Since being named president of the world's largest stock exchange at the end of 2021, Lynn Martin has found herself in charge of a business whose very name stands for the equity markets and the flow of capital. It's a big responsibility, one that has her thinking about where to take the exchange next: "How do we build the NYSE for the next 231 years?" asked Martin, nodding to the exchange's last birthday this May. "By continuing to lead the way with advocacy, with doing what's right for markets globally, for the future."
Martin heads the NYSE Group division of Intercontinental Exchange, having worked for the company and its predecessors for more than two decades. Her unit includes the storied 2,300-ticker stock exchange located on Wall Street, as well as two options exchanges and four electronic equity markets. She also chairs ICE's fixed income and data services group, which she formerly managed.
Outside of work, Martin is on the board of her alma mater, Bronx, New York–based Manhattan College, from which she received her bachelor's degree in computer science with a minor in finance. She also serves as a director of the Partnership for New York City, a public-private initiative with the aim of bettering the Big Apple, and the Inner-City Scholarship Fund, which provides financial assistance to students attending the city's Catholic schools.
Martin got her start in the markets during her first job, at IBM. She quickly realized that, while she enjoyed the work, computer programming wasn't for her: "I was interested in the math that drove financial markets," she recalled.
Graduating from Columbia University with her master's degree in math and statistics, she was hired at Liffe, an exchange that was "going through a floor to screen migration into an electronic trading system," Martin said. Because many exchanges at the time "found themselves with a lot of people who understood the products but not the technology, the exchange was looking for someone who could interact with programmers to talk about how to code to an exchange's API and interact with an exchange's matching engine," she added.
The new job introduced Martin to algorithmic trading, which was just beginning to become important in electronic markets, as she did more business-development meetings. Starting her climb to leadership, she began putting into place lessons she absorbed from watching her mentors along the way. First, tell people what's going on. "One of my early bosses at IBM got irritated with me because I wouldn't always communicate if we were slipping [on] a timeline," she said. "The lesson was that, in business, you can never overcommunicate."
Second, teams are how leaders get things done. "You need to be a part of the best team or you need to be putting the best team on the field when you're tackling a strategic initiative," Martin said.
Third, even an organization that's nearly as old as the country's founding needs to reinvent itself frequently as technology and the outside environment continue to evolve. "There's always a better way to do something, even if you're having the utmost success," she said. "Continuing to think like an entrepreneur is what's going to keep your organization relevant."
But for a financial services firm under strict government oversight, and especially one as highly regulated as a stock exchange, any new ideas have to hew closely to the established rules. "We've always viewed regulation as a tailwind for us," Martin said. "Being an entrepreneur doesn't mean always running after the newest fad in the market."
One area Martin's teams have been moving into is AI. "We've actually been using machine learning and large language models for about a decade, for efficiency," she said. "From a cost perspective, it allows you to do more."
ICE provides "evaluated pricing on 2.7 million fixed-income securities globally and terms and conditions on millions of instruments globally," Martin said. "We have a human overlay that throws out the noise and handles really volatile markets. We wouldn't be able to cover that size of an increasing universe in fixed income without some form of machine learning or AI."
Similarly, the NYSE's compliance team uses AI to parse enormous volumes of trading data before handing the analysis over to a human "to make determinations on various regulatory matters," she said. The software allows the exchange to make its people more efficient — "it's not in place of that headcount."
In addition to back-office applications, "we've seen the adoption of large language models add transparency to some of our core markets," she said.
The ICE Chat instant messenger program uses a large language model that the company built for traders to execute transactions right in the messenger app, she said. "It knows if I'm talking to you about what day of the week it is or about a potential trade idea. It will automatically put into the chat fair market data about the instruments you're talking about, and you can seamlessly click on the trade data and send it to the clearinghouse, particularly in energy markets."
As traders have seen their workflow become more automated over the past two years, the chat feature has grown in popularity. The number of trades sent to the energy markets from within ICE Chat grew up to 60% from the first half of 2022 to the comparable period in 2023, according to ICE's last quarterly earnings call. "This is a highly regulated platform with compliance tools," Martin said. "The compliance people at the firms love it for this reason."
