Platform Finance | Ulysses Pascal (Vrije Universiteit Brussel)
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As the core functionality of the modern stock market shifts to cloud-based platforms, a fundamental question arises: who sets the terms of access, coordination, and participation in the global financial system? The history of platform finance offers one way to answer this question. By tracing how financial infrastructures have become increasingly portable, commercialized, and privatized, we can observe how the expansion of global financial flows has concentrated control over the infrastructures that make global finance possible.
In this presentation, I examine the emergence of platform finance through the institutional and technological history of NASDAQ. In 1971, NASDAQ became one of the first markets to use computer networking to connect brokers through a distributed system of terminals. By 1986, it had partnered with the London and Singapore stock exchanges to build a 24-hour market by linking their central computers. This early experiment in transnational networking helped lay the foundation for the globally integrated capital markets we know today. From the late 1980s onward, exchanges around the world adopted NASDAQ’s technology—and with it, the institutional assumptions built into its design.
Today, most exchanges still bear the names of their cities—New York, London, Tokyo—but the infrastructures that support them are increasingly produced, standardized, and managed by a small number of multinational firms such as NASDAQ. Understanding NASDAQ’s history is essential to understanding the rise of platforms—not only because major tech firms such as Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and Google chose to list there, but because NASDAQ itself helped pioneer the platformization of capital markets.
Using primary source material from the Charles Babbage institute, the Hagley Archives, The British National Library, and the National Library of Singapore, I argue that geography, regional regulations, and colonial legacies influenced the design of global market infrastructure with lasting effects on the distribution of control over the mechanisms that underpin the global economy.
Ulysses Pascal researches how digital technologies mediate social, economic, and political life. His current research explores the globalization of financial information infrastructures and the rise of platform finance, focusing on how the politics embedded in technologies, protocols, and policies shape market logics. He is currently completing a manuscript titled *Circuits of Finance: NASDAQ and the Making of the Global Market*, which traces the history of NASDAQ from its origins in the 1960s to the collapse of the first dot-com boom in the early 2000s. Drawing on methods from critical infrastructure studies and human geography, his work examines how NASDAQ transformed its underlying market infrastructure into a commodified electronic trading platform that underpins stock exchanges around the world. He holds a PhD in Information Studies from UCLA and is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Finance and Big Tech at Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB).