The day after Jeffrey Sprecher, the chairman and chief executive of Atlanta's Intercontinental Exchange took control of the New York Stock Exchange, he sent trusted lieutenant Thomas Farley to size up the 222-year-old icon of capitalism.

On a crisp November morning, the 38-year-old Farley arrived alone at the corner of Wall and Broad streets in lower Manhattan. After walking beneath the building's majestic colonnade and past its storied trading floor, he found signs of an institution that was showing its age.