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The 2016 Tech 50: Craig Donohue

The executive chairman of Options Clearing Corp. joins the Tech 50 ranking at No.

32
Craig Donohue
Executive Chairman
Options Clearing Corp.
PNR

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.”

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

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