Dealing with post-financial-crisis derivatives trading and clearing regulations, CME Group feels its customers’ pain. Phupinder Gill believes the company is uniquely placed to ease those burdens by “leveraging technologies to make clients’ lives easier.” The $3 billion-in-revenue parent of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and other markets, including recently launched CME Europe, has been designated a systemically important financial institution, notes Gill, who has been CEO for the last two of his 26 years with the organization. “More agencies are looking at us” — not just futures regulators but also the Bank of England and Federal Reserve — “and that raises the cost of compliance.” In that sense, CME is no different from other exchanges that spent the previous decade focused on the speed, reliability and functionality of their trading platforms. An opportunity for CME to set itself apart and gain a competitive edge lies in the application of its global reach and economies of scale to “help clients meet regulatory requirements as cost-effectively as possible,” says Gill, 53. Building “seamless, straight-through regulatory reporting” into the transaction flow, for example, is especially appealing to “smaller clients lacking the bandwidth to do it on their own.” Not neglecting the longer term, CME has formalized a formerly ad hoc strategic investments function, targeting “early-stage companies that can transform trading in a meaningful way.”
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Phupinder Gill
Chief Executive Officer
CME Group
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The 2014 Tech 50