< The 2016 Tech 50

32
Craig Donohue
Executive Chairman
Options Clearing Corp.
PNR

In 23 years with CME Group, the last eight as CEO before retiring in 2012, Craig Donohue put his legal background to work — he has both a JD from John Marshall Law School and a master’s of law in financial services regulation from IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law — on the company’s 2002 IPO and $20 billion-plus in M&A deals. He also spearheaded one of the most aggressive technological transformations in the exchange industry, centered on the now-24-year-old Globex platform. (Donohue ranked No. 2 in the 2011 Tech 50. His successor, Phupinder Gill, is No. 4 this year.) Retirement did not last long: CME’s Chicago neighbor Options Clearing Corp. came calling, and in January 2014, Donohue took the helm as executive chairman. Global regulators had designated OCC a SIFMU (systemically important financial market utility) in 2012, and Donohue jumped on the opportunity to bring the company organizationally and technologically up to speed. “Risk management and capital efficiency are more at the forefront of our attention,” Donohue, 54, explains. At OCC, which clears an average 17 million options contracts every day on 14 U.S. exchanges, “we pay less attention to the factory aspect and more to how resilient we are, given the financial crisis in 2008, in terms of capital, liquidity, margin coverage and clearing fund resources, so we can perform the obligations we have to our clients.” A new technology team, led by chief information officer Luke Moranda, who joined in March 2015 from JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s treasury services business, is charged with ensuring resiliency — a pillar of Donohue’s strategic plan. For OCC and its clearing members, the business has become highly capital-intensive, requiring $100 billion in margin collateral and a $7 billion mutualized insurance pool as a backstop against failures. Donohue has introduced data warehousing and information analytics to reduce capital needs — for example, by identifying which options positions are driving up costs. “Risk analytics is the next frontier to support clients on their trades and reducing costs,” says Donohue. The tech agenda includes looking at blockchain and distributed ledger, which Donohue sees as potentially “very significant in the central counterparty clearing landscape over the next ten to 15 years.”

Visit The 2016 Tech 50: Making Financial Services Faster, Cheaper, Bigger for more.

 
The 2016 Tech 50

1. Catherine Bessant Bank of America Corp. 2. Jeffrey Sprecher Intercontinental Exchange 3. Lance Uggla Markit Sponsored Navigating the Multifamily Market Cycle: WDIP’s Strategic Approach to Emerging Opportunities Sponsored by Walker & Dunlop Investment Partners, Inc. (WDIP) October 27, 2025 4. Phupinder Gill CME Group 5. Shawn Edwards and Vlad Kliatchko Bloomberg 6. R. Martin Chavez Goldman Sachs Group

7. Robert Goldstein BlackRock 8. Adena Friedman Nasdaq 9. Deborah Hopkins Citi Ventures 10. Daniel Coleman KCG Holdings 11. Stephen Neff Fidelity Investments 12. David Craig Thomson Reuters

13. Michael Spencer ICAP 14. Michael Bodson Depository Trust & Clearing Corp. 15. Charles Li Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing 16. Chris Concannon BATS Global Markets 17. Blythe Masters Digital Asset Holdings 18. David Rutter R3CEV

19. Neil Katz D.E. Shaw & Co. 20. Lee Olesky Tradeweb Markets 21. Richard McVey MarketAxess Holdings 22. Seth Merrin Liquidnet Holdings 23. Robert Alexander Capital One Financial Corp. 24. Brad Katsuyama IEX Group

25. Antoine Shagoury State Street Corp. 26. David Gledhill DBS Bank 27. Lou Eccleston TMX Group 28. Andreas Preuss Deutsche BÖrse 29. Dan Schulman PayPal Holdings 30. Scott Dillon Wells Fargo & Co.

31. Mike Chinn S&P Global Market Intelligence 32. Craig Donohue Options Clearing Corp. 33. Gary Norcross Fidelity National Information Services 34. Steven O'Hanlon Numerix 35. Sebastián Ceria Axioma 36. Michael Cooper BT Radianz

37. Tyler Kim MaplesFS 38. Neal Pawar AQR Capital Management 39. David Harding Winton Capital Management 40. Chris Corrado London Stock Exchange Group 41. Brian Conlon First Derivatives 42. Jim Minnick eVestment

43. Stephane Dubois Xignite 44. Mazy Dar OpenFin 45. Yasuki Okai NRI Holdings America 46. Kim Fournais Saxo Bank 47. Jock Percy Perseus 48. Robert Schifellite Broadridge Financial Solutions

49. Brian Sentance Xenomorph Software 50. Pieter van der Does Adyen