Video · November 26, 2024
How Nasdaq consolidated 17 allocation applications into one platform and unlocked AI-driven forecasting
About this video
Nasdaq, globally recognized as a financial exchange and the trusted fabric of the financial system, had built a broad but fragmented Finance technology landscape. The allocations process alone ran across 17 separate applications, and Finance data moved through too many systems before becoming available to leadership. Moving from on-premises to cloud and from many applications to one was not just an efficiency goal. It was a strategic imperative for a CFO who wanted data to move as little as possible before being acted on.
OneStream now supports consolidation, forecasting, allocations, revenue forecasting, and people planning across Nasdaq's Finance function. The allocations process that previously required 17 applications now runs in less time than a single one of those applications used to take. With data unified in the cloud, Nasdaq is moving toward scenario planning and AI-driven automated forecasting that frees Finance professionals to be playful with data rather than anchored to a single static forecast every cycle.
Speakers
CFO | Nasdaq
Key takeaways
- Theallocations process ran across 17 separate applications. OneStreamconsolidated it into one. The entire allocation now runs in less time than it previously took to runa single one of those 17 applications, a dramatic efficiency gain for a complex global Finance function.
- A CFO wants data to move as little as possible before it is available and actionable. Moving from on-premises to cloud on one unified platform gave Nasdaq the transparency, efficiency, and data confidence that fragmented systems could never deliver at this scale.
- OneStream supports consolidation, forecasting, allocations, revenue forecasting, and people planning in one place. The breadth of scope Nasdaq has achieved on a single platform has brought significant efficiencies across every major Finance workflow the team manages.
- Nasdaq is moving from static forecasting toward dynamic scenario planning powered by AI. Rather than a single forecast that produces a big reveal each cycle, the goal is an automated forecast out of OneStream that lets Finance professionals focus on evaluating new investments and running the business daily.
- AI-driven forecasting elevates the Finance role by letting humans be playful with data rather than anchored to conservative assumptions. When an automated baseline exists, Finance professionals can focus on what is genuinely new, changing, or worth evaluating through an ROIC lens rather than defending the base case.
Read Full Transcript
Sarah Youngwood, I'm the CFO of Nasdaq. You know Nasdaq as an exchange, and we're definitely an exchange and proud to be an exchange. But if you're an exchange, you can actually exchange 200 billion messages a day to create markets.
But once you have that technology, you can use it to be the trusted fabric of the financial system. I think we have managed to use literally everything that OneStream offers. We have certainly the consolidation, the forecast, the allocations.
We use it also in some of our products for the revenue forecast. We also use it for some of the people planning as part of the forecast. So it's a very broad scope, and it's one that has brought a lot of efficiencies to us.
We went from on-prem to cloud. Second of all, we went from many applications. Just the allocations process was 17%. applications to one. That allocation, for example, is now taking less time to run in total than to run one of the 17 applications.
And if you're a CFO, what you want is for the data to move as little as possible to be available and to be on cloud, we've been able to do that with OneStream. And so what that enables us to do is to have more transparency, more efficiency, more smoother, more ability to know our facts.
And also, now we are working towards doing scenario planning, because at the end of the day, you don't want to do one static forecast, you want to be able to do more with the data that is available to you and really use it to run day to day to day to day business and not have this big aha every time you have a forecast.
What's exciting once you have the data in one place and in the cloud is that you can do a lot more with it and you can leverage AI. I believe that people are inherently very conservative when they forecast.
And so you need to prove that there is something new that's happening that requires a conservatism, for example. And if you're doing something new, you are changing, you're adding a product, you're doing a new investment, then you can evaluate it through an ROIC, which you then integrate into this forecast.
And you could really see how you would have an automated forecast that would come out of OneStream and that would let the humans now be playful. And leveraging all of that data, it elevates the job in finance, which I'm also very excited about.
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