Where to go public is it all location, location, location? What factors influence identifying the best location for a company to access capital? Should it be in its home country or on a distant global exchange? NYSE Euronext's co-head of U.S. listings and cash execution discusses trends and strategies for companies planning their public debut.

• Author: Heffes, Ellen M.
• Position: Strategy - New York Stock Exchange - Interview

Every tourist map of New York City proudly displays the historic New York Stock Exchange at the tip of Wall Street, the icon that exemplifies capitalism itself. But over the past seven-plus years, NYSE Euronext Inc. has become a different business from one primarily involved in listings, trading and regulating financial markets alone.

Scott Cutler, executive vice president and co-head of U.S. Listings and Cash Execution for the exchange, recently spoke with Financial Executive's Editor-in-Chief Ellen M. Heffes about the business of the exchange itself, as well as the factors involved with listing on the Big Board.

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What's changed about NYSE--and the general perceptions many hold about its business?

CUTLER: Listings is only one facet of the business of NYSE Euronext today. Seven years ago our business was pretty simple. It was listings, trading and regulating.

Today that business is global--we now have listings platforms around the world. Besides here in the U.S., we are also running exchanges in Paris, Lisbon, Brussels and Amsterdam under the Euronext umbrella. We also have a derivatives business, the London Liffe Futures Exchange, as well as a growing technology solutions business that provides market data and connectivity to platforms.

So our business has become a lot more complex and broad.

To put it in a global perspective, in the U.S. we have about 2,200 corporate issuers listed on our platforms, and we have a nearly equivalent amount on our European platforms.

We have been in the business of raising capital dating back to 1792, so capital-raising is at the forefront of many of the things that we're involved in.

For example, last year we raised $33 billion in IPO capital proceeds and nearly $200 billion in equity financings on our platform--ranking as the number one global exchange in all those categories for 2011. So the listings business continues to be a very important part of the NYSE Euronext brand today.

What can you report in terms of numbers?

CUTLER: It's a complex business, in which we're processing nearly $2 trillion worth of transactions across all of our platforms and products on a daily basis. We trade on the equities side daily significantly more than what eBay will do in an entire year. Additionally, for perspective, consider we are doing two and a half times the number of transactions as Google will do searches in a day.

The technology underpinning the financial markets on which we operate on a global basis is at the forefront...