At the turn of the millennium on Wall Street, there was a feeling in the air that anything was possible. The dot-com bubble was growing and companies like Amazon and Google were beginning to reshape how we use technology from a useful tool to an integral part of everyday life. Tech was also fast becoming a key force underpinning financial markets, and someone who was taking notice was Lynn Martin, a programmer at IBM who had just graduated from Manhattan College with a degree in computer science and a passion for writing code. As a lover of puzzles, it was no surprise that Martin soon developed an interest in the mathematics of financial markets, leading her to gain a master’s degree in statistics from Columbia University and leave IBM for the New York Stock Exchange’s (NYSE) derivatives business.

Today, technology is even further entangled in global financial markets, which means Martin’s unique blend of skills and experience make her a fitting boss for the world’s largest stock exchange. When she was named president of the NYSE in late 2021, two decades after beginning her career there, Martin said she was “floored” – and not only because of what the promotion meant for her future. “I was honoured, mainly because I understood the gravity of being asked to do this role as a woman and what it represents to have the confidence of a Fortune 500 CEO and entrepreneur whom I have admired for years,” she said, referring to Jeff Sprecher, chair and CEO of Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), which owns the NYSE.

The appointment of a woman with Martin’s vast experience and potential opens the door to even more innovation for the exchange, Carole Crawford, chair of the board of directors for the non-profit 100 Women in Finance, told World Finance. Indeed, Martin is the first to admit that her route from computer programmer to exchange boss was not a traditional career path that girls could follow when she was young.

From Commodore 64 to the Big Board
While Martin was growing up on Long Island in Smithtown, New York, her parents did something that changed her life: they brought home a Commodore 64 computer. “That initial exposure to computers turned into a college major, got me my first job, and then created the cornerstone of my career,” Martin wrote in an op-ed for Fortune in January 2022, just as her tenure as president of NYSE began.

Martin’s first full-time job as a programmer at IBM during the dot-com boom put her at the heart of a pivotal moment in the tech industry, and her early experience with technology instilled a lifelong “appreciation for the value of data and what technology can create,” she wrote. This understanding catapulted her from “that girl who loved to code” on Long Island right into the centre of the action in lower Manhattan, heading up one of the world’s most significant exchanges. Her familiarity with technology is one of Martin’s superpowers, and she is keenly aware that succeeding at the NYSE “will require me to look both forward and back, to view the future through the lens of my unique experience and to help guide an iconic institution in an uncertain age.”

Martin came to the top job at the NYSE at a time when the economy was still reeling from the pandemic. Two years in, and while Covid-related issues are fading, the exchange is under increasing pressure from rival Nasdaq, which beat the NYSE in the battle for initial public offerings (IPOs) in 2023 for the fifth consecutive year.

There is also the rapidly shifting landscape for environmental, social and governance (ESG) standards to contend with, and the small task of ensuring that global firms continue to see the US capital markets as the most attractive place to take their business. Martin is tackling the challenges head-on, applying her unique brand of data-driven insights to come up with new ways for the NYSE to work. In ICE’s fourth-quarter earnings for 2023, its exchanges segment posted a 16 percent rise in revenue to $1.1bn, equating to half of the total company revenue in the quarter.

Recalling the first time he spoke with Martin in 2013, just after ICE acquired the NYSE in a massive $8.2bn deal, CEO Sprecher said, “I remember thinking about how bold and determined she was. And I liked that about her.” It is what led him to appoint Martin, who had been working in the NYSE’s listed derivatives business at the time, to run Interactive Data, a market data company that ICE bought for $5.2bn in 2015. Although the business had potential, growth was lagging, and Martin was challenged with improving its prospects. She did this and then some, proceeding to double the company’s growth rate and build it into ICE’s multi-billion-dollar fixed income and data services segment. However, considering current market challenges, the NYSE still faces hurdles. Despite earnings from the exchange business helping ICE to beat Wall Street’s fourth-quarter expectations, the listings segment declined by four percent due to a lacklustre market for IPOs. IPO proceeds in the US reached $23.9bn in 2023, according to Jessica Chen and Joel Rubinstein, partners at White & Case, but this was less than half of the $62.6bn in proceeds seen pre-pandemic in 2019.

While 2023 was yet another year of stubbornly low IPOs, experts say the tide could finally be turning this year. So far, 2024 was off to a good start, Chen and Rubinstein said, and what’s more, “the US’s position as a global magnet for cross-border listings has remained undiminished,” with listings like Germany’s Birkenstock on the NYSE securing a market valuation of $8.6bn. “It is hoped that the steady performance observed post-IPO and across US stock markets generally will encourage more companies to pursue IPOs in the coming months,” they added, noting that the Renaissance IPO Index, which tracks the performance of companies that have listed within the past three years, rose 44 percent in 2023, beating the S&P 500. Plus, there is strong interest in the technology sector, where deals involving chipmakers and artificial intelligence (AI) are gathering momentum. In March, social media platform Reddit went public after a long-awaited IPO, and on the first day of trading, shares jumped 48 percent. “The IPO markets are definitely opening back up,” Martin told CNBC in April. “Deals are getting done,” she said, adding that these were “really optimistic signs for the IPO market.”

The issue, then, is attracting them to the NYSE over its rivals. Between January 2018 and July 2023, the NYSE’s market cap for domestic listed companies grew from $23trn to $25trn, according to data from Statista. Meanwhile, Nasdaq’s shot up from $11trn to $22trn. Nasdaq, which has a reputation for being the ‘tech exchange,’ boasts lower listing fees and costs, which can attract smaller companies. NYSE, meanwhile, is associated with a sense of prestige and history – executives who list on the exchange have the opportunity to ring its famous opening bell in front of live traders. Yet as Mark Mandel, chair of Baker McKenzie’s North America capital markets group, told the Financial Times, choosing between the two is like picking between a Bentley and a Tesla: “You won’t go wrong with either, but companies, like people, tend to gravitate towards certain brands.”

Blazing a trail
Becoming president of the NYSE, Martin had big shoes to fill. She replaced Stacey Cunningham, who was the first woman to lead the exchange in its more than two centuries of operation in 2018. Following ICE’s acquisition of NYSE, Cunningham “embraced the challenge to reinvent a global icon,” Sprecher said. The NYSE’s entire portfolio was worth more than $25trn as of December 2023, including four fully electronic stock exchanges and two options exchanges. Running this operation requires a skill set balancing strong leadership with in-depth knowledge of the fundamentals of its systems.

As a leader, Martin is focused on innovation. “I don’t accept the phrase ‘We’ve always done it that way.’ Because with that mindset you don’t grow and innovate,” she said in a NYSE Communications release. In a sign of her openness to new ideas, the NYSE revealed in April that it was polling market participants on round-the-clock trading. The poll followed news of start-up 24 Exchange, backed by Steve Cohen’s Point72 Ventures fund, going to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for approval to launch the first 24-hour exchange. Such a move could shake up US stock markets, which, unlike cryptocurrencies or even US treasuries and major currencies, don’t operate at all hours.

As someone who has continually been at the cutting edge of a rapidly growing industry – and as a trailblazer herself – Martin is in tune with the bold thinking needed to innovate in financial markets. In 2013, she was named CEO of NYSE Liffe US, the American division of NYSE Euronext’s international derivatives business. Having worked her way up from COO of the firm and senior vice president at NYSE Euronext, the appointment made her the first woman to head a US exchange since the 1980s. Martin didn’t know about this milestone until it was pointed out to her in an interview with John Lothian News, but she did not shrug off the landmark moment, saying it made the appointment special “not just from a professional standpoint, but also from a personal standpoint.”

Martin continued, “When I was growing up, my mom and my grandma always used to say to me that I was so fortunate to be born when I was born, at a time when a woman had all the opportunities in the world in front of her. Being reminded of that every day forced me to work hard throughout my life, and it motivates me to continue to work hard, and also to be thankful for any opportunities that are presented to me, because women in the past didn’t always have those opportunities.”

Within global financial services institutions, as of 2021, women held 21 percent of board seats, 19 percent of C-suite roles and just five percent of CEO positions, according to the report by Deloitte, Advancing more women leaders in financial services. While progress has been made over the past two decades, the report’s authors concluded that these efforts must continue, as inaction could reverse hard-won gains by as soon as 2030. “These statistics illustrate that more work needs to be done to advance gender equity across the industry,” they said. To find evidence of this, one does not have to look far. In April, a Wells Fargo employee accused the company of an “unapologetically sexist” workplace, the latest in a slew of lawsuits against large US banks related to their treatment of women employees. Other suits have been lobbied against the likes of Citigroup and Goldman Sachs, the latter of which agreed to pay $215m to settle a class action lawsuit alleging widespread bias against women in pay and promotions.

What’s more, the independent think tank the Official Monetary and Financial Institutions Forum found in its Gender Balance Index 2023 that progress is very slow going. At the current rate, it will take 140 years to achieve parity between men and women in leadership positions in the industry, it found.

However, Deloitte’s report identified an important caveat: when there are enough women in leadership ranks at the organisational level, there is strong evidence for the ‘multiplier effect,’ whereby for each woman added to the C-suite, there was a positive, quantifiable impact on the number of women in senior leadership levels just below the C-suite. “For decades, companies have focused largely on activities to improve the pipeline for DEI [diversity, equality and inclusion] efforts. Based on our findings related to the multiplier effect it is equally, if not more, important to focus on diversity at the highest levels of the organisation to drive progress and improve the overall pipeline of diverse talent,” said Neda Shemluck, Deloitte’s US financial services industry DEI leader. “In the finance industry, female role models are not just desirable, they are imperative,” Crawford of 100 Women in Finance said. “Their presence not only inspires confidence and ambition in aspiring women but also challenges the status quo, driving much-needed diversity and innovation.”

“Lynn Martin,” she told World Finance, “is a trailblazer whose journey exemplifies the immense potential of female talent and reaffirms the necessity of ensuring representation of women at every level of leadership in the industry.”

The ESG question
One of Martin’s core guiding principles is her belief that ESG considerations are only growing in importance in the US market. ESG is “top of mind for virtually every public company CEO and board of directors,” Martin wrote in Fortune. And the reason was not, she said, government regulations or quotas, but instead “the free market at work.”

Ioannis Ioannou, an associate professor of strategy and entrepreneurship at London Business School, agreed that businesses – and investors – are recognising the importance of addressing ESG. “The impacts of climate change, resource scarcity, and shifting consumer preferences because of these issues pose significant risks to companies’ operations, supply chains, and overall business models and strategies,” he told World Finance. “Therefore, businesses cannot afford to ignore these challenges; addressing ESG issues is crucial for building resilience, cultivating innovation, and maintaining a competitive edge.” Andreas Hoepner, a professor at University College Dublin’s School of Business, identified the biggest ESG issues of the moment as: carbon emissions, the energy transition, the gender power gap and responsible AI. He said these areas of focus are becoming “increasingly important in fundraising and risk management.”

NYSE and ICE are keenly aware of the way the market environment has changed over recent decades. In a note to staff in late 2021, Sprecher outlined what $130trn worth of finance commitments pledged by the private sector to address climate change at the COP26 gathering in Glasgow meant for ICE, saying it “provides great opportunity in many areas of our exchanges segment.”

Today, investors are demanding that companies pay close attention to issues like climate change and diversity, and shareholders are making their voices heard through their investment decisions. “Investors recognise that environmental, social, and governance issues pose genuine risks to a company’s business model, performance, and long-term viability,” Ioannou said. “Therefore, they are looking for ESG data that effectively captures these risks and enables them to make well-informed choices.”

As a financial data scientist, Hoepner told World Finance, he regularly checks updates on corporations’ individual risks filed with the SEC – which he is seeing more and more of. “Filing risks on key ESG issues and even greenwashing accusations themselves keep rising at considerable pace,” he said.

However, the quality, accuracy and comparability of this data “still leaves significant room for improvement,” Ioannou said. Especially at a time when ‘anti-ESG backlash’ in the political domain has led some companies to take a more cautious approach to ESG issues – at least publicly – to minimise the risk of ideological targeting, Ioannou said. “Given the current political climate, I expect the term ‘ESG’ to become more contested in the US during this election year, even as the approach remains pragmatic and necessary in other parts of the world, with the EU leading the charge,” he added.

Yet despite these challenges for ESG investing, Martin remains a big believer in the work the NYSE can do to boost transparency. It’s an area Martin has direct experience with, having helped to create databases that tracked board diversity, climate risk and other ESG measures as part of her previous role at ICE.

Ioannou said he expects the current quality and accuracy of ESG data to continue improving as issues like climate change, biodiversity loss, societal issues and political division underscore the need for robust ESG risk management, enabling more informed decision-making by companies and investors alike. And with more transparent data will come increased interest from investors. “As these efforts progress, I believe that ESG considerations will inevitably become a core component of investment decision-making,” Ioannou said.

In 2022, Martin put another stake in the ground when she launched the NYSE Sustainability Advisory Council. The council brings together select sustainability leaders within the NYSE community of more than 2,400 listed companies to identify and share global best practices addressing ESG issues. “The NYSE Sustainability Advisory Council is designed to help companies navigate this complex and evolving terrain,” Martin said in a press release about the council’s launch. Chair Elizabeth King added that the group hoped to leverage the power of the NYSE community to “raise all boats and advance the identification, development and adoption of best practices at organisations of all sizes.”

As Martin wrote in Fortune, “The Fearless Girl statue stands vigil outside the NYSE and reminds us every day that while there is still much work to be done, ESG-driven risk management is here to stay, and will only become a larger factor in the years ahead.”

What is next?
While Martin has taken a tech-led approach to issues like ESG investing, the creation of the Sustainability Advisory Council shows she recognises that it is people working together that make the difference in business. “Data and technology allow each of us to do much more, much faster, but at the core of any successful enterprise is people collaborating toward common goals,” she wrote in her op-ed. “It is important that we keep this in mind as we move into a future that will demand the best combination of humanity and processing power that we can muster.”

I don’t accept the phrase ‘We’ve always done it that way.’ Because with that mindset you don’t grow and innovate

To do this in practice at the NYSE, she takes a collaborative and open approach, inspiring colleagues to work together across business lines in order to inspire innovation and creative thinking. For Sprecher, Martin’s transparency with colleagues was a key reason he has kept her as part of his inner circle. “When she took that job running our data division, I would periodically receive an unsolicited communication from her that told me exactly what was going on in the business,” he said. “She is very organised and she shares a lot of data and information with others. She is very transparent, which builds a level of trust and endearment that very few people really have.”

In 2022, Martin launched a new initiative to build trust further, not only within the NYSE, but within US capital markets on the world stage. “As the world’s largest stock exchange with a storied history of more than 230 years, the NYSE has a unique platform and substantive role to play as a leading advocate for capital formation around the world,” said Martin at the launch of the NYSE Institute. The institute was created to use the NYSE’s resources, expertise and relationships to support public companies, advance sound public policy and foster economic growth around the world. “The NYSE Institute provides us with a new structure to formally advance this agenda and offer a strong voice supporting the innovative work of our listed companies and the markets we operate,” Martin said.

Martin has long used her voice to champion her core beliefs around the values of technology in our modern world, the importance of transparency of ESG risks and the resilience of US capital markets. As her position as president of the NYSE amplifies her voice further than ever before, executives, exchanges and business leaders around the world are sitting up and taking note.