. And what it boils down to is that if basically for a tier one bank, what we calculated is almost like a $380 million annually of actually lost interest nowadays because of the way how collateral is being managed.

So think about taking all of that liquidity and put it to good use. Now for the first time, by actually taking collateral management into a digital world, we can address that. So basically if you move collateral management onto tokenization onto tokenized trails basically, and we're doing this together, for example, with the Canton network, but it's going to grow beyond that. Obviously, there needs to be fungibility across the different rails. What you can do, you can be instantaneous in terms of when you move these different types of assets, you can be quite fungible in terms of do you want interest in bearing ones or not? You can use money market funds.

And it's beneficial really for everyone. It's beneficial for the trading participants because suddenly they have liquidity that they can invest and where they can drive growth. Also, think of it as in terms of a CCP, they're a big part of that whole risk infrastructure. If now I can basically allow an ecosystem where the way I can manage collateral is instantaneous. And by the way, if I need local currency, it's okay because I can basically transition it instantaneously, the barrier to entry for that market reduces. So I would very much hope that it basically allows for more liquidity in markets that basically connect to that infrastructure.

It's not super straightforward because obviously you have different rails and you have different types of assets and they all need to work with standards to kind of make sure there is a good common understanding, but the opportunity is huge.

Bianca Lopes:

Valerie Bannert-Thurner:

The investment opportunities, the trading opportunities are moving from your very standard working hours and days to everywhere all the time, basically, here and now. So huge implications. You have at the same time a big move on top of that towards tokenization. I talked about this different circles and waves that are coming at the same times. These are definitely two big ones. And the third one is obviously AI.

But think about your broker or your bank. Banks are moving now at rapid pace to kind of say, "I'm going to move all my internal transactions. Every time I move money, it's going to be on a digital rail and it's going to be fast and it's going to be a total no-brainer. And then by the way, I'm going to do it not at my bank. I'm also going to connect with all the other banks." And at the same time, the same thing is starting to happen on the trading side. There's issuance on tokenization, collateral is moving onto tokenize. And really for securities to kind of moving native tokenize, it's not very far out now.

Bianca Lopes:

Valerie Bannert-Thurner:

Exactly. And then you bring AI in a fold. And then when you talk to, it could be a bank, it could be a regulator, a broker dealer, an exchange, the sheer amount of either opportunity to grow and really create fundamentally new value for clients or the opportunity to streamline your operation and really drive efficiency in the systems, A, they're huge. But, B, there's also a lot of them all at the same time. So the amount of change happening and all in the different directions, and by the way, it's all a bit different depending on who you are, is very, very rapid at this point in time.

So when they think about what that means, it's not only changing your applications and technology to capture those opportunities, you have to change your operating model, like how do you actually run your bank? How do you run your broker dealer? And you have to change the underlying infrastructure. And then talent is obviously part of this. And who do you work with? At the moment, you have to really change all layers at the same time to grapple with these opportunities. And this is where we come in. We really try to help them with being that partner with the platform, but also the expertise and the infrastructure that can help them to capture not all of these opportunities, but a couple of them.

Bianca Lopes:

Every institution tackles this differently. So for example, what does it actually look like for a large regulated exchange?

Valerie Bannert-Thurner:

Many of them are, or at least used to be monopoly. So think about from moving something that really ran as a countrywide monopoly towards competing. So an operating model is changing. The asset classes are changing. All of them want to offer tokenized assets for trading. They have to do it real time. So the operating model is changing. And then it's not them. They are at the center of a community, of a whole ecosystem. As a market, you never alone. You really have to think about not only how do I modernize and kind of upgrade and scale, but how do I bring my entire ecosystem along? And maybe, ideally, I don't only bring them along, but actually I grow it. I grow the ecosystem, I grow the value, I can deliver the services.

So an example of what we have been doing with a number of markets is, besides obviously providing them with more modern technology that allows them to run 24/5, that allows them to trade crypto, is we also provide now a whole new operating model for them. So we work with them to leverage together also with our partnership with AWS, for example, cloud compute infrastructure, and they can bring that to their market so they don't actually have to unroot everything. They can bring cloud compute to their market. So their members and everybody who's, for example, trading right at the market, co-lo facilities, has access to cloud style capabilities. So it's not only them, it's their members as well.

We, to some extent, also help run the platforms so our customers can focus on the actual innovation and the liquidity and what they want to do. So a lot of our operational excellence, the resiliency that we bring, the integrity that we bring, we bring to these markets. So we help them basically on the operational model and the expertise side so they can move faster. And then one thing that's super important, if you think you are a big trading firm, there's trading opportunity globally. So where are you going to connect first? In Vietnam or in Mexico or in Argentina? There is always a decision to be made. So one thing we do with our clients is how do we lower the barrier to entry so they can modernize, drive liquidity and create that opportunity for more global community of members.

So if you think about how you do that, there are kind of traditional ways like APIs, for example, or good integrity solutions. But what's new is how you bring AI into that conversation, and compute.

Bianca Lopes:

Valerie Bannert-Thurner:

Everybody sees that this is just the beginning. The opportunity on top of these capabilities, it's going to unleash a whole new wave of innovations. And I think people understand that this is just putting in place a lot of good plumbing and it's going to ride an ecosystem of opportunity and nobody wants to miss out on it. So I think people see kind of what's possible. Not everybody wants to be first, and that's completely understandable. But I think nobody is at a point anymore where they say, "I'm not doing this at all."

Even our ... And we've seen this like globally, it's different, every segment is different. Some of the neobanks have been doing some of these things many years ago and some of them had stopped it again because it was a bit too early, sometimes you can be too early. We have many thousand clients. We do start seeing a whole sway of different conversations with even some very traditional firms with some of the largest banks in the world. So everybody is moving now in slightly different ways. But I think it's a bit like the cloud, it took a while and now people, it's mainstream. It's the same here. I think the writing is on the wall and people are embracing it. Just the journey is a very different one.

And I think to that point, it's never one decision. There's always, it's really about how you go on that journey and how you fail together and how you succeed together. Maybe some of the exact solutions and opportunities as we've framed now, they will definitely change. There's so much changing. There's so many other players in this ecosystem. So it's a little bit about who do you pick yourself to? Who do you partner with to be able to pivot, to change, to fail, to succeed, but then ultimately to grow fast.

And that's really kind of our positioning. We're not saying it's perfect. We're basically saying we're on a journey together and we committed to the journey. And ultimately, the trust you only build when you keep behaving in a way that people can trust you. You lose trust in a second and you don't gain trust overnight. It's something you work on over many, many years. So for us, it's really that journey and different firms come on that journey at different points in their life. So I think it's not the one decision that you make. It's about who you align with and who you work with in the long run.

Bianca Lopes:

When you look at this long run, the billion, trillion dollar question of who do you choose? Who do you choose to walk this journey with you? I know you must have chosen many, many partners throughout your career and Nasdaq in 15 years, and I'm sure that multitude, you've talked many times here at an ecosystem in terms of deriving value from connection and seeing where these Venn diagrams of opportunity explode. When you look at this relationship looking forward of picking the right partner, what do you see clients expecting from that choice that they maybe didn't five years ago?

Valerie Bannert-Thurner:

The way the conversations have changed is away from transactional into truly strategic all the way to visionary. If you think about what is important, it is the conversation around where the industry's going to be in three to five years time and what we want to explore together to get there. That's one part. The other part is very, very much around the understanding of being a regulated entity and being in this ecosystem, operating on a global scale does come with its own very big demands, especially around operational resilience, around how you work with regulators. So that empathy, that understanding of what it means to kind of operate in this ecosystem and under these special circumstances is super important to our customers.

These things together, the long-term view, the long-term commitment, and to some extent also how you behave commercially long-term. It's never about the quick win here now, it's about the long-term commercial success, the long-term technology innovation, but the empathy around how to work with regulators. I would put as kind of the three most important things that come up in these conversations that we have on a very different level now. It's not the transactional dealings anymore. Those are the things that we believe create trust. There's a lot of good foundations and science behind trust and what it takes to truly trust somebody in the long run. And I think a lot of around is around empathy and understanding and truly caring about the success of who you work with.

Bianca Lopes:

So the next 5, 10, 15 years, and now it's a bit cheesy and hard to predict, but what isn't when you look ahead and when you think of these, as much as the pendulum has swung, like you said, what are the things you look and you say, "Okay, this is what my ecosystem and finance might look like, and this is what I'm going to go out and service"?

Valerie Bannert-Thurner:

This is what we spend our time on and like in terms of where's the world going and how can we contribute value in that fabric basically. And I'm personally an optimist, I think we still have a role to play and there's still people in jobs as well that actually interact and it's not all fully automated away. It's interesting because it goes back to some of the roots of where we come from is almost a little bit like the future of where we're going because at the core and at the heart of what we do is we create opportunities. If you think about markets and what markets do, we create opportunities. And our future is, we still believe that we have a big role to play to create opportunity, and the way we want to do that is really through being a trusted fabric of the ecosystem.

So we already have this phenomenal community of clients and we touch everybody in the financial ecosystem, right from regulator, the infrastructure providers, the banks, the brokers, everybody. Being in this position to really have kind of a touchpoint with all of them and helping them and being supportive and underpinning in terms of how they drive that ecosystem, what we want to do is be that connected tissue globally and ultimately for more opportunity, which more opportunity should ultimately hopefully drive economic growth and prosperity in terms of what it does to the economy. I'd love to make sure we can touch trades transactions where they happen globally and really make sure we deepen liquidity, we deepen the transparency and the integrity and that trust in that ecosystem, and also kind of the transparency with which this can be used across this ecosystem.

Despite some of the challenges, trends we have around kind of country sovereignty concerns, I still believe that the future will sit maybe in a slightly more complex, but definitely, and tech enabled, very, very connected ecosystem because that's where the opportunity sits. And what we want to be is that fabric, that underpinning of that ecosystem.

Bianca Lopes:

And what do you think is the hardest challenge for you guys to become that?

Valerie Bannert-Thurner:

We definitely have the ingredients. And I always feel like we're incredibly honored because we have such amazing people and experts and tools and teams. So I think the foundations are all there. Personally, I very much think it's hard to make the right choices at the moment because there are so many really good opportunities and you can never do it all in one go. So really making sure we set the right priorities as we service our clients. There's nothing worse than being in an ecosystem where nothing changes. We definitely don't have that problem. We have more change than we would probably all want with amazing opportunity and a great foundation in terms of what we can bring to the table and to our clients. It's just what we do for us, really, and how we sequence it. This is, I think, the biggest challenge.

Bianca Lopes:

This has been Fintech Files from BCG Platinion. This season, we're digging deep into the ideas reshaping the future of Fintech. Make sure you subscribe so you never miss an episode. Thank you so much for tuning in. We'll see you next time on Fintech Files.