< Wall Street's Nerds: The World's Most Powerful Trading Executives

CME Group boasts a long list of historical milestones: Its Chicago futures exchange opened in 1848. It began trading futures contracts on seven foreign currencies in 1972. But it was the launch in 1992 of Globex, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange's electronic trading platform, that set the company on a course of technological disruption and innovation; currently, 87 percent of its volume is electronic.

"Technology is absolutely part of the culture, at the core of what we do," says Bryan Durkin, who as president of $3.6 billion-in-revenue CME Group is responsible for overseeing technology, global operations, market technology and data services, and international businesses. Technology, he says, is "a key component of how we stay competitive." It has everything to do with the "robust global infrastructure" that enables CME to serve a global marketplace every day around the clock, with the capacity to handle a 12 percent year-over-year increase in volume (to 15.6 million contracts per average day), as it did in 2016, with ever increasing efficiency along with risk controls that ensure market integrity.

Named president in November when CEO Phupinder Gill announced his retirement, and reporting to chairman and CEO Terrence Duffy, Durkin personifies how technology pervades the culture. An MBA graduate of Illinois's Lewis University, the 56-year-old says, "I am not a technologist." But over a 34-year career, he has earned his stripes. He was COO of the Chicago Board of Trade, with a remit including operations and technology, when, in 2007, CBOT and CME merged. Durkin was responsible for the postmerger integration, which was completed "within a year and without a hitch," he recalls. He repeated the exercise a year later when CME acquired the New York Mercantile Exchange. Today all of CME operates on a unified trading, clearing, and settlement platform.

 
The 2017 Trading Tech 40

1. Richard Prager BlackRock Fireside Chat- The New Credit Playbook: Convergence, Liquidity, and Innovation in Institutional Portfolios Sponsored by Nuveen June 17, 2025 2. Chris Isaacson Bats Global Markets 3. Bradley Peterson Nasdaq 4. Brad Levy MarkitSERV 5. Dan Keegan Citi

6. Glenn Lesko Bloomberg Tradebook 7. Bryan Durkin CME Group 8. Mayur Kapani Intercontinental Exchange 9. Mike Blum KCG Holdings 10. Raj Mahajan Goldman Sachs Group

11. Ronald DePoalo Fidelity Institutional 12. Nick Themelis MarketAxess Holdings 13. Jenny Knott NEX Optimisation 14. Billy Hult Tradeweb Markets 15. Rob Park IEX Group

16. Bill Chow & Richard Leung Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing 17. John Mackay (Mack) Gill MillenniumIT 18. Paul Hamill Citadel Securities 19. Eric Noll Convergex 20. Veronica Augustsson Cinnober Financial Technology

21. Tyler Moeller & Joshua Walsky Broadway Technology 22. Alasdair Haynes Aquis Exchange 23. Gaurav Suri Arcesium 24. Manoj Narang Mana Partners 25. Michael Chin & Neill Penney Thomson Reuters

26. Robert Sloan S3 Partners 27. Anton Katz & Stephen Mock AQR Capital Management 28. Donal Byrne Corvil 29. Stu Taylor Algomi 30. Alfred Eskandar Portware

31. Steven Randich Financial Industry Regulatory Authority 32. R. Cromwell Coulson OTC Markets Group 33. Peter Maragos Dash Financial 34. John Fawcett Quantopian 35. Donald Ross III PDQ Enterprises

36. Jennifer Nayar Vela Trading Technologies 37. Dan Raju Tradier 38. Susan Estes OpenDoor Trading 39. David Mercer LMAX Exchange 40. Oki Matsumoto Monex Group