2016年Fintech Finance 35: Rumi Morales

9月中旬，rumi morales.在CME Ventures坐落在芝加哥商品Mart旁边的Mayor Rahm Emanuel及其伦敦同行，萨氏汗，讨论了政府可以做些什么来鼓励两个城市的创业和技术发展。衍生品交流运营商CME集团的风险投资公务员执行董事，莫拉莱斯谈到了金融创新在刮风城的重要作用。“In this regard, it’s a very exciting time to be an entrepreneur, a very exciting time to be an investor, and a very exciting time to be in Chicago,” says the 40-year-old, who joined CME in 2010 to work on international business development before becoming a member of its venture team. The core mission of CME Ventures has remained the same since the unit’s January 2014 inception: to invest in emerging technologies that can have an impact on CME and, more broadly, financial services in three to five years’ time. “This is really very much looking at the future of our industry,” says the Wellesley College grad and New York University Stern School of Business MBA. “It’s about transformational innovation.” CME Ventures, which will invest as much as $5 million in an early-stage company, has focused on three general themes: digitization, which incorporates real-time payments and blockchain; advanced or adaptive security systems employing techniques like behavioral analytics; and what it calls “the next generation of big data,” including quantum computing and neural networks. CME has grown its portfolio from six to 11 companies in the past 12 months, adding investments in Digital Asset Holdings (blockchain applications), Digital Currency Group (blockchain and Bitcoin), Fortscale (cybersecurity), Orbital Insight (big data), and SparkCognition (security analytics). The group enjoyed its first financial exit this year when chip maker Intel Corp. reportedly paid as much as $400 million for Nervana Systems, a California-based deep learning company that CME funded in 2015. “What’s great about Nervana is not only that they were acquired by Intel, but we are actually working with them in-house, at the CME, exploring some use cases,” says Morales. “This is an indication of what we’re trying to do as CME Ventures, which is to inform the organization.”