The 2013 Tech 50: Dominique Cerutti

To Dominique Cerutti, IntercontinentalExchange’s pending $8.2 billion acquisition of NYSE Euronext (seeJeffrey Sprecher, No. 2) is the “main deal.”  Two other transactions are related: the move of NYSE Liffe derivatives contracts onto ICE’s London clearinghouse, effective July 1, and the IPO of NYSE Euronext’s continental European exchanges, planned for the first half of 2014 if the main deal closes this year as anticipated. Cerutti, whose postmerger role has not been announced, talks up the IPO as a way to bring those exchanges “closer to the real economy and to the small- and medium-size enterprises that are very important in those markets.” Meantime, “we keep running the show as an independent company,” the 52-year-old says of his responsibilities as NYSE Euronext president, deputy CEO and global head of technology. A former IBM Corp. executive who joined the New York exchange company in December 2009, Cerutti observes that the quantity of data is exploding — “we process 5 terabytes [trillion characters] daily” — and says the disruptive forces of speed and fragmentation “challenge our system” and call for solutions to ensure global market structure stability. “Technology will be core, as always,” he says. “We leverage it for our own markets and for NYSE Technologies,” the company’s commercial systems and services arm. First-quarter IT revenue amounted to $112 million of NYSE Euronext’s $963 million total.