The 2016 Trading Technology 40: Chris Isaacson

< The 2016 Trading Technology 40

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Chris Isaacson
Global Chief Information Officer
BATS Global Markets
Last year: 6

As recently as 2008, BATS Global Markets — then BATS Trading — was an alternative trading system making the transition to full exchange status. Almost overnight, in January 2009, BATS was the third-largest exchange company in notional value traded, and it was upward from there, with virtually every leap assisted by, if not dependent on, the technology Chris Isaacson had been developing since the firm’s start in 2005. In early 2015, BATS completed the integration of the Direct Edge exchanges it had acquired the year before, and from September through November it was the world’s biggest equity exchange operator, according to World Federation of Exchanges data. In December, BATS’s U.S. equity market share was 21 percent, up from 20.8 percent a year earlier; BATS Chi-X Europe remained No. 1 in its markets at 23.7 percent, rising from 22 percent; the opening of a second U.S. options market pushed BATS’s share of that asset class to 10.1 percent from 6.3 percent a year earlier; and foreign exchange platform Hotspot, acquired last March from KCG Holdings, boosted its market share to 12.7 percent from December 2014’s 11.6 percent. Lenexa, Kansas–based BATS Global Markets filed in December for an IPO, conjuring memories of its most glaring failure, the March 2012 systems crash that aborted the previous IPO attempt. Isaacson, 37, global CIO since 2014 after seven years as COO, has his sights set on market-structure and regulatory developments that promise “greater transparency and efficiency across the trading landscape.” These include technology-enabled agency trading in forex, Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID II) preparations in Europe and “across all markets innovation and optimization in clearing and settlement with the potential use of blockchain technology.”

2016 Trading Technology 40