Brandon Tepper is SVP of Investment Intelligence at Nasdaq.
What were the key theme(s) for your business in 2022?
Data will continue to be a major catalyst for investor decision-making across futures, derivatives, equities, alternatives, and emerging asset classes like digital assets. Now more than ever, investors want and need differentiated datasets such as ESG, digital assets, and global insights so they can make informed and responsible investing decisions.
Our business continued to evolve as we tuned in to the individual needs of our clients, focusing on their experiences. We identified new data sets, helping clients unlock insights to adjust investment strategies during periods of uncertainty. Part of this process is having optionality and providing proactive solutions for financial information portals. This can include enterprise access to market data which allows for greater data distribution without hefty administration and compliance burdens of traditional subscriber models.
What surprised you in 2022?
The sustained levels of retail interest, specifically in the U.S. capital markets and across the globe was surprising given a downturn year compared to 2021. In fact, retail adoption this year surpassed pre-2020 participation meaning that overall, the retail market continues to grow. It could be an indicator that the retail market has become more sophisticated as more educational resources from Nasdaq and other platforms became available.
The market, news, and social media move quickly, and retail clients demand real-time, high-quality data at their fingertips. Retail investors were interested in a variety of data such as real-time data for all U.S. exchange-listed stocks, fundamentals and options trading data along with other retail activity as a comparison.
What are your expectations for 2023?
As investors’ demands change due to the macroeconomic environment, cloud-based data management solutions have an opportunity to grow as they can help firms be nimble by integrating internal and external datasets quickly with secure, end-to-end data hosting through managed infrastructure and data onboarding services.
To improve optionality, Investors will likely look toward data that is available from simple APIs via the cloud. There is also potential for a greater shift toward open-source delivery standards rather than relying on traditional hardware and connectivity.
The evolution of public, private, and hybrid clouds can also be expected to evolve in the coming year. Cloud is not a one-size-fits-all model, and the use of public, private, and hybrid clouds will depend on a company’s goals and resources to implement the technology.
