| 2 |
| Kevin Kometer |
| Chief Information Officer |
| CME Group |
| Last year: 1 |
Exceptional technology almost has to be a given for a global derivatives market complex like that of CME Group, which handles 3 billion contracts worth $1 quadrillion annually — the vast majority traded electronically — and had $2.25 billion in revenue through the first nine months of last year. Indeed, chief executive officer Phupinder Gill describes Chicago-based CME as “a technology-based company” — a fact underscored by the size and scope of the information technology organization led by CIO Kevin Kometer. With 1,040 people as of December, Kometer’s army has increased by about 100 over 12 months and amounts to more than one third of CME’s 2,800 overall workforce. Involved in much more than keeping the lights on and transactions flowing, they help push an aggressive international agenda that includes a showcase technology installation at Brazil’s BM&FBovespa, completed in October; the pending opening of the CME Europe exchange; and implementations of a swaps execution facility and trade repositories in accordance with recent regulatory reforms. So complex and transformative are those rule changes that Kometer has built a compliance team within IT to keep pace. An office in Belfast, Northern Ireland, opened in 2012 and now staffed with more than 100 people, is part of a “globalization of the workforce” to support overseas growth and better ensure business continuity should disaster strike, says Kometer, 49, who has spent 17 years with CME, nearly six of them as CIO. He points out that the Globex e-trading platform was “rearchitected” last year to “improve consistency of performance.” Though traders are generally satisfied with transaction speeds, “large matching events or quantities of market data can cause platform performance to deviate,” Kometer explains. “Customers are looking for predictable performance.”
See also Kometer’s profiles in the 2013 Trading Technology 40 and the 2012 Trading Technology 30.
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< 1. Edwin Marcial | The 2014 Trading Tech 40 | 3. Raymond Tierney III > |
