---
title: "Nasdaq → Adenza"
url: "https://mahouse.world/ma-deals/nasdaq-buy-adenza-2023"
type: "M&A deal"
year: "2023"
author: "Ihor Vlasov"
reviewed: "2026-09-20"
---

# Nasdaq → Adenza

Nasdaq's largest acquisition: $10.5bn in cash and shares for Thoma Bravo's risk-management and regulatory-reporting software group, which gave the private equity firm a 15% stake in Nasdaq and Nasdaq a business selling to banks rather than to traders.

Nasdaq's largest acquisition, buying Thoma Bravo's risk and regulatory software group and prompting a separate fintech division.

- **Acquirer:** Nasdaq (United States)
- **Target:** Adenza (United States)
- **Value:** $10.5B
- **Announced:** June 2023
- **Completed:** November 2023
- **Sector:** Fintech
- **Deal type:** acquisition

## Why it mattered

Adenza was Calypso, the capital-markets risk and treasury system, and AxiomSL, the regulatory-reporting platform — both bought and combined by Thoma Bravo two years earlier at a valuation of about $4bn. Nasdaq paid 31 times EBITDA to become, in its own description, a technology company that also runs exchanges: Adenza's recurring subscriptions from banks and asset managers would make software and services the majority of revenue and reduce dependence on trading volumes and listings.

The price was contested by Nasdaq's own shareholders — its stock fell 12% on announcement — and defended on the basis that the software Adenza sold was required by regulation, renewed at high rates and priced with the rest of the buyer's anti-financial-crime and surveillance products. The deal closed in November 2023, with Thoma Bravo's Holden Spaht joining the board.

## What it left behind

A pattern among exchange groups — ICE with mortgage technology, LSEG with Refinitiv, Nasdaq with Adenza and Verafin — of buying software businesses at software multiples to be valued as software. For private equity it was a textbook exit: a platform built from two carve-outs, doubled in value in two years, sold partly for the buyer's shares.

— Ihor Vlasov, M&A FinTech Expert. Last reviewed 2026-09-20. https://mahouse.world/authors/ihor-vlasov