The 2015 Trading Technology 40: Brenda Hoffman

The successful launch of the world-beating, high-speed trading engine TMX Quantum XA was a crowning achievement for TMX Group and won for its group head of information technology,Brenda Hoffman, the 2014 Chief Information Officer of the Year award from the Information Technology Association of Canada. Quantum XA has reduced trade times from 2,000 microseconds to 25 on the Toronto Stock Exchange, TSX Venture Exchange and Alpha Exchange. That is 20 times faster than the previous system, on a “hardware footprint” that is less than half the size. “We did all this while maintaining 100 percent availability in the markets,” boasts Hoffman, 50, who joined the TMX flagship TSE in 2001 after working on global exchange projects for Canadian consulting firm TIL Systems and IBM Global Services. “Getting the platforms that need to be ultralow latency — that job is done,” she says. She notes that TSX is streamlining its market structure in other ways, having applied to regulators for permission to close TMX Select — the alternative venue that was the first to test Quantum XA, in 2013. There are also plans to apply the equity-trading technology to options and derivatives as well as to TMX’s data- and message-distributing ticker plant. Next on Hoffman’s development agenda: risk management and big data.

See alsoHoffman's profile in the 2013 Trading Technology 40.

1	2	3	4	5
Kevin Kometer CME Group	Richard Prager BlackRock	Raymond Tierney III Bloomberg Tradebook	Jonathan Ross KCG Holdings	Charles Vice Intercontinental Exchange
6	7	8	9	10
Chris Isaacson BATS Global Markets	Bradley Peterson Nasdaq OMX Group	Brad Levy MarkitSERV	Dan Keegan Citi	Ronald DePoalo Fidelity Institutional
11	12	13	14	15
Gerard Beatty Goldman Sachs Group	Gerald O'Connell CBOE Holdings	Brenda Hoffman TMX Group	Billy Hult Tradeweb Markets	Nicholas Themelis MarketAxess Holdings
16	17	18	19	20
Bina Kalola Bank of America Merrill Lynch	Gil Mandelzis EBS-BrokerTec (ICAP)	Steven Randich Financial Industry Regulatory Authority	Jerry Dobner GFI Group	Michael Liberman BlueMountain Capital Management
21	22	23	24	25
Bill Chow and Richard Leung Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing	Jamie Selway Investment Technology Group	Brad Katsuyama IEX Group	John Mackay (Mack) Gill MillenniumIT	Jamil Nazarali Citadel Execution Services
26	27	28	29	30
Robert Cornish International Securities Exchange	Tyler Moeller andJoshua Walksy Broadway Technology	Rishi Nangalia REDI Holdings	Manoj Narang Tradeworx, Thesys Technologies	Oki Matsumoto Monex Group
31	32	33	34	35
Alasdair Haynes Aquis Exchange	Veronica Augustsson Cinnober Financial Technology	Stu Taylor Algomi	Luís Otávio Saliba Furtado BM&FBovespa	Tal Cohen Chi-X Global Holdings
36	37	38	39	40
Donal Byrne Corvil	R. Cromwell Coulson OTC Markets Group	Alfred Eskandar Portware	理查德Korhammer SR Labs	Hazem Dawani OptionsCity Software