< Wall Street's Nerds: The World's Most Powerful Trading Executives
7. Bryan Durkin
President
CME Group
PNR
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
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