User Experience is Driving Changes to Nasdaq's Corporate Solution Platform

With a global army of developers, Nasdaq is building a new investor relations platform that moves beyond the technology issues of execution. More significant investments have been made in the design and user experience side, explains Michael Cotter, senior VP of Corporate Solutions at Nasdaq OMX.

Nasdaq is working on a design-led suite of platforms that provide services to specific areas of investor relations institutions. The suite is synchronized closely with the 2013 acquisition of Thomson Reuters investor relations, public relations and multimedia solutions businesses.

Nasdaq's current offering, Thomson One is ready for an upgrade, he explains. "We're building a next-generation platform for investor relations professional that is design led and purpose built for the investor relations practitioner, and for different personas in that role including executive, management and analysts. We're building that from scratch."

The new platform will be much more focused on mobile, be it phone or tablet. "Our design focus for that platforms starts with mobile and works its way back to the website. That's a key and obvious trend."

Industry professionals want more actionable information, so the new platform will be less focused on providing data decks and more on data visibility, especially predictive analytics that will help focus on the key investors or stakeholders. "We try to provide analytics that will save them time from looking through massive amount of data… And because we work with thousands of companies around the world we have global perspective on capital flows and what's driving investment portfolios.. Clients are helping us and telling us the key needs of investor relations."

These functions, which Cotter says are critical to the enterprise's success, require unique analytics and communications. Including targeting audiences, reaching out, measuring the effectiveness of that communication, as well as secure collaboration functions within the private an public space.

Nasdaq also provides tools that leverage media and monitors social channels and provides custom reporting. That workflow also extends to the public relations departments, and Nasdaq is quick to capitalize on the trend. "There's been great customer demand for IR and PR integration. After all, they also care about sentiment and what's being said in social web and key influencers in social media and financial print." For example, Nasdaq recently released earnings. The CIO, Investor Relations, PR, the board of directors, etc. are all weighing in on that process and looking at the market reaction to that earnings event. "There's definitely interest on both sides to understand what's going on."

The challenge in building a platform across the enterprise, Cotter explains, is there are different competitors in each of these areas. "Our challenge was to make sure our solutions are differentiated and stand alone in each area but also built on integrated foundation so we could share some of the analytics across departments. That's the journey we're on, and we're evolving." Becca Lipman is Senior Editor for Wall Street & Technology. She writes in-depth news articles with a focus on big data and compliance in the capital markets. She regularly meets with information technology leaders and innovators and writes about cloud computing, datacenters, ... View Full Bio