Magnus Böcker
No. 10
Chief Executive Officer
Singapore Exchange 

In 2009, when replacing Hsieh Fu Hua — a longtime merchant banker and a fixture in Singapore’s financial community (now a director of state investment fund Temasek Holdings) — as Singapore Exchange CEO, the bourse pushed the technology accelerator. Succeeding Hsieh was Magnus Böcker, former CEO of Sweden’s OMX and developer of one of the most widely used exchange systems, who after a landmark 2008 merger had become president of Nasdaq OMX Group. Böcker vowed to build the world’s fastest trading engine; dubbed SGX Reach, it went live last August with order response times under 90 microseconds and the capacity for as many as a million order-book changes per second. SGX opened a new data center and colocation program last April and is globalizing, with remote-access hubs in Chicago and London opening this quarter. Böcker says he’d “like to see Hong Kong and Tokyo later in the year” and eventually New York on the network. A series of linkages with other Asian exchanges will be going live, starting with Bursa Malaysia in June. Then will come a new posttrade system, “likely to be a three-year project.” The 50-year-old notes that SGX added 24 new memberships in the fiscal year ended June 2011, bringing the total to 132: “We’ve never been close to that take-up in new membership before.”

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