Recently Rob Hughes, Vice President/Head of Index and Advisor Solutions, traveled to Hong Kong to focus on several Asia-Pacific initiatives, including the Hong Kong-Shanghai Connect program.

Launched on November 17th, the Hong Kong-Shanghai Connect initiative allows mainland investors to buy Hong Kong-listed equities directly and waives the need for investment licenses. The program is expected to strengthen the two cities’ roles as global financial centers and open the door for foreigners to a $4.2 trillion pool of capital.

During an interview with Bloomberg TV’s Rishaad Salamat, Hughes discussed the implications of the Shanghai-Hong Kong Stock Connect for U.S. investors and the Indexing business. “As soon as the stock connect program hit the wires, ETF sponsors in the U.S. and Europe were calling and asking what we are going to do in Hong Kong, and how can they approach the market,” he commented. Hughes also sees a tremendous amount of growth potential for ETFs in Hong Kong, and for China retail investors, accessing global ETFs in Hong Kong is a new opportunity. View the Bloomberg Interview.

Hughes also met with Fund Selector Asia, providing additional commentary. “A new access point to the A-share market creates tremendous interest in the developed world. Retail and institutional investors are interested, brokerages may want to open here, ETF managers can maybe run an ETF here. Don’t underestimate how much interest there is in access to Chinese markets." Hughes commented that the local ETF market has room to grow, as retail investors account for just 20 percent of the market, as compared to more than 50 percent in the United States.

Nasdaq Global Indexes will continue to closely monitor this initiative, as well as other opportunities in the Asia-Pac market as we firmly believe this is market poised for growth. To view a list of our current index-related ETFs listed in Asia, click here. For more information on the Connect program, view the Nasdaq corporate blog, Everything You Need to Know: Shanghai-Hong Kong Stock Connect.

John Jacobs, Executive Vice President, NASDAQ OMX Global Information Services, addresses the the future of our indexing business in the fifth installment of his video series.

Transcript: Let’s take a look at where we think NASDAQ OMX Global Indexes will be in a year or two down the road. As a global indexer with multi-asset classes, our near term strategy is to continue to roll out our superior technology on two fronts: The ability to calculate more indexes across more asset classes, so you’ll see us adding in more asset classes like fixed income and commodities. And the ability to have a superior data offering. We’re going to be able to offer data in a far more convenient fashion to the end user in a better way than it’s ever been offered before. So those are two near-term strategies. In addition, there’s been a tremendous movement and demand from the buy side and the sell side, those firms on the street, and those ultimate investors, for more custom capabilities and calculation, and we’re going to be offering a lot more custom indexes to partner with different firms, so they can find exactly what they want for their investment thesis. Whether they want geography or style or some other asset class, we’ll be able to provide that for them. So you’ll see a lot of growth in the custom [indexing]. You’ll continue to see us roll out more exchange traded products. You’ll see more structured products, and you’ll see a richer data set come out from us, both price data and weights and components. We also have recently announced that we’re acquiring eSpeed, which is a fixed income business, so you’ll be seeing a rich data set from fixed income, on-the-run treasuries, and an index family as well. So the next one to two years is going to be a very exciting time for NASDAQ OMX Global Indexes as we continue to fill out our mandate of multi-asset class, a scalable technology solution, create a better value proposition, and the richest, most robust data set in the index business.