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The 2016 Tech 50: Phupinder Gill
CME Group’s CEO comes in at No. 4 on the Tech 50 ranking.
Financial industry CEOs typically don’t throw their caution to the winds of technological change. They are content to wait and see, hedge their bets or adopt fast-follower strategies. Phupinder Gill plays it differently. “We have to be on the bleeding edge to understand emerging technologies,” says the CEO of CME Group, the $3.3 billion-in-revenue parent of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, Chicago Board of Trade, New York Mercantile Exchange, Commodity Exchange and a leading central counterparty clearing operation. The 55-year-old, who has been CEO since 2012, is no wild-eyed radical. He says it’s a given that CME is leading-edge by virtue of Globex, the pioneering electronic trading platform that was launched in 1992 and handles 89 percent of average daily volume (which totaled 14.9 million contracts in May, up 6 percent year-over-year). He believes change is evolutionary rather than revolutionary but says that “evolution will be constant” and its cumulative effects make familiarity with the bleeding edge imperative. Gill and CME go there via formal vehicles — an innovation lab and a strategic investment fund, CME Ventures — as well as through awards and other programs that encourage rank-and-file engagement in innovation. Gill has visited London fintech incubation space Level39 as part of “trying to figure out what all this means.” And he meets regularly with Rumi Morales, executive director of CME Ventures, whose portfolio ranges from big data (Powerlytics) to cybersecurity (Fortscale and SparkCognition) to quantum computing (1QBit) and includes cryptocurrency and distributed ledger companies Digital Asset Holdings, Digital Currency Group and Ripple. “The technologies are evolving, and many things are connected,” says Gill, a Singapore native and Washington State University MBA, who was president of CME Group and its predecessor, CME Holdings, for eight years before becoming CEO. “We have several use cases of blockchain across the firm to help us understand if it actually makes life more efficient.”
Visit The 2016 Tech 50: Making Financial Services Faster, Cheaper, Bigger for more.
 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 |