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 ICEs exchanges around the world. Now let's go Inside the ICE House. Here's your host, Lance Glinn.

Lance Glinn:

Each month on the inside the ICE House Podcast, we engage in insightful conversations with business leaders, CEOs of NYSE listed companies, entrepreneurs and visionaries. We explore their journeys, the challenges they've overcome and their aspirations to shape the future. You can tune in every Monday on all major podcast platforms to catch these discussions and watch full video episodes on tv.nyse.com and on the NYSE YouTube channel.

Inside the ICE House, in July, we aired nine new episodes, three of our traditional inside the ICE House episodes, and six, yes six, encompassing our newest themed weeks of AI leadership and marketing. We kicked off the month with our AI leadership series, spotlighting AI Trailblazers co-founder Greg Kahn, Credo AI founder and CEO Navrina Singh, and writer, chief strategy officer, Kevin Chung.

In these three wide-ranging conversations, we touched on the technology's presence across industry, the significance of having AI without bias, and how its use cases already thousands deep, will only continue to grow in the near future.

Greg Kahn:

Well, I'm glad you brought up public perception because so much is being thrown at them from all sides, from the media, from the big tech giants themselves, and a lot of folks are confused, frankly, they don't know where to turn for information. The models are being developed and rolled out so quickly. The players are getting bigger and bigger. The funding is getting greater and greater in this space. And they don't know where to turn necessarily.

The ChatGPT moment has become so much more than that today that a lot of these individuals are folks that they look up to and that for many, many reasons for their leadership within their companies, but also just as voices to help them understand culture, to help them understand customer. And so I think one thing that we're very, very mindful of, is every time we put on a summit or an event, we get immediate feedback and we do more.

Navrina Singh:

One of my goals is to actually eradicate the word responsible. Responsibility and accountability should actually just be weaved into how we are building artificial intelligence. And so for us, from day one, we've been really intentionally focused on, how do we define trust? How do we trust, not only the systems, but also the people working on it as well as the ecosystem.

And we've really started with, I would say, the first principles on understanding and figuring out, what does alignment mean? So as first Steps within Credo AI platform, our software platform, we make sure that there is a good understanding of the context of the AI use case and what we need to measure to ensure that we can actually consistently measure it.

Kevin Chung:

We have really, really big aspirations. I mean, when I was mentioning, like if you think about sort of a mission, what is the mission of the company? We really want to be able to transform every enterprise and help them, bring them into the AI evolution. And that's the big part of the overall mission.

So we're in hundreds of enterprises now, covering Fortune 10 to the global 2000. We want to run the global 2000. We want to be the enterprise platform that is running the enterprise, right? And so that's the big strategic thing that May was seeing, and I and the entire leadership team are looking at this and saying, we have the technology, we have the enterprise leadership position, and we have all these great partners that are helping us get there. And we have tens of thousands of use cases that we're solving right now. The big thing is, how do we scale to help an enterprise wall to wall?

Lance Glinn:

Episode 477 featured Bill Welch, CEO of cloud security company, Sysdig. Cloud security is undergoing a major transformation as threats become more complex and automated. Gen AI is helping teams cut through the noise, automate tasks and respond to these risks faster. Bill joined us Inside the ICE House to discuss how Sysdig is at the forefront of this shift. Empowering teams with real-time insights and equipping CISOs with tools to fight back.

Bill Welch:

I think it's a good question to balance keeping the lights on and making sure people are actually getting the results of the platform, and then driving innovation. And I saw that many of the companies you've already mentioned. And I think that, the same thing we've done at Sysdig. We've actually split that.

We've said we have our product and engineering team that are going to make sure that customer feature requests are met. We're making sure that the platform we committed to them is being delivered. But then on the innovation, our founder, Loris who founded Wireshark and Stratashark and Falco, he's spending time thinking about what is the next phase of this environment? What is the next phase of cloud security, which is exactly how Sage I was developed.

So I will tell you that that's the thing that's exciting is being able to have two different lanes, although they intersect every single day, to make sure that we meet the current demands while focusing on the future outcomes.

Lance Glinn:

And I want to pivot back to, we obviously started our discussion talking about your transition into Sysdig started in late 2024. Transitions often involved setting a new culture. You're able to get fresh eyes onto everything that's been going on, and it's important to have a tone that aligns with key stakeholders, whether that be shareholders, employees, customers, others in the C-suite.

How have you approached just overall building trust and alignment with your leadership team, employees? And again, as I mentioned, probably the most important stakeholder, or maybe one of the two most important stakeholders as we sit here at the NYC, but, you know, customers.

Bill Welch:

Yes. Well, as I mentioned, it's really important to go and meet with customers, prospects, and partners and employees all over the world. And listen, one of the things I do with employees is whether I have breakfast, lunch, or dinners with them, or any type of engagements, I ask them, what is your executive order? What's the one thing you would do if you were me?

And I'm keeping that running tally, and that list is extensive. Because like I said, they know what we need to do and my job is to keep checking through them, set the strategy and vision as a result of listening to the customers, prospects, partners, and employees. What I will tell you, the other thing that's been very helpful to the company, is pulling the top leaders together in the company and saying, where are we directionally going? I put the pen in their hands and say, what does world-class look like at a functional department level and a cross-functional collaboration?

Lance Glinn:

On episode 478, we were joined by KPMG's Sherry Mager. Going public is a transformational step for companies, not just financially but strategically. It unlocks access to capital, attracts new investors and accelerates growth. Fresh off KPMG's IPO bootcamp at the NYC, Sherry went Inside the ICE house to share key insights on navigating the IPO process and the state of the IPO landscape.

Shari Mager:

Well, certainly some things that we like to see for a strong IPO market is reduced volatility, strong performance from public companies and recently public companies, and really just a reduction of uncertainty, which we've seen quite a bit of in the early part of 2025.

So I think those things right now, are shaping up to give us a good season here through June and through the summer, things tend to quiet down a little bit in the summer time and then pick back up again around September, October. And I don't expect this year to be very different from that. But certainly currently we're seeing strong trends of, strong IPOs going out, pricing well and after market performance... Or sorry, after IPO performance being strong as well, which are things that I think instill confidence in investors and make for a good IPO market.

Lance Glinn:

Absolutely. So in May, US proceeds hit $6 billion, obviously still below the highs of the record setting 2021 market, but double the monthly average we saw in 2024. What do you think is sort of fueling this uptick inactivity and what's behind the growing investor appetite to get involved in new public offerings right now?

Shari Mager:

Well, I think one of the key things is just there's so much pent-up demand. So we had so much activity in '20 and '21 that really pulled forward a lot of IPO candidates. And so things definitely quieted down after '21 and have been slowly increasing since then, but still not at what we would consider normal levels. So I think that pent-up demand is really leading to why we're seeing an uptick in activity when the market, that the characteristics of the market are strong and favorable and conducive to IPO's,

Lance Glinn:

Financial markets have transformed dramatically. Shifting from noisy trading floors to lightning fast technologically driven platforms. In 2024, Citadel Securities appointed Jim Esposito as its new president. Nearing a year into his tenure with the firm, Jim joined us Inside the ICE House to discuss what differentiates the firm its role in helping maintain efficient and orderly markets, and how he CEO Peng Xiao and founder Ken Griffin are plotting its future.

Jim Esposito:

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 US. 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 in 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.

Lance Glinn:

We ended the month featuring leaders in marketing, spotlighting campaign US editor, Luz Corona, Awoye Capital managing partner, Jordan Awoye, and Deep Blue Sports and Entertainment, CEO, Laura Corenti. In these three wide-ranging conversations, we touched on the evolving marketing space, how sports are playing a larger role, and the takeaways all three had from this Cannes Lion International Festival of Creativity.

Luz Corona:

I think all of the above. I think we're at a point now where everyone's embracing AI. A couple of years ago, everyone was kind of afraid to dip their toe into the pool, right? They're like, no, we're not going to let this hinder creativity. But now everyone knows it's not going anywhere, and you kind of just got to jump on the ship and figure out how you're going to use it, whether it's in your process or in your creative.

That's what everyone is saying. Everyone is, pretty much the general consensus was that you have to use AI to keep up with the times, but with the human driving at the wheel, and that's how everyone is kind of approaching it. But I think there's still kind of a gap in how to use it effectively, right? Everyone's trying to figure out how to use it in their process or just internally and things like that. But everyone's still kind of looking, peering over to the side and how are they using it? How are they using it, even down to the prompts. So everyone's embracing it, but with caution and still trying to figure it out, I think.

Jordan Awoye:

The financial industry is a little antiquated in regards to coming around relative to social media storytelling content. So as an independent firm, that's one of the most important pillars of our business. So it starts with the, just relationship authenticity, right? And I'll lean into that world because before I could talk about the other elements such as storytelling and content and things. That's pretty obvious. You have to do your job and do it well, and more importantly, be a good person. Because the word of mouth marketing travels a lot faster than a picture can sometimes, right?

So for us, we've been building it brick by brick, been in the space close to 10 years now, done amazing work, whether it's before we started our firm to, of course present day, and we still have a lot of the same relationships. So the referral market is amazing for us. And then, on the bigger level, for my colleagues and just other business owners, you'll be so surprised how much marketing plays into it.

Laura Correnti:

Well, I think those that invested early in, I think brands like Ally Financial is a great one to point to, who made a very strategic and measurable bet A few years ago in their 50/50 pledge where they were the first brand ever on record to say, for every dollar, media dollar, we'll spend in men's sports, we will spend in women's sports in a quantifiable period of time. They are aggressively approaching that goal in real time as we speak.

And the numbers prove it. Andrew Brimmer, their CMO, has gone on record, can be looked up by anyone to see what the measurable returns have been. So from a business standpoint, those who got in early, invested in the long game, absolutely have benefited on the bottom line, but they can't rest there.

Lance Glinn:

You can listen to these episodes along with all past and future Inside the ICE House episodes, wherever you get your podcasts. Full video episodes are also available on tv.nyc.com and on the NYC YouTube Channel. Be sure to join us every Monday for inspiring conversations with leaders, entrepreneurs, and visionaries. Thanks for listening.

Speaker 1:

That's our conversation for this week. Remember to rate, review, and subscribe wherever you listen and follow us on X at ICE House podcast. From the New York Stock Exchange, we'll talk to you again next week, Inside the ICE House.

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 and clarity.