Adena T. Friedman
President and Chief Executive Officer at Nasdaq
Thank you, Ed, and good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us. Let me first note how proud I am of the resilience of Nasdaq's business, the nimbleness and dedication of our global team, and the trusted relationships we have with our clients. We are certainly familiar with how unpredictable today's operating environment can be as we continue to navigate a dynamic pandemic and economic landscape.
Before I turn to our performance, I would briefly like to address the current market environment. While the markets have experienced increased levels of volatility since the start of the year, we maintain a positive overall economic outlook going into 2022, as the underlying economy continues to have the ingredients for continued growth. Notably, consumer demand for products and services remains high, the ongoing digital transformation of industry continues to drive long-term demand for advanced software and other technology and market innovations, and the resulting employment environment is very strong. That said, there are several factors driving the current market volatility. Notably, due to the cyclical and structural issues, we are entering 2022 with a tight labor market and supply chain challenges, both of which are contributing to inflationary pressures. Those pressures are then creating uncertainty around the pace and rate of monetary policy adjustments. Additionally, there are broader geopolitical challenges and continued pandemic impacts that are adding to the macro uncertainty. So our overall -- while our overall outlook remains positive, we expect the confluence of market-driven factors and macroeconomic and political factors to continue to drive volatility over the near term.
Within that context, we also remain confident in the strength and resilience of our business. For example, we've seen significantly higher trading volumes and within the last week, the industry processed and Nasdaq processed a new record number of messages in a single trading day. We continue to have a healthy pipeline of companies expecting to tap the public markets starting 2022. In fact, we have more than doubled the number of S1's on file with the SEC compared to the prior year period, although market volatility could cause some delays -- some delays to IPO timing, something we're monitoring closely. And in our index business, we expect index asset values to experience some impact associated with various market levels and investor appetite for products tracking our indexes, but also the benefit from higher futures trading volume due to the use of our core indexes in market hedging strategies.
The diversification of our business over the past number of years has created a flywheel effect between our foundational U.S. and European marketplaces and the technology solutions we deliver to thousands of clients across public companies, investment managers and banks, as well as the 100 plus market infrastructure operators, all of whom rely on our mission-critical software to navigate the financial system successfully. This is especially the case during these periods of heightened market turbulence. We help asset owners rebalance their portfolios and manage asset allocation decisions. We enable banks and brokers to prevent financial crime, while handling increased investor activity. We provide critical Investor Relations insights to corporate clients to understand changes in our investor base, and we empower exchanges around the world to handle the market volumes and volatility. Nasdaq is there as a critical partner across the financial markets and our business has demonstrated time and again that we can achieve success in the face of these types of backdrops. I'm confident this time will be no different.
Let's now turn to our results. My remarks today will focus on the following areas. Nasdaq's full-year 2021 and fourth quarter 2021 financial and business performance, the progress we've made to drive Nasdaq forward along our strategic direction and an update on Nasdaq's cloud journey, as well as our ambitions for 2022 and beyond, I'll then turn the call over to Ann, who will provide further update -- details about our results as well as give updates on our guidance, capital deployment and sustainability efforts before we move to Q&A.
Let's begin with our results. I'm very pleased to report Nasdaq's strong financial performance for the fourth quarter and full year of 2021. First, on the fourth quarter, we achieved $885 million in net revenues, a 12% increase compared to the prior year period, while non-GAAP earnings per share of $1.93 rose 21% compared to the fourth quarter of 2020. For the full year of 2021, net revenues of $3.4 billion increased 18% from the prior year. We achieved 14% organic growth with double-digit contributions from both the Solutions segments and Market Services.
Our annualized recurring revenue, or ARR, ended the year at $1.87 billion, an increase of 19% year-over-year. This underscores our continued progress across key secular growth opportunities, including building out our Anti Financial Crime Technology, as well as our analytics and workflow solutions for asset owners. Within our recurring revenue businesses, we see some of our best performances from our SaaS-based solutions. Annualized SaaS revenues totaled $640 million in the fourth quarter of 2021, representing a 34% -- I'm sorry, representing 34% of total company IRR -- ARR, up from 20% [Phonetic] in the fourth quarter of 2020. The 43% year-over-year increase in annualized SaaS revenues primarily reflects the inclusion of Verafin, as well as strong organic growth in our Market Surveillance and Investment Analytics businesses. Because of our 2021 performance, we entered 2022 with solid momentum and we intend to lean into our success as we operate our advanced client led technology solutions and our foundational marketplace businesses diligently in the months ahead.
Now, I'm going to turn to specific highlights from our businesses, focusing mainly on fourth quarter results. Our Solutions segments businesses delivered a combined total revenues of $581 million during the fourth quarter, a 19% increase from the prior year period, driven most notably by standout performances from index and listing services, exciting momentum in our investment analytics offerings and strong performance in our Anti Financial Crime offerings, including the impact of the acquisition of Verafin.
In our Investment Intelligence segment, we delivered $288 million in total net revenues in the fourth quarter, an 18% increase from the prior year period with contributions from across the business. We continue to invest in product innovation to meet the evolving needs of our clients. During the quarter, we brought to the market several new products that are seeing encouraging initial demand. Let me highlight a few.
Data Fabric, which is our new enhanced cloud-based offering is a powerful new feature inside of Nasdaq Data Link that allows clients to bring their own data to the platform and have it securely managed as a service. The early traction we observed with Data Fabric is encouraging and this offering is quickly becoming a critical part of our clients' investment workflows. And in our index franchise, we saw demand growth for the new offerings in our expanded Nasdaq 100 related and ESG focus indexes, including two new sustainability focus ETFs tracking the Nasdaq-100 ESG and the Nasdaq Next Gen 100 ESG indexes. In total, 61 ETFs tracking Nasdaq indexes launched in 2021, accumulating $2.9 billion in assets through the end of the fourth quarter. Notably, 67% of ETF launches in the year were outside the U.S., thus demonstrating the strong international demand for Nasdaq's index franchise.
Turning to Investment Analytics. Building upon our successful partnerships with leading investment consultants that were announced during 2021, Nasdaq's Asset Owner Solutions now distributes investment research and insights for Mercer and Aon, among others, to our growing community of asset owners and asset managers on the investment platform. This is just one of several ways for increasing the value of investment and the broader in asset -- in asset owner solutions offering to our clients, and I'm incredibly pleased to see the tremendous sales growth from new clients reported by eVestment and Solovis for the full year of 2021. Combined new sales in 2021 totaled $26 million, an increase of 41% over the prior year, driven in large part by 79% new sales growth in asset owner in the asset owner business. And Solovis's new sales grew 145% across all client groups.
Turning next to our Market Technology segment. We delivered $131 million in total net revenues in the fourth quarter, a 24% increase from the prior year period. This was primarily driven by the inclusion of revenues from Verafin in our results. More broadly, we saw continued growth in demand for our SaaS-based offerings, both fraud detection and Anti-Money Laundering Solutions, which we call FRAML, and from the market and trade surveillance areas of our Anti Financial Crime Technology, as well as a growing number of market operators utilizing our cloud native marketplace solutions.
Over the course of 2021, I'm pleased to report that in addition to 197 new banks, credit unions and FinTech companies that adopted Verafin, our other market technology businesses welcomed 31 new customers, of which 26 chose our SaaS solutions. The Market Technology overall had a transformational year in 2021, in particular as we grow Nasdaq into an Anti Financial Crime leader with related shifts in revenue composition, we have an equal focus on capitalizing a recovery in the growth of our Solutions business for our market infrastructure operators. Revenues recognized in that business decreased in the fourth quarter on a year-over-year basis due to factors including low -- lower non-recurring professional services revenue caused in part by pandemic related logistical challenge that we've previously disclosed. However, we're seeing some encouraging trends that bring us incrementally closer to a positive inflection in revenue.
First, we're making progress on some of the larger more complex implementations that have been more exposed to the pandemic related travel -- challenges of travel and restrictions to onsite collaboration. In particular, two key projects are approaching their first go-live and acceptance phases in the first quarter of 2022. And in a third, the collaboration with the client resulting in its scope and timeline adjusted to reflect both expanding customer needs balanced against evolving delivery timeline realities.
Second, in the fourth quarter of 2021, we achieved strong new order intake of $142 million, capping a record full year of $378 million excluding Verafin, which constitutes a very substantial 58% increase in new order intake from a 2020 that was highly impacted by the the onset of the pandemic. Further, we have seen a substantial uptick in early stage discussions with clients who want to learn more about our progress, bringing the benefits of the cloud and managed services to their own markets. We are excited to see how they can -- how that can play out not only in driving further growth in new contracts on the line, but also because SaaS and managed service projects entail simpler delivery processes versus our legacy on-premises installations. Obviously, the duration of the pandemic has exceeded everyone's expectations, however, we are encouraged by the growing interest in our Next Gen capabilities and the future opportunities to increase the way we serve market infrastructure operators to complement the strong growth that we see today in our larger Anti Financial Crime offerings.
Moving to our foundational marketplace businesses. Our Market Services segment delivered net revenues of $303 million during the fourth quarter of 2021, an increase of 5% from the prior year period. We maintained our strong competitive performance amidst a dynamic trading backdrop as the retail and institutional investment communities saw new opportunities across equities and options to drive their strategies. Our U.S. options business set a new annual record for trading volumes in 2021, and we are starting 2022 with new records being set in volumes and message traffic.
In early December, we announced our decision to begin the migration of our options markets to the cloud beginning in 2022, starting with our Nasdaq MRX options market. This innovation in the infrastructure that underpins our markets will create more elasticity in our capacity, while maintaining or improving the performance of our clients that our clients have come to expect from us. This will -- this will be made possible with the build-out of the broader cloud infrastructure within the Carteret Data Center, supported by AWS and our local partner Equinix. I will cover this topic in more details in a few minutes.
Turning to U.S. cash equities, the increase of our volumes as compared to the fourth quarter of 2020 mirrored the industry volume increase at approximately 3%. And in the Nordic markets, we continued to experience strong trading performance, including a matched equity market share among lit venues of over 75%. The European equities value traded per day also increased 23% in the fourth quarter versus the prior year.
Finally, our Corporate Platforms segment delivered net revenues of $162 million in the fourth quarter, a 17% increase, driven primarily by our continued leadership in new listings across our U.S. and European markets, as well as growth in demand for our complementary IR and ESG Services. For the ninth consecutive year, Nasdaq led U.S. exchanges for IPOs in 2021 was 752, capitalizing on one of the strongest years for new issuances over the last two decades and with a 73% overall IPO win rate. Nasdaq also ranked number one in the U.S. in terms of IPO capital raise for the third quarter with, I'm sorry, for the third year, so let me read that again. Nasdaq also ranked number one in the U.S. in terms of IPO capital raised for the third year with $181 billion and listed nine of the top 10 US-based IPOs in terms of proceeds raised.
We also had 33 new companies switch their corporate listings to Nasdaq in 2021, including Honeywell, Palo Alto Networks and Baker Hughes, representing an aggregate $361 billion in global equity market capitalization. The total market value of all companies transferring to Nasdaq in the last decade has exceeded $1.7 trillion. In Europe, our Nordic, Baltic and First North exchanges also experienced a record year for new listings with 207 companies raising over $15 billion. And for the first time ever, Nasdaq Stockholm facilitated more capital raised in any other country in the EU, while our combined Nordic exchanges had more IPOs than any other market operator in Europe.
Demand for our IR Intelligence and Governance solutions drove 4% year-over-year revenue growth for the fourth quarter within the IR and ESG business. We continue to see deepened client engagement across Nasdaq IR Insight and Advisory, and have also invested in the expansion of our ESG advisory and reporting services to corporate clients. We now provide the services in our portfolio solutions to offered companies who list on our U.S. market.
Next, I'd like to provide an update on the important progress we made in 2021 to advance our cloud journey and how these milestones support our broader strategic vision to unlock potential growth -- growth potential, sorry, and accelerate our transition to a SaaS business model in our technology, data and investment analytics businesses. Our move to the cloud began over a decade ago and we have used its innovation capabilities to deliver client driven solutions while evolving our own infrastructure for a digital future. In fact, a wide range of Nasdaq solutions are already in the cloud today. We've also advanced our markets ecosystem by migrating several of our market surrounding systems that have greatly benefited from the hyper scaling that the cloud affords us to manage elevated volumes in the world's markets. We were therefore very excited to announce in December a multi-year partnership with Amazon Web Services to build the next generation of cloud enabled infrastructure for the world's capital markets, committing to move one of our markets to the cloud this year. The partnership with AWS will accelerate the migration of our North American market to the cloud for a phased approach. Specifically this year we plan to move our MRX options market to our next generation trading technology and as part of that migration, we also plan to move MRX into AWS's cloud environment within the Carteret Data Center.
The new edge computing solutions that we co-designed with AWS may also they used by other market infrastructure operators and by participants to move their trading systems to the cloud and we look forward to engaging with our market technology clients on this future oriented approach to managing market infrastructure. In addition, the partnership will include opportunities to explore new ways to leverage AWS cloud capabilities across Nasdaq's Anti Financial Crime, Data and Investment Analytics, as well as our market infrastructure software businesses.
Now, as I mentioned at the beginning of my remarks today, Nasdaq made notable progress against our broader strategic journey in 2021. As we continue that path, we would like to share our core ambitions and execution priorities for 2022 and beyond, which we detail on Page 10 of the presentation. First, we want to reinforce a culture of inclusive growth and prosperity within our own organization. We want to continue increasing collaboration across our entire enterprise to deliver more -- more through our deep client relationships to further increase our value proposition as an employer and to continue to advance our sustainability practices.
Second, we want to advance our client first approach to serving the financial ecosystem. We will continue to deliver our core marketplace solutions with superior client service, utmost integrity and technological excellence. We will also continue to listen to our clients' needs as we expand our offerings in Index, Investment Analytics, Anti Financial Crime and ESG solutions.
Third, we are accelerating our technology modernization, our AWS partnership and how we are marching forward on the cloud is an incredible example of this. But we have additional opportunities to increasingly leverage machine learning -- machine and learning within our offerings as well as our agile development within more of our innovation areas. We look forward to updating you on our progress on these ambitions in the quarters to come.
As I wrap up, I will summarize by saying our fourth quarter produced solid results for Nasdaq, completing a very successful 2021 for our company. We remain relentlessly focused on advancing our strategic position as a technology company that is advancing the financial system as we move forward into 2022, capitalizing on the strong momentum generated last year.
With that, I'll now turn the call over to Ann to review our financial details.