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The 2016 Trading Technology 40: Robert Cornish
No. 19 Robert Cornish, Chief Technology Officer, International Securities Exchange


Market segmentation is a proven strategy in consumer goods and other industries — why not options trading? In 2013, 13 years after opening the first all-electronic U.S. options market, International Securities Exchange launched Gemini, followed in February 2016 by Mercury; each is designed to appeal to a different constituency while running on common technology. The brand names are meant to “conjure up the early days of the space program — also a big technology launch where teams got together and collaborated,” says Robert Cornish, the Eurex Group subsidiary’s chief technology officer. The 45-year-old is embracing the latest in lightweight, open-source advances, including Docker container software and the Linux-based CoreOS operating system. Containers house everything necessary to run an application, Cornish explains. They are therefore portable and facilitate installations and functionality with minimal coding and associated infrastructure. “We are the only exchange using this type of software to this extent,” resulting in greater agility, lower costs and shorter development times, Cornish adds. He expects to leverage these benefits further as ISE, with a 16 percent market share in equity options, looks to develop “one if not two new markets in different asset classes.” Cornish — who began at New York–based ISE in 1999 as a consultant, joined full-time after the original exchange went live and has been CTO since March 2013 — is in hiring mode, noting that “we expect everyone in technology to code,” whether they are in systems, network storage or operations. He is pondering the potential usefulness of the blockchain. “It’s a very complex technology and difficult to learn,” he says, but a distributed ledger’s “full listing of what has occurred over history” is promising.
![]() 2. Richard Prager BlackRock ![]() 3. Chris Isaacson BATS Global Markets ![]() 4. Jonathan Ross KCG Holdings ![]() 5. Bradley Peterson Nasdaq |
![]() 6. Brad Levy Markit ![]() 7. Dan Keegan Citi ![]() 8. Ronald DePoalo Fidelity Institutional ![]() 9. Raj Mahajan Goldman Sachs Group ![]() 10. Ari Studnitzer CME Group |
![]() 11. Mayur Kapani Intercontinental Exchange ![]() 12. Gerald O’Connell CBOE Holdings ![]() 13. Nicholas Themelis MarketAxess Holdings ![]() 14. Gil Mandelzis EBS BrokerTec (ICAP) ![]() 15. Bill Chow and Richard Leung Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing |
![]() 16. Rob Park IEX Group ![]() 17. Philip Weisberg Thomson Reuters ![]() 18. John Mackay (Mack) Gill MillenniumIT ![]() 19. Robert Cornish International Securities Exchange ![]() 20. Paul Hamill Citadel Securities |
![]() 21. Eric Noll Convergex ![]() 22. Tyler Moeller and Joshua Walsky Broadway Technology ![]() 23. Rishi Nangalia REDI Holdings ![]() 24. Veronica Augustsson Cinnober Financial Technology ![]() 25. Alasdair Haynes Aquis Exchange |
![]() 26. Manoj Narang Mana Partners ![]() 27. Gaurav Suri Arcesium ![]() 28. Robert Sloan S3 Partners ![]() 29. Anton Katz and Stephen Mock AQR Capital Mgmt ![]() 30. Stu Taylor Algomi |
![]() 31. D. Keith Ross Jr. PDQ Enterprises ![]() 32. Donal Byrne Corvil ![]() 33. Alfred Eskandar Portware ![]() 34. R. Cromwell Coulson OTC Markets Group ![]() 35. Masayuki Hosaka Rakuten |
![]() 36. Peter Maragos and David Karat Dash Financial ![]() 37. Amar Kuchinad Electronifie ![]() 38. Jennifer Nayar SR Labs ![]() 39. Dave Snowdon Metamako ![]() 40. Dan Raju Tradier |