Mitigating the risk of operational failure is top of mind—and a top budget priority—for executives. A single unplanned event can have a disruptive effect across the organization, an outcome management teams work hard to avoid.

For the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), operational resilience is critical given the role it plays in the global economy and capital flows. The NYSE, part of ICE, is the world’s largest equities exchange, running on an advanced deterministic trading technology platform. Its data, technology, and expertise have helped the NYSE stay resilient and outperform during periods of market volatility, global unrest, and record-shattering trading days. 

I recently got to sit down with Lynn Martin, President of NYSE, to discuss her experience leading the largest global exchange group and her approach to achieving operational excellence. 

How do you think about the business model of the New York Stock Exchange?

We pride ourselves on being the stewards of the US capital market. We’re the leading platform for entrepreneurs and innovators to raise the capital they need to change the world. And, as the largest global exchange group, our role is to ensure that our markets remain open, efficient, and transparent—especially during volatile times—so that people can manage risk.

How do you safeguard the environment that companies are listing on, and make it a place people trust when they’re looking to do business with you? 

You have to be rock solid operationally. You have to be state-of-the-art. You have to drive your platform forward and operate at the highest level—day in and day out—with operational excellence. Without operational excellence, you don’t build trust and you’re never going to be able to scale your platform or create the next great innovation to drive your business forward.

The resiliency of our infrastructure from the time a person even thinks about connecting to us to when that order is matched is something we pride ourselves on. We ensure that our systems are hardened with tremendous amounts of backup and resiliency built into each part of the path an order takes once it gets into our system.

I imagine a high-profile system failure is completely intolerable to your business. What steps do you take to build up the operational resilience to withstand and deflect material business risk?

A key component of building resiliency is ensuring that the next-gen technologies and tools are at the fingertips of the people monitoring the markets. We process almost three-quarters of a trillion incoming order messages daily through our pipes. When I started in my position two years ago, that was below half a trillion. Despite a 30-40% increase in message traffic, we’ve reduced response times because of the technologies we’ve invested in—including the PagerDuty Operations Cloud. 

We’ve integrated PagerDuty into our operational perimeter to ensure that, whenever we have a potential issue on any component of our system, we can respond efficiently.

I’ve heard you talk about the importance of bringing human ingenuity together with the power of technology. In the current era of AI and automation, how are you looking at that balance to protect the interest of your business and your clients’ businesses?

Automation has the power to transform the way businesses run. It’s going to enable us to do a lot more with the information we have and be much more efficient. If you’ve got good data—and AI on top of good data—you’re going to enable the human being to do higher value-add types of activities in a much more efficient fashion. Humans are going to need that level of automation because of the sheer growth in the magnitude of data. Importantly, though, if you don’t have that person sitting on top to make sure the output of the algorithm makes sense, you’re going to have a variety of unfortunate outcomes. 

Because of the sheer volume of messages that has increased on our system, our operations team would not be able to do their jobs as efficiently if they didn’t have PagerDuty. They take great pride in the fact that our response times for an average trade have been cut in half since the rollout of our new technology.

How would you reflect on the business relationship between New York Stock Exchange and PagerDuty? What have you been able to accomplish through our journey together?

One of my key focuses is to be the platform for our issuers to tell their stories. If you become an NYSE-listed company, you really are raising capital that you need to change the world. And we’re just so proud to be the platform to allow you all to tell your stories.

Since becoming a customer, I’ve had my head of operations personally come into my office and say, “I don’t know who selected PagerDuty, but thank you from our entire operations team because you have made our lives so much better and so much more efficient”.

Can you share an example of an innovation you’ve unlocked by virtue of having such outstanding stability in the core operation?

Because of the stability of our platforms across our parent company, ICE, we’ve created many different data and analytics solutions that add transparency to the marketplace and give transparency to the risk that people manage every day. It has enabled us to be thought leaders on artificial intelligence (AI), specifically large language models (LLMs)—which we’ve had in production for over a decade—that are driving transparency in the opaque portions of our energy markets.

Talk to me about the role technology integration plays in an M&A context. How do you bring platforms and technology together in service of an outstanding client experience?

We have a very deliberate playbook at ICE. We always prefer to build, but if there’s something in the market that addresses a gap and gets us to market quicker, we’ll buy. 

Since I’ve been at ICE, I’ve done more than 50 acquisitions. These fall directly in our repeatable strategy of turning analog, paper-based processes into digital processes. As a result, we’re able to efficiently integrate these technologies and identify synergies either on the cost or the revenue side.

You’ve been leading an outstanding operational technology business transformation here at the New York Stock Exchange. What advice do you have to share with leaders who have to drive transformation over the next couple of quarters and years?

Don’t be afraid to make investments in your technology and people that will pay dividends in the medium to long term. Short-term, there may be operational issues you need to address. But always plan for the medium to long term.

It’s going to continue to be a data-driven world, and we have to harness the power that data gives us. At the New York Stock Exchange, data is necessary to ensure that the markets continue to move forward as transparently and securely as possible, and we don’t lose sight of the fact that the US capital markets are the envy of the world.