The 2016 Tech 50: Andreas Preuss

When Deutsche Börse and London Stock Exchange Group signed the definitive agreement in March for what they described as an industry-defining merger of equals, they projected that technology efficiencies and organizational streamlining would produce €450 million ($500 million) in annual cost savings within three years. As a result of an executive board realignment that Deutsche Börse, senior partner in the $20 billion merger deal, announced in November and put in place on January 1, deputy CEO Andreas Preuss has ultimate responsibility for the information technology part of the process. Preuss, 60, heads the newly created IT and operations, data and new asset classes division; among the functions consolidated under him is the market data and services business, previously run byHauke Stars. (No. 36 last year, Stars is now in charge of the cash market, pre-IPO and growth financing division, which includes the flagship Frankfurt Stock Exchange and Xetra trading platform.) Reporting to CEOCarsten Kengeter, Preuss has been on Deutsche Börse’s executive board since 2006 and has had a hand in market technology innovations since 1989, when he was working for Andersen Consulting and participated in early design work on Deutsche Terminbörse (DTB), a pioneering electronic derivatives market and predecessor of Deutsche Börse’s Eurex subsidiary. With a graduate business administration degree from the University of Hamburg, Preuss worked for DTB in new products and customer service from 1990 to ’94, then spent four years in Deutsche Börse’s benchmark products division before joining the executive boards of Eurex Frankfurt, Eurex Zurich and Eurex Clearing — entities he would later oversee as CEO. Since 2007 he had been a director of New York–based options market operator International Securities Exchange, which was sold to Nasdaq on June 30 for $1.1 billion. The Börse is honing its fintech edge: It co-led with Markit (seeLance Uggla, No. 3) a capital round for the Illuminate Financial Management Fintech Opportunities Fund in November; opened a development hub in Frankfurt in April; and launched its own strategic fund, DB1 Ventures, in June.

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