Jon Herrick is Head of Equities at The New York Stock Exchange.

What was the highlight of 2019?

At the NYSE, the highlight of 2019 was successfully migrating all of our equities markets onto NYSE Pillar, our state-of-the-art, integrated trading technology platform. Pillar enables member firms to connect to all five of our equities markets using a single specification, which reduces connectivity costs for the industry by millions of dollars annually. The rollout was an ambitious undertaking, as the NYSE implemented the Pillar platform while markets remained in full operation, and the technology now underlies nearly a quarter of all equity shares traded in the United States. Market participants are already seeing the benefits of the platform through more efficient processing, lower round-trip latency and the industry’s highest level of determinism.

What are your expectations for 2020?

In 2020, we expect to see several new entrants in the equity exchange landscape. Market participants will keep a close eye on these developments as they weigh how they will access new venues in an already fragmented marketplace. For the NYSE Group exchanges, our all-in cost to trade is about the lowest it’s ever been and is structured to enable investors to choose the blend of services they need. Three of our five exchanges are primary listings venues while the remaining offer unique functionality and pricing that cannot be obtained on any of our other exchanges.

What trends are getting underway that people may not know about but will be important?

NYSE is continually assessing how the Securities Information Processors (SIP) — the core data feed that links all U.S. equity markets — can be enhanced to better serve the industry and investors. In 2019, the NYSE offered a proposal to make available for the first time depth of book and auction imbalance data on the SIP. We are also investing in two major technology projects to enhance the SIP: a network upgrade and migrating the data feed engine to NYSE Pillar.