This content is from: Portfolio

The 2016 Tech 50: Chris Concannon

The Bats Global Markets president and CEO remains at No. 16 on the Tech 50 ranking.

16
Chris Concannon
President and Chief Executive Officer
Bats Global Markets

Bats Global Markets’ first attempt at an IPO, on March 23, 2012, was an embarrassment. A technical breakdown forced the company to abort the offering on its own exchange. The demons were exorcised on April 15, 2016, when 15.3 million Bats Global Markets shares began trading on BZX Exchange, one of the Lenexa, Kansas–based company’s four equity platforms. “The IPO was not the finish line,” says Chris Concannon, 48, president since December 2014 and CEO since March 2015. Investors clearly have agreed, pushing the $19 offering price as high as $29 on May 31 before it fell to $25 as of early July. In the context of the company’s business accomplishments, the IPO was almost an afterthought. Founded in 2005 as an alternative trading system and licensed as a U.S. exchange in 2008, Bats is now No. 2 in U.S. equity market share and No. 1 in Europe, runs two fast-growing U.S. options markets and owns foreign exchange platform Hotspot, whose acquisition from KCG Holdings was engineered by Concannon last year. In early May, Bats reported that its first-quarter operating income had virtually doubled, to $62 million, from a year earlier. The company also claimed a market-leading 26.2 percent share of trading in exchange-traded funds — it has been No. 1 since February 2014 — with 14 listings added in the first quarter, bringing the total to 70. On April 1, Bats acquired news and data provider ETF.com as part of its plan to be “a major player across the entire ETF ecosystem,” says Concannon, a graduate of Catholic University’s Columbus School of Law, onetime Securities and Exchange Commission staff attorney, former head of transaction services at Nasdaq and president and COO of Virtu Financial. “I have always loved the exchange business,” he says, adding, “The growth of fintech services will undoubtedly redefine the costs of investing.” He believes blockchain, or distributed ledger, “will play a role in the future of the financial services sector,” but “we are at the very beginning of the discovery process.”

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
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

Related Content