This content is from: Portfolio
The 2016 Tech 50: Craig Donohue
The executive chairman of Options Clearing Corp. joins the Tech 50 ranking at No.


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.”
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![]() 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 |