Speaker 1:
From the library of the New York Stock Exchange at the corner of Wall and Broad Streets in New York City, you're Inside the ICE House, our podcast from Intercontinental exchange on markets, leadership and vision and global business, the dream drivers that have made the NYSE an indispensable institution of global growth for over 225 years. Each week, we feature stories of those who hatch plans create jobs and harness the engine of capitalism right here, right now at the NYSE and at ICE's exchanges and clearinghouses around the world. And now, welcome Inside the ICE House. Here's your host, Josh King of Intercontinental Exchange.
Josh King:
60 years ago in 1962, just up the street from here at the United Nations, our ambassador to the UN, Adlai Stevenson, addressed the Security Council on the buildup of Soviet missiles in Cuba and American resolve not to let that stand. Let's take a listen.
Audio:
I want to say at the outset that the course adopted by the Soviet Union yesterday to avoid direct confrontations in the zone of quarantine are welcome to my government. We also welcome the assurance by Chairman Khrushchev in his letter to Earl Russell that the Soviet Union will take no reckless decisions with regard to this crisis.
Josh King:
Ambassador Stevenson had served as governor Illinois and had been a three-time presidential candidate before that. A product of Choate, Princeton University and Northwestern Law School, he came from a long line of Illinois aristocracy and American noblesse oblige. That's why I've been struck by the contrast at the UN over the last few weeks as our current ambassador, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, has ramped up American resolve over Russia's pending and now actual invasion of Ukraine. Here's ambassador Thomas-Greenfield over the last few days.
Audio:
Responsible members of this Security Council will stand together and we will stand with Ukraine. And we will do so despite a reckless, irresponsible, permanent member of the Security Council abusing its powers to attack its neighbor and subvert the UN and our international system.
Josh King:
This is from a woman from Baker, Louisiana, educated at Louisiana State and the University of Wisconsin, a career diplomat who served the US State Department for 35 years, including an ambassadorship to Liberia and postings in Switzerland at the UN and also Pakistan, Kenya, Gambia, Nigeria and Jamaica. In her current post, Ambassador. Thomas-Greenfield was proceeded by female representatives of both parties, including Jeane Kirkpatrick, Madeleine Albright, Susan Rice, Samantha Power, Nikki Haley and Kelly Craft.
Josh King:
The role of women ascending to the highest echelons of power around the world and how that might make our world different and better in the future is one of the core reasons we celebrate International Women's Day every March 8th, the day we're releasing this special episode of Inside the ICE House. A recent study from Deloitte stated, and I'm going to quote it, "for every woman added to the C-suite in an organization, three women rise to senior leadership roles. Known as the multiplier effect, this phenomenon is one of the most important reasons why financial services firms should bolster efforts to achieve gender equality." That, from the Deloitte study. And then a different report from McKinsey titled Women in the Workplace showed a 5% jump in the number of women in the C-suite over the past five years. But at its current pace, equality in the boardroom is still several decades away.
Josh King:
But you don't need to be a quant to understand that the power of a multiplier is that growth can be exponential. Joining us inside the ICE House today to crunch the numbers is a self-described quant, Lynn Martin, who first appeared on the podcast way back in episode 70. In January, Lynn completed a multiplier of her own by succeeding Stacey Cunningham as the 68th New York Stock Exchange president and being named chair of ICE Data Services. Our conversation with Lynn Martin on her new job, the role of ESG in the markets and her vision for International Women's Day 2022 is coming up right after this.
Speaker 4:
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Audio:
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Josh King:
Our guest today, Lynn Martin, is president of NYSE Group and chair of Fixed Income and Data Services at ICE. Previously, Lynn served as president of Fixed Income and Data Services at Intercontinental exchange and earlier served as president of ICE Data Services, COO of ICE Clear US and in a number of leadership roles, including CEO of NYS Life US and CEO of New York Portfolio Clearing. Welcome, Lynn, inside the ICE House.
Lynn Martin:
Thanks for having me, Josh.
Josh King:
As we are recording this episode, a big day on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange as you and our chair, Sharon Bowen, welcomed New York City's new mayor, Eric Adams, to ring our opening bell. And here's what he said on the floor, and I'm going to quote him: "Ringing this iconic opening bell at the NYSE is not only how New York's economy opens up every morning, but how the worldwide economy opens for business every day." What was his message to you when he came here, Lynn, and what was your message to him?
Lynn Martin:
I couldn't have said it better myself than what Mayor Adams articulated the role of our bell every day. It was a great talk with Mayor Adams. When I explained to him that I was the 68th president of NYSE he said, "I bet it looked a lot different with number 66 and below that," knowing that Stacey was the first female president of NYSE. So acknowledging the diversity that we've under and the diversity that he has as the second Black mayor of New York City and then, of course, noting Sharon Bowen in her trailblazing 10 years, the first person of color and the first female to be the chair of NYSE, just shows how far we've come as a society.
Josh King:
We've come along ways as a society, but still a lot of stuff practically to do for a new mayor. So in terms of your message to him, I know he was keen about how to get New Yorkers back to work at the NYSE. We had gone pretty ambitiously toward two days at work per week before the Omicron variants set in, and then we all scattered again. And now, we're about to restart that process. But what does a mayor need to do to make it easier for us all to get here?
Lynn Martin:
Yeah, the mayor is really focused on how to drive the economy of New York City, which in my mind is a very refreshing change from some of the past folks who have had that post. He really understands that for a city to thrive, you need people in the city, both tourist dollars as well as people at their offices, buying salads from the local lunch guy, buying coffee from the street vendor, getting their shoe shine, picking up their dry cleaning. It all feeds into the economic health of New York City.
Lynn Martin:
So his message was initially, "Okay, well, how do we get people back to New York City?" and asked my opinion on that. A lot of his current focuses, particularly around crime and improving the safety of New York City, are really areas that he's continuing to focus on. And that's going to be a key driver to get more folks from all different types of constituents into the city.
Lynn Martin:
We're really excited about the fact that, as you say Josh, we have people coming back to the office starting March 1st. And the reason why we're excited about that is because the in-person collaboration really helps build the culture of a company. It helps us mentor the younger, more junior team members to be the next leaders of tomorrow, but it also helps foster idea generation, innovation, entrepreneurship. Some of that gets lost when you are all disconnected, albeit connected through the electronic mechanisms.
Josh King:
We mentioned earlier how you had previously served as president of ICE Fixed Income and Data Services before becoming president of the NYSE on January 1st, and a good deal of that tenure was largely remote. What were some of the frustrations you felt trying to lead a culture that is famously collaborative, famously in person, famously a lot of give and take, push and pull, even to sometimes an uncomfortable degree, getting in people's face and not really able to do that?
Lynn Martin:
Yeah, I could see when we first went home, we were very sharp. We were in constant communication, very reactive to markets. Markets at that point were very volatile. And the markets that we were looking at, particularly the fixed income market, was having transparency issues due to the volatility in the markets and the uncertainty around the pandemic.
Lynn Martin:
As time went on, product development continued, but those light bulb moments, they didn't happen as easily. They still happened, but they didn't happen as easily as they happened when we were all side by side in offices, running into each other in hallways. The problem-solving wasn't done as quickly, and the new idea generation, bringing new products to market, wasn't happening at the same pace as it was prior to us going home.
Josh King:
You mentioned Sharon Bowen earlier in our conversation. One of the things the mayor did here today, surrounded by those who've been unrepresented communities in the business world, was to declare today Sharon Y. Bowen Day after our own chair, the first woman, the first person of color to hold that post. What does that mean to you?
Lynn Martin:
It's amazing. I mean, the fact that the mayor of New York City is acknowledging Sharon and Sharon being such a trailblazer and someone for so many of us to look up to, myself who's had a long career, but more importantly, you think about the youth of New York City who are still dreaming about their futures. What do they want to become? So to look at someone like Sharon, what you can achieve, what she has achieved throughout her career, I think it's magical. It's amazing. It's so inspirational to so many people who have established careers, but also the youth of America.
Josh King:
You and I were talking about the neighborhood a couple days ago. One of the fixtures of this neighborhood is the Charging Bull statue at Bowling Green on Broadway. I want to pivot our conversation to another certain statue of a bull, one that preceded your introduction the ones here on Wall Street. Let's listen to Smithtown, Long Island supervisor, Edward Wehrheim.
Edward Wehrheim:
May 10th, 1941, Smithtown officials and residents gathered to unveil the iconic statue of the legendary bull. Originally cast in the year 1928 in France by Long Island sculptor Charles Cary Rumsey, the bull was brought to the United States, where it first stood for some years in front of the Brooklyn Museum. Upon Rumsey's death, his heirs presented the statue to the town of Smithtown. We're here today to wish Whisper a happy 80th anniversary, watching over Smithtown as he has for those 80 years.
Josh King:
What was life like growing up in a town that was apocryphally named for how long a bull could travel in one day?
Lynn Martin:
I can't believe you found that. I drove past a bull statue, I'd say, every day of my life growing up, asking my parents, "Why is there such a large bull statue in our town?" and then hearing that story over and over again. I guess in some ways, subliminally it made me destined to be working on Wall Street.
Josh King:
Well, staying in your junior high school and high school years, here is an ad from the mid-1980s.
Audio:
How old should your child be before you buy a computer? High school, when he's planning a career? Elementary school, when she can either fall behind or leap ahead? Or preschool to give him head start? When you is up to you, but Commodore makes the decision easier than any other computers. Because it's the 64, it's very powerful. Because it's Commodore, it's very affordable.
Josh King:
Very affordable, Lynn. How did your parents influence your interest in technology both around the dinner table and with the purchase of that very affordable Commodore 64?
Lynn Martin:
So my dad is an electrical engineer by trade, so we were probably one of the first families on the block to have a VCR or VHS machine at the time, and then we were probably also one of the first families to have a Commodore 64. And like the purchase of the video recording machine, I came home one day from school and there it was. And my dad had a big grin on his face saying, "Oh, this is a computer." I said, "Well, what the heck am I going to do with that?" I think I was probably about 10 or 11. Had no idea what it could do and what I should do with it.
Lynn Martin:
But he frequently came home with floppy discs through those, again dating myself, and to those listeners who remember those, full of games. So that started my love of computers because I would love playing with the games. But then I also started designing cards and designing stationery and printing out different types of graphics and so on and so forth. The things that you might expect a girl to do.
Josh King:
I mean talking about those things that you might do with a computer like designing cards and posters and things like that, but you often refer to the impact that being a programmer has had on your world outlook. When did you first realize that coding could be more than just a hobby or playing a game with that Commodore 64, but perhaps also a career path?
Lynn Martin:
Yeah, it was when I was applying for college, actually, and my father suggested that I major in computer science. I had no idea, like any good 18-year-old, what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. And he suggest, "Well, you're really good at science. You're really good at math. So why don't you try computer science?" And I said, "Okay." So I selected that on my college essays.
Lynn Martin:
And I remember going through the applications and also seeing engineering. And I said, "Well, what about engineering, Dad?" And he said, "There is more opportunity for women in computer science than there are in engineering careers," which I thought was something, now that I look back on it, so astute for a father of an 18-year-old girl to say back in the early '90s, particularly given the field that he was in. So I selected computer science and fell in love with coding after I figured out what it meant to be a computer science major.
Josh King:
One of only a relatively small number at the time. And women make up only 28% of the workforce in science, technology, engineering and math, and men vastly outnumber women majoring in most of these fields in college. The gender gap's also high in some of the highest paid jobs of the future like computer science, like engineering. Why do you think that these discrepancies still exist, despite what your dad did and many of the efforts to close them, and what can we do to bridge that gap?
Lynn Martin:
Yeah, I think as a mom of two boys at the moment, I see how there is more curriculum now be being focused towards girls and engendering girls' interest in computers. There are specific female-focused coding classes for young children as well as male-focused coding classes for young children as well. Something that really blends a natural interest alongside the skillset, I think, is one of the keys towards getting more females maybe not today, but in future generations interested in the field and realizing that this is an absolutely available and typical career path for a girl to take.
Josh King:
As a mom, you mentioned your two boys earlier. Lynn, working women also report perhaps more on the job burnout than working men do. And this gap has only widened over the past two years. Is this something that concerns you? And how can companies address the gap?
Lynn Martin:
It does concern me. I will tell you that when we all first went home in 2020, the demands of being a mom and demands of being a professional were never more intense. You had the concerns from the public health perspective that not only yourself, but your children were going to get sick. You had demands from remote schooling because children were not able to go into school. And then you also had your demands from your job to balance without a large support system, which many of us have become accustomed to. Nannies, daycare, whatever the case may be.
Lynn Martin:
It's an area that doesn't surprise me what some of the studies have come out with the results for those two years, but it concerns me and it is something that, in my mind, we need to make a concerted effort, those of us who are female and in leadership positions, to get women back to the workforce those who had experienced burnout out, those who had had different considerations during that period of time.
Josh King:
In your own STEM journey, Lynn, you attended Manhattan College, which is a highly ranked school but had only allowed women to enroll two decades earlier. What made you decide that was the school for you, and what was the experience like?
Lynn Martin:
The reason I chose Manhattan College was because it was where my uncle went to school and spoke very highly of his experience there. He graduated from Manhattan College in the mid-'60s, and my mom always talked about it as a very good school to attend, particularly because of their engineering program. My mom was a former guidance counselor, so she was giving a lot of good advice to someone who was looking to apply to colleges, particularly given what I was good at and my area of interest of studying.
Lynn Martin:
Manhattan was a great school. I had a terrific four years, and the lessons that I learned there from the professors were real-life lessons. It wasn't a school that taught for just the sake of teaching. It was a school that when you left, you were prepared for the real world. You were prepared to get a job in the real world.
Josh King:
Talking about getting a job in the real world, Lynn, your first job out of college was at IBM, 1998. The tech giant then, which was under Lou Gerstner, was in the midst of a turnaround built off of the dot-com boom.
Josh King:
What he wrote in his CEO letter that year, I think, still rings true. And I'm going to quote him. "Someone is always inventing some software code or device that is a little faster or cheaper. More and more, the winning edge comes from how you help customers use technology to steal a march on their competitors, to implement entirely new business models." How did your experience at IBM shape your understanding of how to serve customers?
Lynn Martin:
Yeah, when I joined IBM, I joined their global services practice, which was an area that Lou Gerstner and under Sam Palmisano who was then going to become CEO of IBM at a later date, was focused on building out. That was a service function. I joined their financial services practice, and it was basically to provide consulting services to financial institutions.
Lynn Martin:
So what what I learned there was really how to listen to the customer. The customer's always right, and you can never over-communicate. Those are two very important lessons that I keep in the back of my mind regularly.
Lynn Martin:
Customers always right doesn't necessarily mean what it says on the tin, as they like to say. It means listen to your customer. They're telling you something. They're telling you a concern.
Josh King:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Lynn Martin:
They're telling you a way to innovate. They're telling you a problem that they want to solve. You can learn a lot by listening to your customers, and that can very much influence your own product strategy and your own path for innovation. In terms of you can never over-communicate, that's the golden rule that I listen to and I try to employ with my management teams, especially during challenging times.
Josh King:
Yeah. I mean, talking about your own path of innovation, the way you chart your course through your career, at IBM, Lynn you earned a master's of statistics from Columbia and became a little bit more interested in finance than you had prior. What was behind the shift of interest?
Lynn Martin:
Yeah, at my last year at Manhattan, I had picked up a finance minor at Manhattan College. I picked up a finance minor and I really became interested in the intersection and of mathematical models and financial markets. It was more of an itch that I couldn't quite scratch in undergrad. And once I joined IBM, I really determined that that was an area that I wanted to learn more about.
Lynn Martin:
What was driving markets? It just became something incredibly fascinating to me. And then when I learned that there were mathematical models that were really driving the way people priced assets in the market, it led me to want to get some more education about that, and that led me to Columbia.
Josh King:
And then a next stop in your career, Lynn. 2001, you joined the London International Financial Futures and Options Exchange, otherwise known as LIFFE. At the time, the financial markets were undergoing this tremendous change with the development of new technology. How has the industry changed since then in that space?
Lynn Martin:
Something that I always like to say is that technology is the great equalizer for markets. When I first joined LIFFE, we had just gone through a floor-to-screen migration, meaning we were forced to close our pits because we had lost the Bund contract to another exchange and we were trying to hold onto the short end of the European yield curve, which was the euribor contracts. In order to do that, we had to develop a matching engine which was going to take orders from multiple places, not just folks on the floor, and match buyers with sellers.
Lynn Martin:
When I joined the exchange, we were starting the process of distributing that globally, particularly to US-based clients. And it was really the beginning of the electronic trading revolution, in some respects, because you were talking to traders not about products, you were talking to traders and their tech folks about how to connect to an exchange, what an API was, how to code to that API. And since then, that has only evolved the markets that we have today.
Josh King:
In your first appearance on our podcast, we talked about your work as head of ICE's Fixed Income and Data Business. Data, obviously an important factor in the company's growth over the years. That business specifically accounted for more than 20% of ICE's total revenues in 2021. How did you use data to your advantage?
Lynn Martin:
I always like to say data is an incredible input and an incredible output. If you think about the ecosystem that develops around financial markets, data is the most important output of fully-transparent liquid markets, but then it's a really important input to finding fair value. Data is not that different when you think about a human. If you are communicating with folks in the way you want to communicate with them, that's a piece of data. But what's going into that communication is what you're observing in the outside world. So I see a lot of parallels between personal life as well as professional life with the use of data.
Josh King:
I mean, speaking of using data in new ways, in 2020 you and I spoke on this show with risQ's Chris Hartshorn, a company that ICE actually recently acquired late last year on how climate risks factored into fixed income investing. How is ESG being used not only in equity markets, but also among fixed income investors?
Lynn Martin:
Yeah, I would say ESG is an emerging risk in markets. Folks are trying to figure out how to take environmental risks, social risks and governance risks and apply them to financial markets.
Lynn Martin:
When we spoke with Chris, we had just rolled out a product and partnership with them, applying their climate risk alongside a specific area of the fixed income market, the municipal market. Now, when you think about that, the municipal bond market is very susceptible to climate risks because in order to finance a municipality's operations, they're most likely going to have to issue debt. Well, if there's a catastrophic event in that municipality, they're probably going to have to issue more debt in order to rebuild. So there is a direct applicability of climate risk to the municipal market.
Lynn Martin:
There's also one to the housing markets, though, too. And that's an area that now that we own risQ and their sister company Level 11, we're in the process of working on rolling out something related to the mortgage markets and climate's effect on the mortgage markets. But you need to really think through where there are those risks in order to tie them to understandable, easily-consumable forms of market data that the market knows already to use to manage its risk.
Josh King:
In several of the interviews that you've done two months into your tenure as president of the NYSE, you've mentioned that ESG is something that you're going to continue to pay really close attention to in your new role. How do ESG and ESG data factor into your role, you think, as NYSE's president?
Lynn Martin:
ESG is an important area for the issuer community as well. In my previous tenure, we had developed an ESG database, for lack of better description, which we call our ESG reference data product. We worked with Bank of America in order to be the anchor tenant to roll this product out. And we collect about 450 attributes on right now, about 6,000 public companies around the globe.
Lynn Martin:
The way I describe this to folks is it's your electronic ESG footprint. So what do we do? We look at corporate sustainability reports that are being disclosed by companies. We look at companies' websites. We look at their filings, where they disclose their ESG risks, and we turn it into something that's electronically digestible.
Lynn Martin:
That's really useful from an issuer perspective because as they are increasingly measured on these risks by a variety of data providers, a lot of times they want to know where this information is coming from. So what would a traditional data vendor pull from their website to look at when they're developing an opinion around environmental, social and governance aspects? It's why we've been able to roll this product out so seamlessly and with much positive feedback to our own NYSE-listed community, because we're able to show them, the issuer, what their electronic ESG footprint is as well as what their peer group's is.
Josh King:
After the break, Lynn Martin and I discuss her vision for the future of the New York Stock Exchange. That's coming up right after this.
Speaker 4:
And now, a word from On Holding, NYSE ticker ONON.
Audio:
Pause is essential. It's part of the process.
Audio:
Training doesn't end when my body stops moving.
Audio:
Recovery looks different for every athlete. We have different needs, different goals, different abilities.
Audio:
One thing we share? Our bodies need time. Time to heal.
Audio:
The moment I stopped training for the day, What people maybe don't realize is that the training is still going on.
Audio:
In a way, the training never ends. The journey just starts again.
Audio:
Pause is sanctuary, familiar spaces and comforting routines. It clears your mind and rebuilds your body.
Audio:
Let the healing begin. Time to reset. There's power in pause.
Josh King:
Welcome back. Before the break Lynn Martin, president of the New York Stock Exchange, and I were discussing her career, ESG, improving opportunity and her plans for her tenure here at 11 Wall Street.
Josh King:
We left our conversation, Lynn, mentioning some of your platform as the 68th president of the New York Stock Exchange and just the second woman to lead the Exchange in it's nearly 230-year history. When you think about it, what does that mean to you to come back to this corner of Wall and Broad Street where you spent a significant early portion of your career?
Lynn Martin:
Well, it's like a homecoming. I mean, once this building's in your blood, once this entity is in your blood, it never really leaves your blood.
Josh King:
As you begin your new term as the NYSE's president, as we mentioned earlier in the show, Sharon Bowen also began her role as the first woman and minority to chair the New York Stock Exchange. How are you looking at the combination between Lynn Martin and Sharon Bowen to bring the NYSE to the next level?
Lynn Martin:
Well, given all of Sharon's expertise, particularly in the legal and regulatory area, and all of the work that she has done very thoughtfully in the area of ESG, having her as a strategic advisor on areas that are going to be of the utmost importance to the Exchange, to our issuers, to our markets is a real privilege. And it's an honor to have her as the chair of NYSE.
Josh King:
In a somewhat of a mirror to your situation here at the NYSE, as chair of ICE Data Services you are now out partnering and mentoring Amanda Hindlian, the new president of ICE Fixed Income and Data Services and our guest on the episode back in episode 251. What was your advice to her? And has it been hard to step back from the day to day operations in that business that you integrated and scaled?
Lynn Martin:
It has not been difficult because I leave behind a very capable management team under Amanda. What I have said to Amanda is what got us the growth rates we had for the last six and a half years is not what's going to drive our growth for the next six and a half years. So I'm absolutely thrilled we have someone so capable who is able to look at the business with a fresh set of eyes, particularly given her experience at Goldman studying areas such as ESG, which is going to be a big area of focus for that business to continue to drive its success forward.
Josh King:
While you, Amanda and Sharon were preparing to take on your new roles, a symbol for women on Wall Street faced being pushed out of her place on Wall Street. Let's take a listen.
Audio:
Wall Street's Fearless Girl is staying put, at least for a little while. The city's Landmarks Preservation Commission voted today to keep the statue in its place for three more years. But the fight isn't over just yet. News 4's Erica Byfield is live in lower Manhattan with what's next for what's become a popular landmark in the city. Erica.
Audio:
Adam, it really is. You can still see people coming up to her now. Here she is, right over here to my right. The permit actually for this statue expired on the 29th of last month, hence all the concern today about this vote.
Josh King:
So Fearless Girl, Lynn, sponsored by State Street Global Advisors, that's NYSE tick symbol STT, was created to encourage companies to have more women on boards. And in 2021, 99% of companies listing on the NYSE had at least one female director. How does changing the makeup of public company governance affect equality in markets overall?
Lynn Martin:
It adds diversity. It adds diversity of thought. It's not just diversity of person. It's diversity of perspective that you're adding to the board.
Lynn Martin:
Those companies that have such diversity take less risks. They make more educated decisions. They have a more interesting debate. They achieve greater things. It's why when we look at, for example, the Just 100 list, 75% of that list are NYSE companies. The best-governed companies are the ones that have diversity in their boardroom. And we couldn't be prouder of our NYSE community.
Josh King:
Despite some of the gains at the top, though, there's been several studies highlighting the fact that much of the gender pay gap can be attributed to women being promoted at far lower rates than men, which limits income. How can we make the middle of corporate America more equitable as well?
Lynn Martin:
I mean, it's an area that companies, I think, have an increased focused on because they have seen the benefits of diversity at the board level. They're now looking at different layers of their organizations as to how to continue to foster that diversity of thought.
Lynn Martin:
And many of us are taking concerted efforts to promote that diversity within the ranks, not just at the most senior levels, but also at the next generation of leaders of the company. It's very important that we train, we mentor, we give diverse candidates a path towards success to give them a chance to succeed.
Josh King:
So we are now entering the third year of the pandemic. It seems like yesterday that we at the NYSE made the historic decision to temporarily close the trading floor at the onset of the pandemic. What do you think the future of the NYSE trading floor is going to be like?
Lynn Martin:
So I like to say that the most technology-forward companies couple technology alongside human judgment. The business that I previously ran are Fixed Income and Data Services business. The core of that is to provide fair market valuations on 2.8 million fixed income securities globally, real time, throughout the course of a day. We do that with a heck of a lot of models, a lot of great technology, but we also do it with 200 humans. And what that meant during volatile times, particularly as you just mentioned, Josh, two years ago during the start of the pandemic, is we saw better product as a result of the lack of volatility attributed to human judgment overlaying the mathematical models.
Lynn Martin:
I view the NYSE floor the exact same way. During volatile periods of time, the floor community smooths out the volatility for NYSE-listed stocks. In fact, January 24th, one of the most volatile days in history, we saw two times less volatility at the open and the close for NYSE-listed stocks, directly attributable to our floor community.
Josh King:
You and I were talking about the importance of communications earlier. The importance of connecting with customers was one of the most important lessons that you learned during the entirety of your career, Lynn. Prior to the pandemic, I think you told us in one of the prior episodes that you would be on planes 30 out of 52 weeks during the year to visit and talk to customers around the world. We can do the same thing by Zoom and Webex. Why is actually face time so important? And what's your outreach been so far to some CEOs to get them back here to see them?
Lynn Martin:
Yeah, and we've been really excited over the last couple of weeks, now that Omicron seems to be subsiding, that we've had more and more companies come in, use our facilities. What you pick up from a in-person dialogue is just very different than what you pick up from a Zoom call, particularly when you're establishing those initial relationships. You build trust through being there for customers through really challenging times, but you have to have a base relationship. And doing that in person, you just pick up so many different nuggets, either sidebar conversations or facial nuances or inflection of voice or whatever the case may be that just can't be replicated on Zoom.
Josh King:
You highlighted in a Fortune piece last month one of the priorities is an emphasis on technology. What is it about the NYSE's technology that makes it so unique?
Lynn Martin:
The work that we have done to upgrade our systems to the platform that we have today, which we affectionately refer to as Pillar, makes it the most deterministic set of matching engines that are available in equity markets. Had we not done the upgrades that we've done that Stacey led during her tenure here, we would not have been able to process the message loads that we've seen even in the few weeks since I've taken the reins.
Lynn Martin:
If I look back on January 24th again, half a trillion messages went through our systems on that day. The median response time on the equity markets was 30 microseconds. It was all systems operating business as usual, but we made a tremendous amount of technology enhancements over the previous years in order to get there.
Josh King:
And how are we going to leverage it for years to come?
Lynn Martin:
We're going to continue to roll out that technology and enhance that technology either with more complex order types or different functionality. We're going to be rolling that platform out to our options markets and the coming months because it's right now just on our equities markets. But the code base that we've developed is something that's very scalable, very easily tuned and very easily modified to adjust to the realities of the future markets.
Josh King:
Wrapping up our conversation, Lynn, the conversation began with our thought of what Mayor Adams did today at the exchange. We wanted him to come to ring the bell to close out Black History Month, and he was more than happy to do so. But he came not alone.
Josh King:
He came with his deputy mayors and he also came with young men and women of different financial circumstances, but who were feeling underserved by the financial services community, feeling perhaps like they didn't quite have the level of opportunity that they should. As we come full circle in this conversation, your thoughts as you talk not only to Mayor Adams, but those young people and what the New York Stock Exchange can offer for them in the future.
Lynn Martin:
I think NYSE stands, really, as the beacon for democratized access to capital. I don't know how else you can put it. Our markets are available to the broadest amount of investors globally. It's something we're very passionate, about continuing to promote our leadership position in that regard, and we have the best community of entrepreneurs, thought leaders and CEOs who worry about continuing our markets, continuing to move their businesses forward for the next couple of hundred years.
Josh King:
Moving their businesses forward for the next couple hundred years. Lynn, I hope you and I are here for at least the next 10 of them to watch as that happen. Thanks-
Lynn Martin:
So do I.
Josh King:
Thanks so much for joining us inside the ICE House.
Lynn Martin:
Thanks, Josh.
Josh King:
And that's our conversation for this week. Our guest was Lynn Martin, president of the New York Stock Exchange and chair of ICE Data Services.
Josh King:
If you like what you heard, please rate us on iTunes so other folks know where to find us. And if you've got a comment or a question you'd like one of our experts to tackle on a future show, email us at [email protected] or tweet at us at @ICEHousePodcast.
Josh King:
Our show is produced by Pete Asch with production assistance from Stephan Carpiles, Ken Abel, Kearney Ferguson and Ian Wolff. I'm Josh King, your host, signing off from the library of the New York Stock Exchange. Thanks for listening. Talk to you next week.
Speaker 1:
Information contained in this podcast was obtained in part from publicly-available sources and not independently verified. Neither ICE nor its affiliates make any representations or warranties, express or implied, as to the accuracy or completeness of the information and do not sponsor, approve or endorse any of the content herein, all of which is presented solely for informational and educational purposes. Nothing herein constitutes an offered to sell, a solicitation of an offer to buy any security, or a recommendation of any security or trading practice. Some portions of the proceeding conversation may have been edited for the purpose of length or clarity.
