The New York Stock Exchange is very different these days from what people might think, Mr Richard Grasso, chairman and chief executive officer was at pains to point out at a recent conference.

The New York Stock Exchange, which is famed for its history, location on Wall Street and for celebrities ringing its opening bell so trading can begin, has virtually redefined itself, he said. It has invested more than $2 billion (€1.82 billion) in the last 10 years to connect itself to the world through electronic links and to make trading faster and more effective.

How times have changed and how volumes have grown. In 1989, the average daily volume of trades on the NYSE was 156 million. Today, it carries out about 900 million a day and its platform has the capability to handle in excess of three billion shares.

For a venerable institution that is 207 years old and still housed in the same square footage where it began, the NYSE is grappling with the fast-paced world of new technologies and a US investor who is all too hungry to play in the stock market game. About 70 million Americans are directly involved and 130 million are indirectly involved in the equity markets compared to only 30 million Americans who were involved 25 years ago.

"How truly different the Big Board is today from a few short years ago," said Mr Grasso, in a keynote address at the "IT for Wall Street" conference last week. "The agent that facilitates change and the transformation of markets is technology," he said. About $38 billion changes hands each day on the floor of the NYSE and about half of these transactions are not touched by humans but are done electronically. An order can come from a consumer to a broker/dealer, be delivered to the floor and a confirmed trade will be back on the consumer's desktop in 22 seconds. New issues can be listed without a nanosecond of delay and up to 1,000 messages can be transmitted a second.

"We've exported the floor of the New York Stock Exchange to the consumer. The model is one of embracing the consumer and the consumer business can be routed from anywhere in the world," said Mr Grasso.

He likened the transformation that has overtaken the NYSE to that of the Phoenix rising from the ashes after the stock-market crash of October 1987.

Then, the NYSE trailed the Tokyo Stock Exchange by a trillion dollars. Now, the NYSE is six times its size and the largest stock exchange in the world with a $14 trillion valuation.

However, "we are still primarily a domestic market," said Mr Grasso. Only 90 companies out of the 3,100 listed on the Big Board are non-US companies. But, he said by next year, that figure could grow to 600. He said there were four times as many companies outside of the US that were qualified to be listed on the Big Board than there were in the US.

"If we could attract even the top third of these we could grow our business by $9 trillion," he said. "We've got to be currency blind. Technology will give us the flexibility to be no longer denominated by the US dollar. How broad, deep and democratised the world of equities will become!"

Less than 15 per cent of daily trading on the NYSE is actively generated by non-US companies but five years from now, he said, companies around the globe could account for 3035 per cent of the volume. "They will be given the incentive to come to the Big Board by our deployment of technology," he said.

Even now, to make traders and brokers' lives more efficient, the NYSE has introduced an advanced wireless network for the trading floor and order-management tools. It has enhanced voice and data communications, including voice recognition. It has converted to decimal pricing and has pushed into worldwide equity markets. About 60 per cent of the NYSE's expense line, that is, about $400 million out of $600 million, is dedicated to technology, Mr Grasso said.

The future, he expected, "will be a seamless market that will not be restricted to Eastern Standard Time". By June 2000, the NYSE will introduce three separate trading times. It will open very early to accommodate countries in Europe. It will trade through its traditional opening time 9:30 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. and then it will add on trading at the other end to include those countries traditionally excluded. This means, a stock market that will be open from 5 a.m. to midnight daily. It will also accept more listings. Some 2,000 of the 3,100 companies that trade on its market today were not listed on the NYSE a decade ago. Until 1984, the Big Board did not embrace any initial public offerings, he said.

In fact, only three companies went public on the Big Board in over 100 years. But, since 1984, 1,000 issuers have gone public on the Big Board.

"We are less than two decades after Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and President Ronald Reagan changed the economic axis of the globe forever more with privatisation," Mr Grasso said. Their role has meant that the economic model for the globe has changed to one of a free market, equity principled, democracy-driven ownership.

"It is important to recognise that the world is awakening to a model of ownership that we have created," Mr Grasso pointed out. "All of the US markets taken together define why we lead. The markets around the world will grow and the markets in the US will perhaps grow exponentially in relation to those."

To accommodate this growth, the NYSE expects to open its newly enlarged facility and state-of-the-art trading floor near its present location in 2005.