| 1 |
| Edwin Marcial |
| Chief Technology Officer |
| Intercontinental Exchange Group |
| Last year: 2 |
Edwin Marcial was part of the original crew — as few as six at one point — who got IntercontinentalExchange off the ground in 2000. “We were a true start-up,” recalls Marcial, then as now CTO of the company that chairman and CEO Jeffrey Sprecher built after he acquired a regional power exchange in 1997. “We were tiny but had big goals and grew quickly.” ICE’s lean, mean, multinational market-operating machine in November 2013 completed what once would have seemed incomprehensible: the $11 billion takeover of NYSE Euronext, owner of the world’s biggest equities exchange, whose roots predate ICE by 200 years. “This is a great challenge,” says Marcial, 46. But he is quick to emphasize that neither NYSE nor the historically commodity- and futures-focused ICE is a stranger to merger integrations. For Atlanta-based ICE the string started in 2001 with London’s International Petroleum Exchange. Now consisting of 23 regulated marketplaces and five clearinghouses, ICE has a pending deal with Singapore Mercantile Exchange that will make it the first Western acquirer of an Asian exchange and clearinghouse. Through it all, Marcial and his technology architecture have been important constants. “Our decision making and processes have been very consistent,” asserts the University of Florida graduate, who has a BS in computer science. “We have always taken a best-of-breed approach,” methodically evaluating which systems to adopt after mergers. NYSE is no exception. Marcial says he welcomes the perspectives of “some smart people over there,” noting that about 30 percent of NYSE’s 3,000-plus employees are technologists, versus “north of 40 percent” of ICE’s 1,000. “There are things we can learn from both sides. ICE runs very lean, and we have an opportunity to bring that approach to NYSE to be more technology-efficient.”
See also Marcial’s profiles in the 2013 Trading Technology 40 and the 2012 Trading Technology 30.
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< 40. R. Cromwell Coulson | The 2014 Trading Tech 40 | 2. Kevin Kometer > |
