Within days of Sanderson’s November arrival, Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, German online brokerage Consors and Italy’s Banca ABM bought stakes in Nasdaq’s European subsidiary, bringing the total number of outside investors to 11. And Nasdaq Europe acquired a minority interest in the Berlin Stock Exchange, advancing its plan to post real-time prices on German shares. Sanderson acknowledges that he stepped into the right place at the right time. “I inherited a team that spent a year and a half building a brilliant platform for a pan-European exchange,” says the new CEO. But much remains to be done: Nasdaq Europe, now handling some 9 million shares a week, wants to become the venue of choice for cross-border trading. The challenge, says the 58-year-old Sanderson, who ran the successful Instinet trading operation in the 1990s, is to make the case that “we now have the lowest-cost platform for trading.” Sanderson hopes to drive costs even lower this month, when Nasdaq Europe launches a joint venture with New York’s Depository Trust & Clearing Corp. that will reduce cross-border clearing costs as much as 84 percent. “Today it’s easier for an Italian to buy a Mercedes than to buy 100 shares of a German stock,” says Sanderson. “This is one of the last industries to come into the 21st century.”
