Dominique Cerutti
No. 1
President and Deputy
Chief Executive Officer
NYSE Euronext
No executive move has said more about technology’s centrality in capital markets than Dominique Cerutti’s jump from IBM Corp. to NYSE Euronext at the end of 2009. After 23 years with IBM, the last four as general manager for southwest Europe, Cerutti joined the New York Stock Exchange’s parent as deputy CEO under Duncan Niederauer. One of Cerutti’s initial titles, “global head of technology,” was later amended to “president.” The 50-year-old says he is “still amazed” by the “radical change” in market structure, globalization and trading brought about by automation. For its part, NYSE Euronext regards technology as “a transformational lever to lead the industry,” asserts an admittedly ambitious Cerutti. He dismisses any notion that the biggest exchange operator cannot be agile and groundbreaking. “In a fixed-cost industry, size matters,” he says, citing a justification for megamergers like NYSE’s proposed combination with Deutsche Börse. On its three-year-old Universal Trading Platform, NYSE has reduced latency by a factor of 15, to 100 microseconds. But that is just a competitive baseline. Only with its scale and scope, says Cerutti, could NYSE have integrated a high-speed global network with its UTP for all asset classes, delivering cost efficiencies that rivals managing separate silos cannot match.
