Name: Inside The NYSE
Uploaded: 2025-10-16
Duration: 17 min 44 s

With volatile market swings, record volume of trading, and hot IPOs, the New York Stock Exchange has been at the center of some of the year’s hottest financial news. NYSEPresident Lynn Martin leads the way, navigating a new administration and heightened competition for IPO listings. A technologist (she wrote code at IBM), Martin takes us behind the scenes to share how the exchange is using AI and other tools to ensure trading certainty and efficiency, and why NYSE is planting a flag in Texas.

Inside The NYSE

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I love this event. Oh yeah, that's always this event's always such a great event. Well, how did the markets do today? Oh jeez. Well, It was down and then it was way up and then it was down flat to downish 1100 point range for the day um. Yeah, that's kind of how the markets did today. Thanks for letting you. It's uh I mean it was a volatile day it's um the markets weighing some really positive news a bunch of the banks had earnings today and those were super positive, a lot of outperformance in the financial sector, a lot of bullishness from some of the bank CEOs including Jamie, who I know is gonna be speaking here um in just a little bit. But then there is this concern around China tariffs and are we back at Wart war with China. So there's some barbs being traded from what I gather even walking onto the stage, but that's OK. Do you think it's going to continue to be a factor in the coming months, or depends. Um, I think they've still got to figure out they have to come to an agreement. I think they will come to an agreement. I think we will come to an agreement with China, but um I don't know when, I don't know how, and I don't know how much the market's gonna go up and down in between. Um, if I look at what happened in April, that's kind of my guiding post, you know, we came out with really strong proposed tariffs against. A lot of countries, including a lot of our friends, the market reacted and we say the market, but when you say that people think, OK, just the equities market. What really happened was the bond market started to see stress and that's where you saw the pause, um, start to get interjected into the conversations. If you look at Where we are now, I mean we've come to an agreement with quite a few countries, um, it's just an interesting way of negotiating. Were there any lessons learned from what happened in April? Uh, remain calm, calm remain calm. Don't check your portfolio every 5 minutes because especially if you checked your portfolio when the market opened today. Uh, I think the market opened down 1% today. If you checked it at 1 o'clock, it was up 1 or 2%, and now it's back flat. So, um, stay calm, invest for the long term, keep doing the things that you're doing to drive business. Our economy is super strong. Um, the fundamentals of our economy are good. The banks are doing well. There's a vibrancy associated with the deal making environment. I see a bunch of bankers in the market who are are in the audience who are nodding their heads, both on the M&A side and the IPO side. So we will get past this. It's just stay calm through it. Let's talk about IPOs. So 2025 for a rebound in IPOs at NYSE. How would you describe the healthy trajectory of the IPO? Uh, really, really strong. I mean, the amount of CEOs that are calling me saying when's your government going to, when's the government, what are you hearing? When are they going to open up again? Um, is phones ringing a lot, uh, and we are grateful that the SEC issued guidance last week which would allow companies to get out in a 20 day window now. Um, so we've had a great year so far and IPOs and across all sectors you look at particularly digital finance, the sector that's doing really, really well, that being everything from crypto exchanges to stablecoin, uh, companies like Circle which we're proud to take out, um, the design sector, uh, Figma was a great IPO. Uh, but also Klarna was a great IPO, so there's a lot of deals that are getting out. Large deals are getting done, a lot of investor demand. Um, there's been a lot of investor demand for probably a couple of years now where when I'm talking to our own investors, they're asking me, well, when is the IPO market gonna open? I'm like, I don't know, um. Why, uh, and they say, well, I wanna add more of these new issues to my portfolio to get to capture the returns and I think because of the strong reception on some of the companies that I just well because they're trying to get some sort of market moving yeah no no we're not we're not. I want to know what she's saying because she is talking to her advisor or someone. Uh no, I'm kidding. Oh, please continue. Gas leaks and microphones, that's our day, ladies, but you know what I see you roll with the right, right, right, um, but yeah, and I'm really excited about the rest of the year for IPOs when the government comes back. Do you see any headwinds for companies considering going public? Uh, I don't see headwinds. What I tend to see our companies. Questioning when they go public and not going public um as quickly as they used to they're staying private for longer. Some of that is due to the costs of being a public company uh which you know we were incredibly optimistic with the proposal that Chair Atkins has just issued around the option for a CFO to go to semiannual reporting. Now I don't know how many CFOs are actually gonna take. The SEC up on that, but I think that's a great way for a private company that's about to go public to ease into being a public company, a bit of a glide path if you will, which is something that we've been advocating for for a while now. You think that's part of some of the resistance for private companies? I think the rigidity around reporting um has become. Onerous and that there's a cost associated with that if you think about the scaffolding because that's the last group who who knows it better than anyone, the scaffolding that comes along with being a public company, the quarterly earnings calls, the, the amount of prep that goes into that, the road shows after that, the disclosures upon disclosures, um, simplifying some of those disclosures would certainly lessen the cost. Now let's get into AI. Yeah, um, how is AI impacting NYSC's operations? Yeah, so we're using AI across a variety of our groups, um. When we think about AI. And probably because of the background that I have, we think about data immediately so how do I apply automation at a really big big data set and when I think about the big data sets for lack of a better description that we run the incoming order messages that we process every day is something that's front and center. So to give you some numbers because I'm a numbers person when. I first took this job about 4 years ago. COVID was still rearing its ugly head, a volatile day on our market saw about 350 billion or so incoming order messages. Um, incoming message for us is a buy order, a sell order, or a match trade. This past April, a peak day for us was 1.2 trillion messages, so very short period of time we've had 3 times increase in the amount of messages we process. It's our obligation to protect the financial markets. So we have to surveil those messages. We can't do that with a bunch of humans. We need good technology in order to surveil the market, so we use AI in our regulatory function all over, um, both from a looking for nefarious behavior in the market, but then also how do you automate some of the more mundane reporting tasks that we have. How about cybersecurity? Oh yeah, cybersecurity is the area that we spend a lot of time on, so we are a little unique in that we have our own data center, purpose built data center. We have our own, we have a matching engines in that data center and we run our own proprietary network. Now we leverage the cloud for a bunch of other things. We leverage the cloud for data distribution. Um, particularly the commoditized data sets that we have like historical data, but within the data center that we run, they're all point to point connections. That means there's no internet on those connections. So we take cyber super seriously to the point where when it comes to our most critical infrastructure. We have full visibility of the infrastructure and therefore we can protect that infrastructure. Now you started your career as a programmer. That's why I'm talking so much about infrastructure and numbers and boring everyone in the audience and all that. Nelson bolt. Oh, so you started your career as a programmer and some suggests that AI could eventually replace large parts of computer programming. So I just wanted to get your opinion on that. Yeah, I mean that's another area we're using AI. Continuously, um, as partners to our technology team, um, the automated code deliver um delivery like GitHub and those types of tools we use those all the time as as well it's um I don't know that it's going to change to. Eliminate the need for programmers. I think it's gonna cause programmers to have to do different things, but I don't think it's that different from the evolution of the computer. I mean, there was a guy, I mean a guy because it's a male dominated field that walked back and forth across mainframes with punch cards. In the 50s. That person was probably considered a computer programmer. Um, that continued to evolve over time where a programmer started working with APIs and think about the different levels of code there have been. There's everything from basic is the first language I learned to C to Pascal to C++ to Java. This is just that next evolution. So I think programmers are just going to look different. They'll probably use. AI partners to help them write code, but there's always going to be a need for someone who understands the way the machine works, and AI is part of that machine. Let's talk about talent. Um, how is that going to define or or using AI define how you look at talent NYMC? Yeah, it's um We look at talent based on Real world experiences and then potential, um, intellectual curiosity, um, fiery spirit, things of that nature. Uh, I think people learning to embed AI in their lives are just going to be more efficient professionally, but We're very careful to make sure people understand how to deploy AI responsibly, meaning there are certain use cases for deployment. There's certain things such as intellectual property that you want to keep within your four walls, and a lot of times that intellectual property in this digital age is really data. So how are you deploying AI with IP at. The forefront of your approach makes a lot of sense. Thank you. Um, so with the SEC and the CFTC now clarifying the regulatory path, uh, for, uh, exchanges to list crystal, how are you evaluating evaluating these opportunities? It's an interesting market, um, it's interesting opportunities. uh, we have had crypto ETFs for quite some time since they launched. We were the first, um, exchange to list crypto ETFs. um, we're looking at really I would say tokenization more with interest than a specific crypto from our perspective. Having regulatory guardrails is the first critical step towards institutional adoption. And when we think about regulatory guard rails, you know, the perimeter that we have because of the cyber things I was talking about earlier, because of the infrastructure we've built and refined over the 233 years we've been in existence, that's been Hard end and so you look at some of the other platforms out there they're a bit less um hardened but we're also conscious of. Bringing different asset classes into that environment and not just deploying a technology for the sake of deploying a technology uh but you know we're looking at the technology piece I would say with a lot of interest it's one of the reasons that led us to the partnership with our parent company signed with Polymarket last week um they've got some great technology and it's something that's of interest to us. Thank you, Lynn. Um, how do you see NYSE Texas evolving to meet the needs of companies in the region? I left my boots at home. You left your boots. Well, I like your shoes. Thanks. Um, so we launched NYSE Texas at the end of March this year. We announced we were doing it in. Uh, February 6 weeks later we were up and going and now we have about 70 listed companies on the platform. They're dual listed between NYSE and NYSE Texas. We did that for two reasons. Number one, Governor Abbott has passed some really positive pro-business legislation down in Texas. Um, second, Texas is our largest state by market cap in terms of concentration of listed companies. So many of our companies were moving there. They were moving there because of that pro-business legislation. Uh, so we were able to react quickly and address a need that our customers were identifying and that is we want to take advantage of the pro business stuff down here so and we wanna do it with little cost so. Do you see any other expansion? Besides Texas in the future. Um, I think we're pretty happy with our footprint. We, we run 5 equity exchanges and 2 options exchanges now. Uh, so we're pretty happy with, with our position. And in our last minute, why don't you share some leadership advice? What's the best piece of advice that you've ever gotten? Oh gosh. Um, Man, leadership advice, uh, I always like to say you can never overcommunicate with anyone who's heard me speak before. I've said that before, so I'm trying to come up with something new. Um, I think the team atmosphere is so incredibly important. Like you got to, no one is more senior than the other on my team. um, my door is always open to all levels of people. And I think it's really important to partner people together with different skill sets. So someone who's really quantitative gets partnered with someone who's really outgoing or someone who's more operationally rigid gets partnered with someone who like a mad scientist, um, because I think the combination of people. Really brings a better product. 1 + 1 definitely equals 3, so that all summed up is basically there's no I in team. And I'm in it just as much as my team is, so I feel the loss is probably worse than they do and I celebrate the wins just as hard, not harder as they do. So you're all in it together, yeah, we're all in it together. It's the only way I know how to run a business we're all rowing in the same direction we're all in it together. I think that's a good place to and thank you so much, Lynn. Thank you, appreciate it.