Professional services help clients focus on business priorities by enhancing user experiences. As such they are a central part of successful customer journey outcomes.
In the context of Nasdaq’s recent category win for Best Professional Services Provider in the 2024 FTF News Technology Innovation Awards, we sat down with Gabriel Lopes, SVP, Head of Customer Delivery, FinTech, to learn more about the significance of this win.
How do Nasdaq’s professional service offerings help meet clients’ needs?
Clients’ needs always revolve around methodologies to mitigate project risks, leverage the AxiomSL® and Calypso product capabilities to the fullest, and go-live in the shortest duration with minimum investment. With clients’ needs at the center of every project, creating services and delivering the project cohesively requires the involvement of incredibly passionate people. And passion for customer success, which is the difference between simply delivering a project and going the extra mile to ensure customers maximize their return on investment while achieving high-level of customer satisfaction, is something we are extremely proud of.
Each of our services – Delivery, Managed, Value Assurance, Education and Advisory – are strategically packaged to cater to our diverse client base, from Global Systemically Important Banks (GSIBs) to mid-sized clients spread across geographies. By offering advisory, pre-implementation, implementation, and post-go-live assistance and services, we continuously support the project, ensuring every need is addressed alongside exploring challenges, as every challenge encountered or anticipated presents opportunities to create new services and enhance existing ones.
As a service provider of mission critical software, understanding the magnitude of risk and stringent security involved in clients’ projects is of utmost importance considering their direct correlation with the project outcome. I’m reminded of a recent implementation for a central bank that permitted 0% change in the P&L environment during trade migration. The investment of time and resources, extensive testing, and regular client training sessions to help the client achieve the desired result in compliance with the bank’s policy was tremendous; yet we achieved a successful outcome.
The upshot of all this is a virtuous circle of project outcomes that lead to regular contract renewals which reflect our dedication and expertise, underscore our success, and highlight customer satisfaction.
What differentiates Nasdaq Professional Services from other service providers?
One word: ‘The Team’. The Professional Service function encapsulates the brightest minds who have delivered over 2,000 projects to date, focusing not only on achieving successful go-lives, but also ensuring that the entire process, encompassing multiple phases, is a seamless one. We achieve this by involving our teams in product and upgrade developments and maintaining frequent discussions with R&D during implementation for guidance on queries. After all, achieving customer satisfaction is a collective journey.
While inter-departmental insights are crucial, we place a strong emphasis on intra-department knowledge sharing too. We have an extensive team of approximately 600 Customer Delivery consultants (84% Certified) implementing client projects daily. As each team member’s project experience, learning, and approach to addressing challenges will vary, given the diverse requirements of our clients, we have a knowledge management portal that gathers all of our consultants’ experiences, streamlines them, and makes them available to colleagues. This significantly reduces go-live time by helping teams learn from their counterparts, thereby avoiding reinvestment of time in finding a solution to an issue that has already been resolved.
The quality of our implementation and the development of robust services make us an attractive choice for our customers, as evidenced by the year-over-year increase in new clients, which exceeds 100%.
What part do services play in achieving Nasdaq’s overall business strategy and goals?
Our clients operate in an extensively critical environment, with high levels of data security. As part of the Nasdaq Financial Technology Division, there is an even greater responsibility to introduce methodologies that can help eliminate security vulnerabilities in alignment with Nasdaq’s core mission to eradicate financial crime. And we’re almost there; every effort we put into developing advanced tools, implementing best practices, and responsibly exploring AI contributes to this overarching goal.
But our journey extends beyond technology; it’s about forging strong client relationships built on trust and elevated delivery excellence. Our customers appreciate our investments in new capabilities, resources, and services that consistently exceed expectations, thus solidifying our position as their trusted partner and ultimately bolstering Nasdaq’s mission to become the trusted fabric of the financial system.