John Jacobs on The Future of Our Index Busines

John Jacobs on The Future of Our Index Business By: John Jacobs. John Jacobs, Executive Vice President, NASDAQ OMX Global Information Services, addresses the the future of our indexing business in the fifth installment of his video series. John Jacobs on The Future of Our Index Business By: John Jacobs

Let’s take a look at where we think NASDAQ OMX Global Indexes will be in a year or two down the road.

As a global indexer with multi-asset classes, our near term strategy is to continue to roll out our superior technology on two fronts: The ability to calculate more indexes across more asset classes, so you’ll see us adding in more asset classes like fixed income and commodities. And the ability to have a superior data offering.

We’re going to be able to offer data in a far more convenient fashion to the end user in a better way than it’s ever been offered before. So those are two near-term strategies. In addition, there’s been a tremendous movement and demand from the buy side and the sell side, those firms on the street, and those ultimate investors, for more custom capabilities and calculation, and we’re going to be offering a lot more custom indexes to partner with different firms, so they can find exactly what they want for their investment thesis.

Whether they want geography or style or some other asset class, we’ll be able to provide that for them. So you’ll see a lot of growth in the custom [indexing]. You’ll continue to see us roll out more exchange traded products. You’ll see more structured products, and you’ll see a richer data set come out from us, both price data and weights and components.

We also have recently announced that we’re acquiring eSpeed, which is a fixed income business, so you’ll be seeing a rich data set from fixed income, on-the-run treasuries, and an index family as well. So the next one to two years is going to be a very exciting time for NASDAQ OMX Global Indexes as we continue to fill out our mandate of multi-asset class, a scalable technology solution, create a better value proposition, and the richest, most robust data set in the index business.

Indexes, John Jacobs, custom indexes, fixed income, multi-asset technology,