Speaker 1:

From the New York Stock Exchange at the corner of Wall and Broad Streets in New York City, welcome Inside the ICE House. Our podcast from Intercontinental Exchange is your go-to for the latest on markets, leadership, vision and business. For over 230 years, the NYSE has been the beating heart of global growth. Each week we bring you inspiring stories of innovators, job creators, and the movers and shakers of capitalism here at the NYSE and ICE's exchanges around the world. Now let's go Inside the ICE House. Here's your host, Kristen Scholer.

Kristen Scholer:

Financial markets have undergone a remarkable evolution from the chaotic energy of shouted orders on trading floors to trades executed in microseconds by sophisticated algorithms. Technology has reshaped Wall Street into a global digital arena where speed, data and precision are the driving forces. Today, AI and automation are not merely tools, they're integral to real-time decision-making, enabling markets to operate with unprecedented intelligence, connectivity and efficiency. At the March, 2024 Futures Industry Association Conference in Boca Raton, Florida, Josh King, former host of Inside the ICE House, and now Managing Director and Head of Corporate Affairs for Citadel and Citadel Securities, sat down with Citadel founder Ken Griffin for episode 406.

Their wide ranging conversation touched on the firm's relocation from Chicago to Miami, its deep investments in talent, and the complex challenges Peng Zhao and his team at Citadel Securities are addressing across equities and option markets. Shortly after that conversation, Citadel Securities expanded its leadership team by naming today's guest, Jim Esposito, as president. Founded in 2002 by Ken Griffin, Citadel Securities has redefined the financial markets through relentless innovation, transparency and speed. Since its arrival on the New York Stock Exchange trading floor in May of 2016, the firm has emerged as the largest designated market maker, fusing cutting edge technology with human insight to ensure efficient and orderly markets.

Jim brings nearly three decades of experience from Goldman Sachs where he most recently served as co-head of the Global Banking and Markets Division. Over the course of his distinguished tenure, he held several key leadership roles, including Head of Global Investment Banking, Global Markets and the Global Financing Group, and served on numerous strategic committees. Jim, thanks so much for joining us Inside the ICE House.

Jim Esposito:

Pleasure to be here, Kristen.

Kristen Scholer:

It's great to have you here at the Stock Exchange. I do want to dive in because while the name Citadel Securities is widely associated with Ken Griffin's renowned hedge fund, it is important to recognize that Citadel and Citadel Securities are two distinct entities. So for a broader audience, how would you articulate the fundamental differences between the two firms?

Jim Esposito:

Appreciate you starting there and I think it's an important distinction. Ken Griffin founded two separate and distinct companies, both of which have been very, very successful. Citadel, the hedge fund, has about 65 billion of assets under management, generally perceived to be the most successful hedge fund ever launched. Today, we're not going to talk about anything in the hedge fund. I represent Citadel Securities as president. Citadel Securities should be thought of as a next-generation market maker. Very much a technology-driven first enterprise, and I think what we're doing across global equity and fixed income markets is pretty amazing. And I'm just going to give you a couple of statistics to put this conversation in context.

On any given day, we account for about a third of the volume that's traded here at the New York Stock Exchange. We account for close to 25% of daily U.S. equity volumes, 35 to 40% of U.S. retail volumes. And this one stat always kind of shocks me, we send out into the marketplace close to 25 billion option quotes per day. So the operational scale and efficiency of what Citadel Securities has built is impressive. And against that backdrop, we only have 1,700 people. So you're dealing with a very modern technology-driven platform that's intermediating markets, leveraging technology with, and we'll get into this, some of the brightest minds on the planet, but it doesn't mean we have a lot of people.

Kristen Scholer:

It is quite impressive, Jim, of course, under your leadership here. So before we dive deeper into Citadel Securities and your own personal career journey, I think it is important to establish a clear understanding of what a market maker does for our listeners. So how would you explain the function and significance of market makers and the value that they bring to investors and the broader financial markets?

Jim Esposito:

Sure. And here I think we play a very different role than even some of the largest banks that are involved in market making. When I look at our global equity business, we attract and take in client flows from three distinct sources. One is our on-exchange market making business, exactly what we do with the New York Stock Exchange. The second is all of the retail flow where we partner with some of the big retail platforms in the U.S. That would be names like Charles Schwab, Robinhood, Interactive Brokers and the like. I would point out that the big banks are doing very little today. They used to be big on exchange market making but aren't really as present as they used to be. They're not very active with those retail firms. So those are two distinct sources of flow that we see that the banks don't.

And then the third area is we cover large institutional clients directly. And to your question, what does it mean to be a market maker? We are facilitating the executions of our clients' trades and anything they want to do across single share equities, stock options, ETFs. We'll make markets, we'll make prices, we'll buy and sell securities for them. And I think the impact that Citadel Securities has had on markets is important. And here, the best illustrative example of this is with the retail investor. If we go back 20 years ago in this country, retail brokerage commissions, retail trading commissions were more than $20 per share. Today the retail investor in our country basically trades for free. There's almost zero in the way of trading our brokerage commissions.

We're not the only one that had the positive impact on the retail investor, but it's names like ours, the newer entrants that created competition, created greater price transparency, provided deeper liquidity. I think the impact that we're having on end user clients, people that need to buy stocks and bonds, has been fairly material. We have been a force of good, tightening up bid offer spreads, raising liquidity, and ultimately making it cheaper for clients to trade and transact in their portfolios.

Kristen Scholer:

Well, the New York Stock Exchange, I'm sure you are well aware of, trades 3.2 billion shares daily, and as new investors come into the market on a daily basis, the volume is only set to increase. We've certainly seen some very high volume days just this year. In an era where this trading is done largely electronically, why is it important for a firm like Citadel Securities to maintain a physical presence on trading floors like the NYSE?

Jim Esposito:

That's a good question. I think a lot about this in our business today, and the question I get asked a lot is as AI and machine learning trends become more and more and important is Citadel Securities is going to somehow have less people or the insights and judgments that people provide are going to become somehow less relevant in the future. We don't think that's the case. And so yes, we're very proud that we've had a big impact increasing operational scale and efficiency by leveraging technology. Our company was founded in 2002 and one of the first places we tried to innovate was on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, and that was by bringing more efficient technology solutions to bear and to provide ultimately a better client experience. But we never thought that meant we wouldn't have any people on the floor.

Now the service that we provide as a designated market maker here on the NYSE is critical to corporate clients in this country. Corporate CEOs and CFOs want to have a human interaction. They want to understand the insights of what's moving their company's stock price on any given day. And when I look at what we have on the floor, these senior individuals are critical providing those insights and judgments. You can't just get that from reading a tape or from a machine. And so a hybrid model makes sense. Yes, there's less people than there was 20 years ago, but our role as DMM, the people we have on the floor here are critical for those corporate relationships which are very important to our firm.

Kristen Scholer:

Well, just six floors below us, we're here in the library on the sixth floor of the Stock Exchange, below us is that iconic trading floor where Citadel Securities has had a major presence since 2016 as the largest designated market maker as you've been sharing with us here today. How would you describe the strategic importance of your firm's relationship with the Stock Exchange and how does it translate into better execution for your clients?

Jim Esposito:

Okay. Look, I think it goes without saying, the symbol of what the floor of the New York Stock Exchange represents to the global economy, to capitalism at large. This is an iconic venue, and us being a part of that great history and having a physical presence in this iconic venue is incredibly important to our firm, right up to Ken Griffin, our founder. There's a lot of pride that goes into being a part of this ecosystem. It goes back to what I was always suggesting a second ago.

I think having people in a centralized location focused on providing orderly and liquid and transparent markets in a centralized location where they have access to everything that might be impacting a company's stock price on a given day, and they're able to filter out that information to market participants, including the company who's most focused on what's going on in their makes this hybrid model something that's of huge value to us as a market maker, but to the broader ecosystem at large. And I don't really think this model will continue to innovate, but I don't think we're a mile away from what the final state should look like.

I think the efficiency gains by leveraging technology have mostly happened. Yes, the floor is de-densified are less people than there was previously. We like the current market structure, we like the current role of the exchange and we think the capital markets, the equity markets in this country are functioning as if not more efficiently than ever before. I say that, I should knock on wood, I don't want to jinx us, but we have a capital market in this country that's the of the world and the New York Stock Exchange is critical to that.

Kristen Scholer:

Well, we certainly like to hear that here at the Stock Exchange, Jim, and we would very much agree with you. I want to talk more about Citadel Securities' special sauce, if you will. It is a highly competitive environment as you've been mentioning here, but in this highly competitive landscape, how does your firm continue to set itself apart?

Jim Esposito:

Yeah, I think Citadel Securities, while we're a market maker, just like the largest banks are market makers, we're doing something very, very different at the moment than the big banks. Let me start with the big banks. If you look at the growth in their markets business, a lot of that growth for the banks is coming from financing of their clients. So in equities, it's a little bit less about market making. It's about prime brokerage and the financing of their client balances in the prime brokerage business. In fixed income, the banks are very focused on financing their clients, specifically the private equity industry. They're focused on growing their derivative business. Those are OTC, not cleared, not listed derivatives. So the banks are growing, but they're growing in a different area than we're focused on.

Citadel Securities is really maniacally focused on providing liquid markets to our clients and our ability to monetize the most basic trading flows I think is very strong. And the reason we're good at this is of our 1,700 employees, 300 of them possess a PhD, and many of these employees came from or born outside of the U.S., they came to the U.S. to get a PhD in mathematics, statistics, physics, computer science. They sit in our quantitative researching area and we're taking the risk management that previously had done by a human and we're systematizing these trading flows, we're able to find some form of a pattern in the noise by using statistical quantitative research and capabilities. It's that marriage of being able to execute more flow than anyone else with the quantitative researching capability that leads to very strong financial performance at Citadel Securities.

There are other people doing aspects of what we do, I don't mean this arrogantly, but we're almost in a category of one. No one's quite doing the same business model as Citadel Securities. And the good news for us, 22, 23 years into our history, we're only just getting started. Yes, we have very strong market shares in equities, but in products like fixed income, we've only been at it for a couple years. And so when I look around the globe right now, one of the things that gets me incredibly excited, the number of strategic growth initiatives that lie before my company is quite large, and so we're big, but we're very, very ambitious. And I think when I look at the next couple of years, you're going to see Citadel Securities take what they've built up in U.S. equities and now apply that to more products and more geographies around the globe.

Kristen Scholer:

Absolutely fascinating. I do want to talk about some of your own ambitions, Jim, your own personal career trajectory here. Your career has spanned more than three decades at Goldman Sachs, encompassing global leadership roles, committee appointments, and a remarkable breadth of experience. You studied at Brown where you also wrestled I see competitively and later earned your MBA from Dartmouth, uniquely multifaceted journey. Drawing on that wrestling background in particular, how do you see the parallels between the discipline and resilience required in such a sport and the qualities essential to navigating and leading within this ever-evolving financial services landscape, especially now at the helm of Citadel Securities?

Jim Esposito:

Yeah, I'll share a quote from the most famous wrestler of all time, Dan Gable. And Dan Gable said something along the lines of, "Once you've wrestled, everything else in your life is easy." And so I grew up in New Jersey, a product of public schools, and I was a decent elementary school, but ultimately high school wrestler. And I wrestled up and down the state of New Jersey. I wrestled in a few national tournaments all the way out in Iowa, and I think I learned a lot of important life skills from the sport of wrestling. It is a one-on-one sport. You learn to lose and you learn to fail and you learn that you have to pick yourself back up and go again and again and again. Sometimes in these wrestling tournaments, you might lose a match but have a chance to wrestle back and find your way into the finals again.

And I think I took from that experience just so many hard lessons. There was no one to blame, there was no one else really on your team. You were going out and facing an opponent and getting into a decent physical scrap. But so much of what I took from that sport, I think carried me through academically at Brown and Dartmouth, as you mentioned, and I think I learned the art of grinding through wrestling. And my career was long at Goldman Sachs, as you mentioned, 29 years. It doesn't mean at every moment I was a success at Goldman Sachs. I was pretty much a slow starter at Goldman Sachs, but my ability to grind, to keep going, being able to kind of get over setbacks when I didn't get the promotion that I wanted or didn't get the role that I thought I deserved, and that happened plenty of times in my long career.

I think wrestling taught me to be level-headed. Sports are good for that, but people find other things in life. I'll always be of the view that it's important to be successful in a professional setting to learn how to deal with failure and to deal with setbacks and to ultimately still be competitive and have a winning mentality. I can't believe we got this long into the podcast and we haven't talked about Ken Griffin, but one of my observations now being at Citadel Securities for 10 months and getting to work alongside Ken, I can say with the straight face, I've never worked with somebody who has the same level of competitive spirit.

The winning mindset that Ken brings to bear across everything he touches at Citadel is like nothing I've ever seen before. Ken is the ultimate winner. He loves to compete. He's not afraid of failing, but he infuses in Citadel this winning mindset. And so for me, going back to my competitive sports days, it's just so natural it resonates with me. I think to succeed in a career in finance generally, but now specific to Citadel, you have to love to compete and ultimately love to win. Now, it doesn't mean you win at everything, but that winning mindset Ken instills and I think a lot of that for me resonates with my former background.

Kristen Scholer:

I do want to peel back the layer a bit there. It was fascinating to learn those lessons that you've experienced, Jim, throughout your career. So you joined Citadel Securities in September, 2024. What was it about that opportunity, especially the opportunity to work alongside CEO Peng Zhao and founder Ken Griffin, as you mentioned there, that appealed to you?

Jim Esposito:

Yeah, I think I did something hard after 29 years at Goldman Sachs, I kind of decided, had some conversations with the senior leadership group that it was unlikely I was going to go any higher at Goldman Sachs. I had a big important job that I loved doing, but after 29 years, I came to realize if I were going to stay the next five, it was most likely going to be in the same role. I did something hard, a little bit brave, I ripped off that bandaid and I wanted to open myself up to see what life had to offer. I thought I had one other opportunity to do something big and important. When I left Goldman Sachs, I had a checklist of things that I thought could be interesting, but not a specific job in mind. I definitively wanted to work somewhere that was more entrepreneurial, faster growing, potentially a private, not a public company.

And I knew I wanted to build and lever off the skills and experiences that I built up for 29 years at Goldman Sachs. I wanted it to be different, but still relate it to the things that I thought I had learned. And the day my announcement came out that I was leaving Goldman Sachs, literally the first call that came across my phone was Ken Griffin. Ken saw the announcement and he picked up the phone and he called me and he asked me to come visit him in Miami. And he already thought he might have an interesting opportunity for me to discuss with him and to consider, and the rest is history. I spent hours with Ken learning a lot about Citadel Securities. Then when I got to know Peng Zhao, our CEO, I quickly realized what Citadel Securities was building was completely different than anything that existed anywhere else on the planet.

Peng is really ultimately the architect for when I described the quantitative research and capabilities of our firm. Peng himself has a PhD in statistics from Cal Berkeley. He's probably rated a top five statistician on the planet. Peng is an amazing, amazing quantitative researcher. And the relationship that I built with Peng was instantaneously very rewarding because we have complementary skills. I'm not a quant, I don't possess a PhD, although I wish I did, but a lot of things to Citadel Securities that they didn't have the depth in. Some of those would be existing client relationships with the big institutions around the globe. Some of that would be strategy of how to stand up some new businesses and fixed income and other products.

And that complementary skill base between me and Peng is something that I personally find incredibly satisfying. I like to think Peng does too, but it's been the perfect balance for me. Citadel Securities levers what I learned at Goldman Sachs, but it allows me to do it in a much more entrepreneurial way. And the idea of us, I mentioned I was looking for something that's fast growing, I think it's exceeded my expectations that way. I thought on the way in it checked most of the boxes on my list, and I can say 10 months later, it's wildly exceeded my expectations.

Kristen Scholer:

Congratulations.

Jim Esposito:

Thank you.

Kristen Scholer:

That's wonderful to hear. And I know several times during our conversation, Jim, you have mentioned those strategic initiatives and a clear plan for growth going forward. What more can you share about that and what Citadel Securities might look like in the future?

Jim Esposito:

When I look at where we currently make money in our global equity business, yes, we're global. We're a bit too skewed to the U.S. at the expense of the rest of the world. So core Europe is a big growth business for us. And then lastly, I alluded to it, we're only getting started in fixed income. We trade U.S. rates, we trade U.S. investment grade credit. We currently don't trade high yield bonds, municipal bonds, emerging markets, mortgage backed securities. So we have a limited number of products currently in fixed income. In the future, I could envision a world where we have a full service suite of products in fixed income. And so we've had a lot of fast growth over the past decade at Citadel Securities. I don't want to predict the future, but it's certainly conceivable the next decade is as attractive and as friendly to us from a growth position as this previous decade because we're only getting started.

Kristen Scholer:

I like that a mantra, we're only getting started. So after dedicating your entire career to one firm, which you've talked about, what was it that ultimately after those conversations that you'd referenced earlier with management at Goldman Sachs that said inside of you, "Okay, I can do this. I'm ready to open the next chapter of my journey."

Jim Esposito:

Yeah, I don't know if there's ever one thing that leads to a decision to leave a place that I continue to adore and love, which is Goldman Sachs. I had an amazing 29 year career. I guess I got to the view two real factors. One was just age. I thought about if I'm going to commit to a new firm, you're going to need an extended period of time to build something and to really dig in. And so I was getting to an age where I was going to start to hit an upper bound and I wanted to avoid that. And then the second was what I suggested, I'm a believer that you want to continue to grow as a professional, take on new challenges, be able to be offered new assignments if you're performing well. And for a variety of reasons, it's no fault of any one individual or the firm, I felt like my growth was going to start to stagnate, and I wanted to avoid that.

I got to take on with each year at Goldman Sachs increasing responsibilities. I moved divisions, roles, geographies, an incredible experience. I started to feel like I wasn't going to have the same ability to do that. And so the combination of reaching a certain age with growth opportunities perhaps being more limited, it felt like the right time. Last thing I'll say, we exist in a modern world today where the pace of innovation, technology's impact on every company and every aspect of the capital markets is going to be serious material, probably only accelerating from here. The idea of jumping into the pool around that opportunity was exciting to me and Citadel Securities in the proverbial line of skating to where the puck is going.

Kristen Scholer:

Yep.

Jim Esposito:

If you and I were to make a list of things that we agree on that's going to play out in the real economy, we would agree AI's going to have a bigger impact. We agree that large language models, machine learning, increased computing power is going to have a big impact on markets and how clients engage with markets. If all of those technological trends are going to continue to impact markets, who would you bet on to get those right? We're not the only firm that you might bet on, but we'd certainly be very, very high on that list. Again, to trade a quarter of U.S. equity volumes on a daily basis and to only have 1,700 people, it just speaks volumes to how well we integrate technology into everything we do.

That's the future. We started from that place and we're fortunate to have been able to start from that place, but our ability now to play offense and to extract real value from computing and machine learning, I think, is exceptionally strong. And so that type of opportunity is harder to unlock at a big bank. Not impossible, but it's harder to unlock. Being somewhere that's a bit more nimble, a bit more entrepreneurial in terms of its approach, Peng and Ken are the ultimate entrepreneurs, is exciting, and it's just been an incredible fit.

Kristen Scholer:

Amazing. Well, we know the financial landscape is always evolving, as you've referenced here, of course, driven by shifting strategies and new technologies. These advancing technologies often and sometimes unnecessarily can coerce leaders to implement change. How do you decide when to embrace the evolution and adapt compared to staying the course with what may have worked over the years and maintain status quo that has brought the firm success?

Jim Esposito:

Look, I think from where we sit at Citadel Securities, we're big believers that we need to continue to disrupt ourselves and continue to innovate. And so we're having this debate right now in regards to generative AI and its impact on the investment process. And so we have a very successful business model that's working incredibly well in this moment. And our leadership team barely sleeps at night because we're so worried about what could we miss? What could change in the technological landscape that might impact our business? And so as an innovator, as a disruptor, that's in our DNA, and we continue to think about who's trying to disrupt us and our model and how technology might play a role in that. So for us, it's a constant evolution.

You won't see us get complacent thinking what we're doing today is going to work forever. That's how we think about our business. It's how we think about markets. When you think about the founding of Citadel Securities, going back to 2002, if you were to look on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, the big banks were very prominent on exchange market making. Ken had a hunch that it was right for innovation and disruption and the technology existed already, and he went to work. That insight, the model we built, the partnership that we built with the New York Stock Exchange, levering technology to provide a better experience, we're now running that play in a hundred other places.

The foundational roots are really here at the Stock Exchange, but that has to make you a little bit paranoid as a leader as well because we disrupted some pretty entrenched players back then. And so we think about this a lot and a healthy amount of paranoia is a good thing as a business leader. And I think we possess the right amount of that at this moment.

Kristen Scholer:

Well, we've certainly seen an influx of market volatility just in the past few months, of course, stemming most recently from geopolitical situations. Of course, domestic monetary policy and trade. So this volatility does arise at times unexpectedly. I think this year it caught some people off guard. But when faced earlier this year in April with the unpredictability, the NYSE President Lynn Martin penned an op-ed for CNBC stating "the infrastructure and operational practices underpinning our markets are the envy of the world and have met the challenges posed by recent volatility". I know that you would agree that our markets are the envy of the world, as you referenced earlier. How does Citadel Securities meet those same challenges and proactively prepare for volatility that can come at any given time?

Jim Esposito:

Yeah, I appreciate the question. We take our fiduciary responsibilities for the role we play in the capital markets, but let's be specific to equity markets for a second, incredibly seriously. We put up very sizable market shares across most equity products. And so we think about, we obsess about the reliability and durability of our technology platform. And so when I think about the strategy meetings that we do with Ken and Peng, if we're going to enter a new product, we look back at 25, 50 years of history in that product. What was the peak volume day? Could we have accommodated that with our technology platform?

That's not good enough. We want to build something that can accommodate 5 times, 10 times the historical peak volume of that business. We think a lot about what would happen if we had a technology, either hardware or software snafu in our platform. Can we transition the clients to a new server, a new platform instantaneously? Our clients want a partner who's there for them all the time in a reliable and durable way. That's critical to building deep and meaningful client relationships. We obsess about this role. The reliability and durability of everything we do across the products we trade is important.

The thing we take great pride in, and going back to your point about April, if I were to show you historical client data of any time we get true market turmoil, when there's major dislocations in financial markets, at Citadel Securities, our client market shares increase. People turn to us in turbulent markets, and that's exactly who and what we want to be. So they're not able to necessarily always find reliable and durable partners during those periods. Our market shares are going up, that means our model is working, and that's exactly what we're going to keep building towards.

Kristen Scholer:

Well, I could talk about volatility all day, but we'll continue to carry on here, Jim, as I'm sure you could. So as we start to wrap up, you're at the helm of a firm that sits at the center of global financial markets. What market structure trends are you paying the closest attention to that could shape how Citadel Securities operates and competes?

Jim Esposito:

So there's a couple things there. I think having a defined rule set in this country, there's no reason why we should cede the trading of crypto activity to everyone outside of the U.S. So I think there's industrial logic to having an appropriate rule set for investors to trade crypto in this country in sort of an easy and transparent way. So that's high on our list. Second, I would call out not something, and I want to be clear, not something we're spending time on, but when I look at some of the growth in event contracts, this would be making markets on political elections, political outcomes, economic releases.

By the way, both retail investors, but importantly, institutional investors might have a need to hedge something they have in their portfolio around a presidential election, around a big unemployment report coming out on a Friday morning. And so creating liquid products that will be appropriate tools for investors to hedge, we see nothing wrong with that activity. So I think there's scale and scope both for us to grow in that area, but for the markets to coalesce around a rule set would make sense to us.

And then the last thing I'll mention is extended trading hours. We ourselves are not obsessed with extended trading hours, but we're always going to be defined and we're always going to go where our clients want us to be. And so when you look at the crypto investor experience, they're used to trading 24/7, now they're demanding that same amount of liquidity after hours and on weekends for equities and other things that they might trade. So once the genie is out of the bottle, you're going to see extended trading hours catch on. I have no idea how much liquidity or activity will find its way there, but we have to build, working with the New York Stock Exchange and other global exchanges an appropriate common rule set for extended trading hours that will support clients.

I think that's going to be a big focus in the next one to two years. We're already building towards that. And so lots of future things that will require working with policymakers, regulators. We take a very principled view on market structure. We put out a white paper as a firm recently advocating for certain market structure rules and policies, and we think it's important to have a voice and to use that voice. We're big advocates of liquidity, transparency, free and fair markets. And so we're always advocating for what's in the best interest of our end user clients. But there is a lot at play right now. This is obviously a much more pro-business administration. There is work that needs to get done and we look forward to being a part of that dialogue.

Kristen Scholer:

Wonderful. Well, we look forward to watching as well. And to close here, Jim, I do want to ask how you, of course, Peng Zhao and the leadership team at Citadel Securities are looking to shape the firm's strategy for sustained success and continued growth in the years ahead.

Jim Esposito:

So look, I said this earlier about our fiduciary responsibilities. Everything starts and stops with the client experience. We've had a materially positive impact lowering trading and brokerage commissions, increasing liquidity, and that provides a better end user client, and we're really proud of that. When we think about the client experience, providing a seamless front to back experience levering technology, we think there's a lot more we can do for clients on that front. Imagine a world where a client can live in your ecosystem, run pre-trade analytics, do sensitivity analysis, access datasets that they might not possess, model their portfolio, model a potential trade or reshuffle they want to do, and then click to trade with Citadel Securities.

Amazon is an incredible business model. We think about Amazon a lot. It gets smarter and better with your use of it. Amazon creates stickiness between their platform and their client. It's not a perfect parallel, but there's a lot embedded in that. And so for us, I won't say we've mastered, but we think we're operating with scale and efficiency already. Now we think a lot more about what can we add to that client experience that will make that client better at what they're doing on the investment front, provide a more seamless and efficient experience. And if we can be a part of that client journey, we know that'll be a successful business formula for us. And so we're building around that and we think we now have a core foundation, a core global client foundation that we can build upon, and we're incredibly excited about that.

Kristen Scholer:

Well, Jim, congratulations again on your role.

Jim Esposito:

Thank you.

Kristen Scholer:

It's been incredible to follow your own journey and we are very much looking forward to what is ahead for you and Citadel Securities.

Jim Esposito:

Thank you. I've enjoyed the discussion.

Speaker 1:

That's our conversation for this week. Remember to rate, review, and subscribe wherever you listen and follow us on X@icehousepodcast. From the New York Stock Exchange, we'll talk to you again next week Inside the Icehouse. 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 offer to sell, a solicitation of an offer to buy any security or a recommendation of any security or trading practice. Some portions of the preceding conversation may have been edited for the purpose of length or clarity.