Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
Intercontinental-Exchange
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While many securities and derivatives exchanges have been struggling to keep volumes steady, IntercontinentalExchange has continued to grow, setting revenue records for more than seven consecutive years, most recently with $334 million in the first quarter, a year-over-year gain of 19 percent. “We’ve expanded the number of customers and segments we serve and taken advantage of changes in technology to develop new approaches to a century-old business,” says CEO Jeffrey Sprecher, 56. A onetime power plant developer, Sprecher built the former Continental Power Exchange of Atlanta into the multinational, multiproduct powerhouse ICE. His world-conquering ambitions have hit a couple of snags — he failed to scuttle CME Group’s 2007 merger with the Chicago Board of Trade, and the joint ICE–Nasdaq OMX Group bid for NYSE Euronext was withdrawn in May because of antitrust concerns. But those setbacks did not detract from a much longer list of successful acquisitions, including that of the innovative voice and electronic credit default swaps brokerage Creditex in 2008. Nor has ICE wavered from its core strategy, which spans agricultural, credit, currency, emissions, energy and equity index markets, as well as a thriving clearing business that resulted from “our long-standing conviction that central counterparty clearing would become a cornerstone of risk management,” says Sprecher. In 2010, ICE implemented more than 100 technology enhancements and launched a mobile real-time data service; mobile trading functionality is on the way.
