Nasdaq

The Fortune 500, in its 70th year in 2024, ranks the biggest U.S. companies by revenue.

Fortune 500

The Fortune 500, in its 69th year in 2023, ranks the biggest U.S. companies by revenue.

This year’s Fortune 500 marks the 68th running of the list.

This year’s Fortune 500 marks the 67th running of the list.

F500-2021-480-Nasdaq

The global electronic marketplace for buying and selling securites has become a household name, thanks in large part to its namesake tech-heavy stock index. In its 50th year, Nasdaq is joining the<em> Fortune</em> 500 for the first time.

This year's Fortune 500 marks the 66th running of the list.

This year's Fortune 500 marks the 65th running of the list.

This year's Fortune 500 marks the 64th running of the list.

This year's Fortune 500 marks the 63rd running of the list.

This year's Fortune 500 marks the 62nd running of the list.

This year's Fortune 500 marks the 61st running of the list. Wal-Mart claims the top spot again. See who made the list.

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Nasdaq (NDAQ): Company Profile, Stock Price, News, Rankings

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nasdaq

Nasdaq (NDAQ): Company Profile, Stock Price, News, Rankings | Fortune

Stan Choe

The Associated Press

Trump’s tariff bonanza has sparked a fresh stock market selloff: The S&P, Nasdaq, and Dow are all in free fall

/2025/04/03/trump-tariffs-stock-market-selloff-sp500-nasdaq-dow-jones/

Emma Burleigh

The world’s billionaires now hold more wealth than every country in the world except the U.S. and China—and they’d be even richer if it wasn’t for tanking stocks

/2025/04/02/world-record-number-of-billionaires-wealth-higher-than-most-gdp-despite-stock-market-bloodbath/

Ruth Carson

John Cheng

Bloomberg

Fears of U.S. contagion spur traders to find hedges across world

/europe/2025/03/11/fears-us-contagion-spur-traders-hedges-nasdaq/

Emma Hinchliffe

Nina Ajemian

The end of Goldman’s IPO diversity rule abandons one of the business world’s most powerful levers for diversity

/2025/02/12/the-end-of-goldmans-ipo-diversity-rule-abandons-one-of-the-business-worlds-most-powerful-levers-for-diversity/

Allegra Catelli

Cathie Wood welcomes AI competition as DeepSeek could lower costs

/2025/01/29/cathie-wood-welcomes-ai-competition-deepseek-could-lower-costs-tech-stocks-nasdaq/

The world’s billionaires now hold more wealth than every country in the world except the U.S. and China—and they'd be even richer if it wasn't for tanking stocks

https://fortune.com/2025/04/02/world-record-number-of-billionaires-wealth-higher-than-most-gdp-despite-stock-market-bloodbath/?itm_source=parsely-api

Trump's tariff bonanza has sparked a fresh stock market selloff: The S&amp;P, Nasdaq, and Dow are all in free fall

https://fortune.com/2025/04/03/trump-tariffs-stock-market-selloff-sp500-nasdaq-dow-jones/?itm_source=parsely-api

Jeff John Roberts

Can Dallas steal New York's financial crown?

https://fortune.com/crypto/2024/06/10/blackrock-citadel-securities-texas-stock-exchange-txse/?itm_source=parsely-api

Brooke Seipel

Wall Street soars as Hong Kong sees biggest single-day drop since 2008

https://fortune.com/2024/10/08/date-stock-market-today-dow-sp500-nasdaq-3/?itm_source=parsely-api

U.S. stock market ends week higher despite the chill; Asia rallies on stimulus

https://fortune.com/2024/09/27/date-stock-market-today-dow-sp500-nasdaq-2/?itm_source=parsely-api

Chloe Berger

Nvidia’s billionaire boss: ‘I used to clean bathrooms, and now I’m the CEO’

https://fortune.com/2024/08/28/nvidias-billionaire-boss-i-used-to-clean-bathrooms-and-now-im-the-ceo/?itm_source=parsely-api

Jane Thier

How the Celsius CEO turned a cult-favorite energy drink into a stock-market lightning rod with 6,000% growth

https://fortune.com/2024/07/15/celsius-ceo-john-fieldly-secrets-to-success/?itm_source=parsely-api

Marco Quiroz-Gutierrez

Trump will soon be free to tank his own stock

https://fortune.com/2024/08/23/trump-truth-social-trump-media-stock-djt-price-lockup-period/?itm_source=parsely-api

Orianna Rosa Royle

World’s billionaires see $134 billion wiped from their fortunes overnight in stock bloodbath

https://fortune.com/2024/08/05/billionaires-134-billion-wiped-from-fortunes/?itm_source=parsely-api

Adena Friedman, Chair and CEO, Nasdaq
C.S. Venkatakrishnan, Group Chief Executive, Barclays
In conversation with: Lee Clifford, Executive Editor, Enterprise, Fortune

Fortune Global Forum 2024: The Next Decade in Finance

Photograph by Michael O’Shea for Fortune

Conferences

Hello, everyone. Uh well, be out. We're going to dive right in. Uh tell us what you make of the US election results and did Wall Street get what it wanted? Um Well, the markets think so. Uh Thank you for, for Lee, for having me and uh being part of this wonderful panel with Lena. So the election results, I think obviously saw a great premium that kept into the equity markets. Markets did well. Uh they did well for banks and financial firms and they did well more broadly. I think there are a couple of reasons. One is clarity is always welcomed by Wall Street. Uh Second is there's a greater clarity. It doesn't matter which side you're on when all the three parts of the legislative and, and, and, and the executive align the President House and Senate. Um and it happened quickly and people were fearing that it would not happen quickly. So I think those three things and then thoughts about what might happen in terms of regulation or might attack the economy all led immediately to the, to the, to the rally in the market, I think uh when you step back and especially if you look at it from abroad. You know, I work at a British Bank. Uh People will start asking themselves deeper questions about what does this mean for trade? What does this mean for defense expenditure? What does this mean for geopolitical realignment? How do the countries, especially the ones in Europe which are having growth challenges fund themselves in what this new world will be? And then ultimately, where does it go into broader social questions of ESG and climate? Well, Adina, you were saying that you see what's happening in the markets the past week or so as a sugar rush, are we gonna come off the high or what? What's your prediction? Well, I actually, II, I would say not specifically a sugar rush but certainly a honeymoon uh associated with everything that the Vin cat just described. Uh and, and what's happening right now is you've got one thing that's very certain, which is with the way that the um the legislative branches and the administrative branches are aligned, there's going to be a tax policy change. There actually has to be a tax uh tax discussion within the next year because the current tax rates, the tax um plan expires. So with knowing that it's aligned um down down the line with the Republicans, I think that there's an expectation that will benefit um you know, the corporate world or at least retain the benefits we already have. And I think that that's obviously seen as a positive in terms of, of Corporates and, and the ability for them to generate profit and retain those profits. I think that's AAA benefit. And then the second thing is uh the notion of, of smart regulation, you know, how do can we get to an era of what I call smart regulation, outcome oriented re regulation as opposed to input oriented regulation, looking at regulations and saying, did we actually achieve its original intent? Are we measuring the those outcomes as opposed to just creating activity traps within the financial industry and others industries that frankly suck capital away from more productive activities? And if that also is kind of, there's a general sense that that's a possibility and that also could create a lift both in terms of, you know, the ability to retain those profits, but also in terms of being able to deploy those profits into growth and into liquidity in the markets. So I think all of that is kind of manifesting themselves, but there are the super questions, there are the longer term impacts. I think those people want to wait to see what actually does come out of um the, you know, kind of the the policy decisions around tariffs and other things to know how that might impact um different sectors over time. I I think that there's still that to be played out. Yeah. Well, drilling down a little bit, I know you love to talk about fixed income. So tell us what's ahead. Well, the bond markets have backed up a little, which means rates have gone up. I think what they're seeing or looking for is that, uh obviously with lower taxes, uh greater spending might be inflationary interest rates will have to be higher for, for longer. Uh We'll, of course, you know, have to look at what the fed does and what central banks around the world do. But stepping back, we're in a place where I think you've had a very soft landing. I sometimes call it a featherbed landing. That's happened certainly in the US and in the UK where if we had asked ourselves two or three years ago, would we have got, had growth come back to be normal, inflation come back to be normal levels and had held on to the very strong levels of employment. Then we would have all thought that, that, you know, we would have welcomed such an outcome and thought it not likely to be possible, right? But here it is. And here we are. So we started that very, very good place. Now, economic issues clearly had an effect on the uh on the election, but that was probably more about inflation than anything else. So I think the bond markets are looking for a period of some calmness but probably with higher levels of inflation. What do you see happening in the equity markets? Well, I I everything that, that Vinca just talked about to um you know, we always say cost of capital matters, right? And right now, we still have a pretty big delta between actual inflation that's occurring in the country and the interest rates that people are paying. And while I do agree with you that the citizens in this country really were impacted by inflation. And that was definitely um a a key element of the election outcome. They're also on the flip side, like on the back side of now, seeing lower prices going up less fast, they're having a much higher cost of capital. So they're kind of been hit with a double whammy. Um And so if we can start to and we're starting to see the fed, you know, taking those slow actions to normalize rates against the inflation rate. I think that's a positive in terms of both from a corporate perspective and from a consumer perspective and that obviously creates a lift in the markets. But I agree with Vinca that they're gonna, you know that right now they've taken, they've taken two actions pretty quickly. The question, do they kind of start to slow, roll it because of the fact that they won't know what this, what, what any sort of policy decisions are with the new administration. But they also do see the fact that the economy at the aggregate level has remained strong and therefore they can take a slower, slower process going forward. But there is an opportunity to continue to bring rates down over the next year. Just depends on how fast. Yeah. Um, well, we all love big predictions. So we're here to talk about the next decade in finance. Uh Could you give us a couple big forces or predictions that you see playing out over the next decade? Then you can go first. Well, look, technology and technological change is very much a part of the financial landscape. And you know, if you look at the period through the up to the financial crisis, it was financial technology, it was the way in which you did what was called financial engineering. I think now it's going to be much more straightforward. It's going to be how do you analyze data? How do you take information and make better decisions, financial decisions and investment decisions which have an impact on the financial system and then how do you continue to manage money? You know, we run a large retail bank uh digitally and make that broadly available to your society and do it with all the trust and the security that people are coming to expect. And that's harder to provide in an age when you know, there are as many bad guys out there trying to get into the system. I mean, I, I think that there's, this is a renaissance period for technology in the industry and it will be for the next decade. Uh I, I think it'll unleash a lot of opportunities for us to continue to globalize capital flows, reduce friction in terms of global payments, make it so that we have more of an opportunity to create more. I would say a a more what we're approaching is because we provide technology to 100 and 30 other markets around the world. In addition to our own, we provide very scale technology around risk management, regulatory reporting and anti fin crime to the banking industry to the extent we can create a more harmonized experience across the capital markets in the world with tech. So absolutely, a domestic market is something that will continue to be a a critical component of every economy. How do we to drive more liquidity into those domestic markets by opening up the capital flows, making there be less friction and and having flows go across the world in addition to and that's a lot of a lot of technology, payment rails will modernize et cetera. Having more of a cloud orientation towards running markets will create more scalability, the ability to manage the data more effectively and will open them up the exchanges and the market participants up to new services. So the next decade and obviously A I plays a huge role in all of that. And then on the on the protection side, I do think it's critically important that the banks and providers like us who provide services to the banks that we are able to leverage the A I capabilities to the best of its ability in order to catch the bad guys. And because you can, as I can assure you, the bad guys are gonna use it to the best of its ability, as fast as they possibly can. And to the extent that A I is a force that can be used for good purpose, which it really is in terms of um finding criminal actors getting them out of the system. It's really important that I think we unleash the power that takes technology for those defensive purposes. And so that's a big part of our, of our mandate. It's a big part of the mandate that banks have and it's something that we're very aligned on with many of the governments around the world. So very excited about what we can do there to advance um the ability to, to manage crime out of the system. Yeah, I'll say if anyone has a question, please put up your hand and one of our Mike Wranglers will find you. I wanted to shift gears for a second. And you know, if we're looking at 10 years, the types of people that you might need to hire, you don't even know what jobs they're going to be doing 10 years from now. So what are you looking for now in the people that you're bringing into your organization and promoting up through your ranks of leaders? Yeah. And I think, you know, it's, it's one of the toughest questions which any large organizational leader faces because it's not just what kind of people you want now, but what will the skills they need to have? 1020 30 years from now? Um As they are then senior people in organizations, I think clearly in the banking industry or in finance, some amount of economics and finance and accounting is important. But the technological skill set and the ability to use it, understand it, deploy it, understand its potential and its risks is absolutely important in all the ways in which Tina said, which is just efficiency, automation protection and, and service delivery and, and and then equally how is it that you understand where your clients are going and how they are going to use the technology and how do you serve them better? So you know, what's the role for bots and customer service? What's the role for digital payments? And then how do you help? Because we reach lots of retail customers. How do you help the people who are slower on adoption? Yeah, that's actually really an interesting point in terms of wealth, there still is very much a role for the human in manage, helping people manage their wealth. But there are a lot of tools that even those humans can use now to augment their, their capabilities. And I think that'll accelerate. But in terms of skills, uh we are a technology company. So and we have about 50% of the people inside of NASDAQ are in the development and engineering organization. And so obviously, as we continue to bring more A I capabilities into our products and embed them into the agile teams. Data science is a critical component of our skill set, um Data engineering as well in addition to traditional engineering um development abilities. But then I also would say there's always going to be relationships that you, you know, the soft skills are still very important as well. And one of the things that we really focus on are kind of having a culture where we have constant curiosity, you know, a growth mindset, which means in humility and in terms of what you know, and what you don't know um as well as curiosity about the world around you and what can change and how you wanna bring that change into the organization, serve our clients team orientation, so low ego. Um and as well as I think a way as well as like hard expertise, whether it's market structure expertise or engineering expertise or, you know, uh governance expertise or other things in terms of the services that we offer. And, and that's a, you know, that's a well rounded person. Yeah. And at the end of the day, we are always, we will always look for well rounded people regardless of the role they're in. But that data science capability is gonna be an increasing part of the skill set that we bring in. If I may just add to what I said, there's something, you know, deeply important there because the only thing we know for certain is there will be change. And so those people who are then adaptable and resilient are the ones who will then thrive. Agree. Agree completely. You're looking for the low ego, people who wanna go work on Wall Street. I think we have um a question up here. Well, now that you put it that way, I thank you all so much for the insightful conversation. Uh My name is Ashton Jackson. I'm a reporter at C NBC. And I feel like with young people, young millennials, Gen Zers, there's kind of this like FOMO about investing and it's leading them to invest in or make speculative investments and things like Cryptocurrency and uh and um uh meme stocks. So my question you is, what advice do you have to give young people when it comes to balancing risk, reward and long term financial planning in such like a fast paced hyper competitive environment? All right. So I have uh two sons who are in their mid, mid to late twenties. And so I'm, I, I, I'm living that OK. And it's really interesting because I learned so much from them. Uh One of my sons the other night was showing me um how he was engaging on an event marketplace. And um and he was calling and he was making a market so he was taking different sides of the trade all night long on like what the temperature of New York was gonna be overnight. Um And it was just fascinating and he was showing me the app and he was showing me how he was laying in his orders and what it was. So and I mean, I'm talking like $10 increments. I just want to be very clear. But what was so cool about it is he was learning market structure. He didn't even realize he was learning market structure, but he was learning market structure. That is awesome. So, of course, my, my first question is always, how much money are you spending? Not? How much money are you investing? How much money are you spending? Because it, you know, if he ends up making money great, but if he ends up losing money, I want him to think about it as I'm spending money on, on enter, you know, to entertain myself, you know, in this particular case, and I might have an opportunity to learn and I might have an opportunity to make money on it. But, but he's not, you know, kind of spending his life on it. He's not and he's, and he's experimenting in it. Uh Now, when it comes to what we see in terms of a very engaged retail investor base, the most important thing that you can do as a retail investor is get educated. Um And in some way of getting educated is just learn by doing. But with small amounts of money, learn by doing with small amounts of money or even on platforms where you don't actually have to use real money because there are platforms like that. Um But at the same time as you get more engaged and more educated, then you can start to take more risk if you feel like you understand the risk reward that you're really, really entering into and, and, and then you get, you know, kind of get more confidence, but you recognize at any point, those strategies can go either way. And so you have to be ready for any outcome and if that's the case then get engaged, you know, and, and one of one of the great things about the US, and I would say we've been looking at this, um you know, it's, it's one thing to kind of take, take some, some of your dollars and investigate and explore and, and experiment and learn. But at the end of the day, it's another thing to make sure you are investing for your future. And with that, be thoughtful, be long term, be fundamentally oriented because that's what's going to make it so that you can uh afford your schools or your children's schools, afford a home and, and afford to travel the world and experience the world. And those are more serious things that you want to make sure that you're having a long term orientation around while you take a little bit of your extra cash and, and, and apply it in some of the short term. And so it's, it's something I care a lot about because we um we're very excited by the fact that, you know, 39% of household income in the United States is invested directly in equities that is the highest in the, in the world. Um But actually Sweden is 36. I just want to point out it was really interesting to, to look at the Sweden as a, as a real marker there. Whereas other parts of Europe and other parts of the world are really in the twenties and below. So that is important because it, it is a foundational element of wealth creation in this country. And so it should remain that while people can experiment on new things. Sorry. Yeah. No, no, I absolutely agree. I think the most important thing for young people is to understand that investing in their future is really one of the biggest decisions they can make that they should start young with that first paycheck, have a really long term view and the equity markets are a really important part of that. And you have to think about building that future and you've got to get interested, right? And the most important problem I see. And I've got three kids, the youngest of whom is 18 is the risk of disengagement. Um And you know, you mentioned equity market participation in the UK. It used to be like the US 30 years ago and now it's just barely into the double digits and part of it is the pension system and so on. But the equity market is a fundamental part of growth and a part of everybody's investment portfolio and I think we have to end it there. Thank you guys so much for such a great conversation. Thank you.

How John Fieldly, the CEO of Celsius, turned the company from a penny stock to a stock-market lightning rod with 6,000% growth.

Features

How the Celsius CEO turned the company from a penny stock to a stock-market lightning rod with 6,000% growth.

How the Celsius CEO grew the company by 6,000%

At Celsius. I've been here almost 13 years. I have two cans a day. So that's over 9000 cans of Celsius. I've drank so far and we're still going love the product. Really refreshing. I have to go old school. I got to go with orange, orange is one of the original flavors. It is phenomenal but the teams have been coming out with some amazing flavors lately. 7-Eleven, we got a green apple cherry and then the cosmic vibe, which is that sparkling fruit punch is out of the Hello, my name's John Fieldy. I'm the president and Ceo of Celsius holdings. 44 years old. These are the secrets of my success. I was born in Newburgh, New York, but grew up north of Tampa Florida in a town called Pasco County. My very first job I tried, actually, when I was 13, I tried to start a lawn mowing business because in Florida grass grows like crazy. Was not successful. So I wound up, my first job was working at Mancini Carwash at 14. I am a US F grad I did in night school during the day. I worked at Eckerd Drugs. So that's where I did about eight years. I actually worked through Ecker Drugs through the end of high school all the way through college. I wound up being towards the end of my stint at Eckerd Drugs. I was part of a turnaround team that helped rebuild underperform stores. And I did that all through college while I was going to US f and that taught me a lot about consumers, their purchasing patterns, how to Upsell at retail, really understanding, you know, consumer shopping patterns, demographics of consumers, making sure you have the right product in the right store. Once I graduated from USF, I got my accounting degree and I was able to get a job as a staff accountant at Labar Freeman for the B to B publishing company. I worked for a biotech company for a little bit that was publicly traded. So that's when I had the opportunity to really on some sec filings, which I was really excited about. I got involved in Celsius back in 2012. And it was really part of a turnaround story here. The original investor tried to sell the business. I couldn't find any buyers. All their investors lost their money in the company. And one thing the main investor wanted to do is make everyone whole again. So that was the main thesis I was introduced to the company by a gentleman called Jerry David and he joined as the original, as the turnaround CEO and he wanted me to join him on the journey as his CFO and the goal was to get the company back listed on NASDAQ. It was on the OTC pink sheet companies. Uh More of a penny stock really. We basically got delisted out of all the retailers. So it was a really troubled time. I probably only thought it maybe I had another six months or a year left at the company. It was troubling asking investors for payroll for the team and had a small team. But we were, we were all committed. We knew we had a great product. It was just trying to find our niche in the industry to be able to scale and grow the business. When I started with Celsius, we had 12 employees and today we have close to 800 employees nationwide and around the world. It's amazing right around mid 2015 is when we got the company at a break, even level. When I started went on investor. Basically, it had a $5 million commitment through a line of credit to get the company to break even. That was the initial strategy to make those investors whole. There was a line of credit for $5 million that we could use to invest in the business to grow and scale it and to drive it to profitability. And we achieved that in late 2015, prior to really 2020 the company was growing it probably around like 30 to 40% which is great. But we really saw an uptick in sales right around the COVID pandemic. That's really when we changed the strategy from being more scientific to really be fitness lifestyle brand and a fitness lifestyle company. You know, the liquid has to be more than the ingredients in the can. We really wanted Celsius to stand for a global iconic brand. We want Celsius to be that apple logo, iconic monster claw. And when you look at Starbucks logo, that was really important. And that's one thing that when you look at kind of the turning point was really focusing on the overall brand and this fitness lifestyle that's really been able to connect with a broader consumer than ever before versus prior. We're really going after more diet and sports nutrition. So we took the brand and really made it mainstream and it's taken off. Sampling has been really critical because we knew we had a great product but sampling in the right locations. So we focused on first responders, nurses, firefighters, police officers, we focused on social media through a variety of different influencers, a variety of different platforms from Snapchat, Instagram, Tik Tok. The team does some really good stuff of in office activation on tiktok and that has gone really well, still focusing on our core and fitness. So further partner with Barry's boot camp and Gold's Gym 24 hour, but really positioning the company for a broad lifestyle position. I transitioned from CFO to CEO in 2018, Jerry wound up retiring is getting up there in age. Um I think the stress of travel and running a public company took a toll on them. So actually for about a year and a half, I was the CFO and the CEO, the company was looking for a CEO at the time. They actually went through a variety of interviews after the third try, a third attempt, I told them I wanted in on the interview process, I did a presentation, I talked about the consumer, talked about the targeted consumer, how we're going to tactically approach the consumer to create daily loyalty and I won it over. So I wound up becoming a uh CEO of the company in 2018 officially and D filled the CFO role. So how I turned Celsius around once I became CEO is really focusing on a disciplined approach. Continue to focus on core markets, really focusing on the financials to our activation to our tactics, driving with a focused approach on the core consumer that we were looking at. When we look at plans and our strategies, we control dollars and execution based on targeted consumer tactics on communities. We're looking to activate, we've been profitable since 2015, we have always focused on financial discipline and there's really difficult in the beverage industry to find success. There's over 1000 new beverages that come to the market every year, you know, less than 10% will make it to $100,000 in sales. And then maybe 10% of those make it to a million dollars in sales. And to get a brand to do a billion dollars in sales is practically near impossible when I took over Celsius as the CEO we did $36 million in total revenue for the year. And just now in 2023 we did $1.3 billion Celsius. Secret success is connecting with consumers in a meaningful way about living, fit, living life to the fullest and accomplishing your health and wellness goals. That's been the DNA of the brand. Consumers want more function in the foods they consume. Celsius delivers on that and fitness is hip, cool, sexy premium and connects with a broader consumer than ever before.

Tal Cohen, President, Nasdaq, Inc. Katherine Wetmur, Managing Director and Chief Information Officer, Cyber, Data, Risk and Resilience, Morgan Stanley Moderator: Luisa Beltran, FORTUNE

Future of Finance 2024: Navigating Risks and Rewards of Latest Technologies

Hi, everybody. Thanks for coming today. So we're just gonna dive right in. Um So in the past few years, we've seen some major changes to market dynamics. There's rising regulatory scrutiny and clients have changed their expectations. Ty can you speak about the regulatory changes involving T plus one, basil three and how it's impacting the capital markets in the banking sector? But first, what is T plus one, T plus one is T plus one is just one day faster than T plus two, but it's a settlement cycle for equities and other asset classes. So when you execute a security, you, you need to settle that security settle and clear that security today, it's T plus two, 48 hours after that transaction. And that's being brought in to T plus 24 hours. And that requires the industry to invest in automation tools and processes that allow them to ensure that they're not taking undue risk as a result of bringing their settlement cycle. So, yeah, so I'll talk a little bit about it. Yeah, and, and so, and that was the tip of the iceberg when you mentioned T plus one and baseball three end game. There's just a number of regulations and a number of changes and they're regional, they're global and they're going downstream in terms of the impact that it's having. And the three themes that we hear from customers are really, really consistent. It's one they want to streamline and comply and they want to streamline. Comply. In the following way. They want a better man explosion, regulatory costs and obligations while simultaneously complying with enhanced liquidity and capital requirements, really not easy to do. And that's a big piece of work. But once they've done that, they're talking to us about simplifying and standardizing. That's kind of the second theme I'm hearing from customers where these organizations become very complex, operationally, complex and there's lots of silos and they want to break down those silos that introduce operational and financial risk. And then once they've done that, we're talking to clients about modernizing and digitizing and this is clients' ability to keep up with forces of change, forces of disruption, whether that's competitive or emerging technology. So a number of customers are looking for leaders in this space, but just as importantly as somebody who understands the challenges they face. Each of those challenges requires a real deep understanding of how those institutions work. Katherine, can you talk about modernization efforts? Yes, I mean, I tell spoke quite a bit about it, right? Is all of the all the items you mentioned we're having to implement, right? So T plus one balls of end game any of these things and there's a significant amount of work. So the focus that we've been having in our technology area at Morgan Stanley is saying, whenever we have an opportunity, um thinking about process changes, so process optimization or business processes or regulatory requirements is how can we also think about modernizing our technology stack? You have an opportunity to do some of these things together when you have big projects that are going to require a lot of work, it's an opportunity to do that and the more that we modernize our applications and more that we modernize our technology, we become much more nimble. So back to some of the comments you made earlier, how do you automate more? How do you do more straight through processing? How do we make sure that we're using modern tech to do it? How can we make changes really quickly? How can we be more api driven all of that has been a big focus of what we're doing in our modernization play? How can we make sure we can scale? Should we use cloud? Can we use bursting all of that is needed as we think about all of these big regulatory projects? Great. So everyone's talking about gen A I today and we're gonna continue with it. Um Morgan Stanley was the first mover with its partnership with Open A I. Katherine. Can you tell us about the challenges this created? Sure so I'll talk a little bit about it. I mean, it was, it was very exciting for us to be, um, a first mover in one of the, the financial industry, um, lead in working with Open A I. Um, and what we found with it is we learned a significant amount from Open A I that came with a lot of expertise and they learned stuff from us of how to deal with a financial regulated institution. Um So the first thing we learned is you got to make sure you're picking the right use case. There's so many generative A I use cases people have and you got to make sure you're using one that you can implement, you can implement in the time you want. It has an impact on your businesses and you can learn from and you minimize the risk with. So what did originally working with? Open A I is, we said, let's look at something in our advisors area. Our advisor could do work with our clients better if they can have more information at their fingertips and be able to answer their questions faster. So we said, ok, so let's look at how we can create a chat bot. We call it A I at Morgan Stanley assistant. We didn't name it a name, you know, like a lady's name or a man's name. We said it's an A I, it's not a person and that A I can assist our advisor by them asking questions to that. A and the key thing that we did, which was very important as we looked at everything. We didn't want any data loss. We didn't want any hallucinations. We didn't want these things. So we curated our own data. It's only going against the data that we have in Morgan Stanley. We also made sure we put all the controls around it. It meant when we were first starting out a lot of conversation with people in the privacy side, people in our legal people, in our cyberspace, people in our information security area and making sure we were choosing the right use case for that. And, um, you know, we're going to continue to do more and more, but I think it's just the beginning is that you have to make sure you're building some of these guardrails to start with and a lot of these products earlier on didn't have those guard rails in them. You're starting to see a lot more of that happen and we've had to build some of those ourselves. So when did you introduce it? Um, we introduced it about a year ago, we spent about six months building it and a key thing with it is we constantly get feedback from our advisors. So the advisors enjoy using it, but we did some things like this, gives thumbs up, thumbs down. Did it give you the answer you're wanting? Did it not? And that you're able to read to on that very quickly and how many advisers use it now? Um, thousands fast. And so is that a thumbs up or is it a thumbs up? It's definitely a thumbs up and it makes them quicker, makes them quicker and able to answer questions without having to go through reams of paper and look things up. Tal You guys also just announced the launch of your gen a feature for market surveillance technology. How's it going? Yeah, very exciting. So yesterday we announced it really a quarter our mission. So when we think about A I, whether it's Chen A I or algorithmic A I, the first question we ask is, is these are these use cases, are they going to deliver our mission in a bigger way in a better way? And one of the missions we have in NASDAQ is to ensure the integrity of the market and ensure investor confidence. And so we have a surveillance solution that Morgan Stanley and others use exchanges use and regulators use. And what we've done is we have announced that we're going to have a gen a co pilot investigation, co pilot and the way that it works, it is really cool. It allows an analyst to truncate the investigation time and increases the efficacy of each investigation. The way it works is the surveillance tool will generate alert of a potential market abuse or market manipulation really serious issue. Now that analyst now needs to undertake a number of manual activities once that alert is generated and it could take hours. In fact, it takes 4 to 6 hours every time an analyst needs to look at something. But what if we can have Genai? I provide the context and a summary of all that extensive information and provide that to the analyst shaving off about two hours of 33% of the investigation time. What that allows is the analyst now focuses on higher value, makes a better assessment of the situation and the client can scale that across their operations. So it has lots of benefits in terms of productivity. It lives up to our ambitions to make sure that we're protecting the market. And really importantly is the guard wells that we do. And Catherine mentioned this. So we've been, we've not only been putting this into POC, we're just out of PC, we're going to use it for our own markets. And that's really important for our clients to understand if we're using it for our own markets. That's a proof point that I think is, is really powerful. And so we'll look at use cases like this is one of many, we probably have 15 to 20 Po CS that we're running, but they have to be specific use cases with an understanding of how we're going to deliver value to our clients and we want to do it safely and responsibly. So, is it a thumbs up? It's a thumbs up. I mean, we haven't launched it yet, but the POC uh like I said, it showed a reduction of 33% in the investigation time. And think about what that means in today's dynamic markets where market manipulation, the way it was done in 1999 is not the way it's being done today with the advancements of technology. So putting intelligent tools in the hands of our clients so that they can better surveil the markets and we can help them and be their partner. That's terrific. That's, that's meeting our mission every day, all day long. Interesting. So, but with all the focus on A I, people are forgetting about cyberattacks, Kathy. Can you talk about that? What do you, what are big banks doing? I don't think we ever forget about cyber attacks but, but I was wondering how I do wanna thank Hal because I'm very excited that it's gonna take us half the time to deal with any of our alerts going forward. So that's a very important thing for us. And um it will be worth then going through the paperwork of all the model control as we bring the new products in. Um but on the on the cyber side, um and all the everybody right, you, you can't open a paper any day and not see some kind of cyber event, hearing something about fishing, something happened to individuals, something happening to companies. Um And we don't look at ever celebrating anybody having a bad day. Right. You know, nobody, we don't want to see that anywhere. So, we work very collectively across all the banks. All of our C OS, um, that's our chief information, security officers. We know each other at all the different, um, um, industries across all of our, um, banks. We work very closely together. We all sit on very, um, types of industry groups, whether it's F SI A or the ARC, which is a resiliency group. And um we're doing a lot of things, right? So you talked about um A I, you know, the amount of data that every single bank has to collect on any day to understand malwares, to understand any anomalies, to look at detections, to understand business, email compromise. There's a tremendous amount that all the banks do for that. We have to also protect our perimeter. Think about all the amount of emails we get the amount of file uploads, the amount of things that people are pulling off the internet, we have to protect our perimeter to make sure things aren't coming in through those routes and everybody's having to do those same things. And it's really a big data challenge, right? The amount of data that you're looking at to find these anomalistic behaviors is huge. So it's a huge technology challenge and we're all working together, fighting the good game in this space has A I increased. The cyber attacks are you seeing different sort of cyber attacks. I say, I say one thing you see in, you know, a little bit, you talked about how the world is changing. Also in, in the AM L space. You see that in any kind of the fraud areas, the cyber areas, you know, think about the phishing type emails you used to get, you'd look at them and go well, this wasn't written by somebody who really knows me. This wasn't a sophisticated actor. Now you anything very targeted, you know, people will look up, you know what kind of role somebody has, the type of job, something will be targeted at you. And it looks very much like something you should have gotten, right? A mail that makes sense and you click on it and now you have some malware exposed to you. So we're seeing more sophistication because the A I tools are now writing some of these things for them, right? So, you know, there's a positive on the A I tools and then that's maybe the negative of it. Same things with fake web sides. It's very simple to create things that used to take more sophistication to do before that is allowing it to be much easier for people to do. Also with just being able to automate, you can just automate attacks, anybody trying to do an attack, it doesn't have to be successful 100% of the time if they can try a million times one in a million is good. Right. So the new technology you see are just allowing things to be at a much higher pace and a much higher speed and that's what we're having to defend against. Yeah, I just add on, on what Catherine said. She made a number of good points. The way to think about A I and in the way that we think about it in the product for our red tech products is we're going to help our clients get to the right answer faster. And, and regulators expect us to surveil our markets, for example, or monitor our customers activity in real time. They also expect us to make connections between different patterns. They expect us to understand what's going on one side of the market and the other side of the market. And so A I could be really, really effective in allowing us to be much better at detecting those trends in real time and be that extra layer of defense because we know that A I can be weaponized, we understand that. But on the other side of that, we need to use it to make sure that we're making or the human element of it better. So A I is effectively like the best teammate, a surveillance analyst can have and that's how we think about it. Great. So with all these technologies that we're having all these emerging technologies and all the new capabilities, what do you think is it a blessing or a curse? I'll take that one. So to make it a blessing and not a curse, you need to do the following. You can never embrace emerging technology unless you've made the upfront investment. So for us, we're talking about A I for us to be able to embrace A I at NASDAQ or Morgan Stanley. You need to have invested in a couple of things. One is managing your data, you've got to know your data. You heard that right? Two, you've got to invest in the cloud, understand the cloud and the potential three is you've got to have a really mature posture on the infosec side. And fourth, you need to have great governance. You need to understand that governance is a lubricant for A I and these technologies. And then the last one and very importantly, you have to upskill your workforce, you have to bring your workforce with you when you're, when you're taking these emerging technologies into the market because your clients expect you to be a user and knowledgeable about these technologies. So that that requires a cultural change potentially. So it's investments, it's a cultural change and it's being committed to being a leader in a particular space. If that's your ethos, that's our ethos at NASDAQ, we need to be committed. And what that means is we need to start using it ourselves. We need to start getting uncomfortably comfortable with the technology within NASDAQ for us to then have a conversation with our clients. Have you increased investment, financial wise? Like, what's that? Have you increased your investment? We, well, it started for us in 2016 and we started with a small team. That team is absolutely increased. But the roi you know, the, the win rate, you have a lot of pcs, some of them are not going to work. So the win rate is one aspect of it. But if you can get it in production and you have the right use case, the RO I on this can be extremely high, extremely high. So that's the way to think about it because to Catherine's point, the automation and the drive and the productivity gains and the efficiency gains, you can recognize well pay for that investment up front when we do. And so we have a centralized team as well. So we're also making sure that anything is ubiquitous across the firm. You don't want to develop the same capability 34 or five times which a lot of firms I think are struggling with right now. So we've centralized it which allows us to make the investment and allows us to scale the investment. Katherine blessing or curse. Yeah, I, I say it's a blessing um for some of the same reasons that how said it's, you know, we've done many of the same things. We, we've named a, you know, a chief officer in A I, we've also um put a centralized team together, we have a centralized governance group. And I think all of that is actually very important because you could start building many different things and not using some of the same technology. Um I just imagine, you know, you had an assistant every day instead of you going, looking at how many times you go look up something online or go look over here and you're trying to bring everything together or you're trying to read a document, you wanna have somebody just quickly tell you, you know, paraphrase exactly what was there? There will be huge game changers, right? Huge time saves for everybody. Same things. You're in meetings, if that meeting minutes could be taken for you and then you can disseminate it out to people that weren't there. You take notes, all of these types of things are gonna become really helpful to folks to make them more productive. And I think that's the thing that we're gonna gain out of this and those are the, some of the easier type use cases if you think about it's really the productivity that everybody's gonna have. And I think that's a blessing. Do you use a I personally do I use it? Yes, I use the chat GP T and stuff like that. What do you have? I've asked it many different things. Sometimes it doesn't come back with the right answers though. I think that's the key back to your data. Right. Is that oftentimes and this is what we, you know, very important I said earlier is that we're curating our own data. You have to be very careful of the data that you have and you got to make sure your data is good. Otherwise it can answering the question in an old way is an example like it's no longer relevant because it's not current. So I think those are also going to bring out new roles in organizations as data curation type roles. Yeah, just to build on what Catherine said, we say this all the time. And as a I wasn't designed to be right. It was designed to give you an answer. And now it's your job to understand if that's the right answer and understand how you want to train it if it's not the right answer and what data it needs to get to the right answer. So a simple question like what's the price of an apple? You need to understand context to get that right. You know, how far do I live from the supermarket? Where am I am I buying from wholesaler? All these simple things, this reasoning that needs to happen. So you just need to understand the limitation of the tool and how you invest in the tool and what you're going to get out of it because it's not just a source of truth and we've run out of time. So I thank everybody for coming today and weren't my panelists. Wonderful. Yeah. And our moderator.

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Freshworks CEO: “While many build software for the Fortune 500, we build it for the Fortune 5 million”

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Freshworks CEO: We build software for the Fortune 5 million

“While many build software for the Fortune 500, we build it for the Fortune 5 million”

So at Fresh works, we help businesses modernize their customer experiences and their employee experiences. Fresh Works was founded in 2010 in the aftermath of the global financial crisis. The idea for Fresh works came from a personal customer support experience. Actually, a really bad customer support uh experience that I had with the shipping company that broke my TV. And I really want to do something to change that. And that's how we ended up creating fresh help desk software, which is how we started Fresh Works. We are into our 13th year. Fresh Works is today a global company with more than 5000 employees. We are publicly listed on NASDAQ. We want to make it fast and easy for every business to be able to delight their customers and their employees. And we do that by making software that's designed for the frontline user that offers rapid time to value and that is available to organizations of all sizes at a lower total cost of ownership. And I would like to say that while many enterprise companies actually build software for the Fortune 500 at Fresh, we build software for the Fortune Five Million over the years, we have always believed in being a socially responsible company. I'm super proud of some of the initiatives that we are doing. Let's start with uh our fresh work software academy where we help train Children who have completed high school but are not able to afford college uh because they are from low income families. So we actually take these kids and train them over a period of two years in software and life skills and actually help them break their poverty cycle by getting them jobs in the software industry. Now, the stories that I've seen in the academy are like heartwarming. I will tell you the story of a young girl who comes from a tribal village in India uh where there was no school. She had to cross over a mountain every day to go and finish school and she's the only girl in that entire neighborhood of 12 villages, was completed high school today uh as part of fresh software academy like she is now ready to take on a career as a software engineer. I'm a big believer in making sure that anything that we do we do with purpose and purpose is what connects all stakeholders in the company, whether it's employees, investors, customers, I would like fresh Works to be known as the first global product company that's publicly listed that comes from India. So we are super proud of our Indian roots, but we are building a global organization that is transforming the way businesses delight their customers and their employees.

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