The 2015 Tech 50: Chris Concannon

< The 2015 Tech 50: Racers to the Edge

16
Chris Concannon
President and Chief Executive Officer
BATS Global Markets
PNR

The founders of BATS Global Markets prided themselves on their computer programming backgrounds and distance from Wall Street. They set up shop in the Kansas City area, launching an alternative trading system in 2006, obtained an exchange license in 2008 and took off from there. Today BATS is the second-biggest U.S. stock market operator and No. 1 in European trading. The BATS BZX Options Exchange is fourth in U.S. equity options market share. And the management cast changed in December, when former Nasdaq OMX Group executive Chris Concannon came in as president, based in New York. He ushered the company into foreign exchange by overseeing its acquisition of the Hotspot platform from KCG Holdings in March (see Daniel Coleman, No. 12). At the end of that month he added the CEO title, succeeding Joe Ratterman (No. 16 last year), a member of BATS’s founding team, who remains chairman, stationed at headquarters in Lenexa, Kansas. With an MBA from St. John’s University and a JD from Catholic University’s Columbus School of Law, Concannon was head of transaction services at Nasdaq (and a colleague of Adena Friedman, No. 10) during the acquisitive 2003–’09 period and then was president and COO of high-tech market maker Virtu Financial. This year BATS completed the integration of markets it acquired from Direct Edge Holdings “with no service interruption and no loss of market share,” says Concannon, 47, crediting “the team led by our global CIO Chris Isaacson [that is] as good as I’ve ever seen.” Three major projects are due for completion by November: a London matching engine for Hotspot; a data center migration for the Hotspot U.S. engine; and the launch of a second options exchange, EDGX Options. “Given our history, we fully expect to execute on all three according to plan,” Concannon says.

See the full story, “The 2015 Tech 50: Racers to the Edge.”

The 2015 Tech 50

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1. Jeffrey Sprecher Intercontinental Exchange 2. Catherine Bessant Bank of America Corp. 3. Phupinder Gill CME Group 4. Lance Uggla Markit 5. Robert Goldstein BlackRock

6. Shawn Edwards & Vlad Kliatchko Bloomberg 7. R. Martin Chavez Goldman Sachs Group 8. Deborah Hopkins Citi Ventures 9. Stephen Neff Fidelity Investments 10. Adena Friedman Nasdaq OMX Group

11. David Craig Thomson Reuters 12. Daniel Coleman KCG Holdings 13. Michael Spencer ICAP 14. Michael Bodson Depository Trust & Clearing Corp. 15. Charles Li Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing

16. Chris Concannon BATS Global Markets 17. Christopher Perretta State Street Corp. 18. Antoine Shagoury London Stock Exchange Group 19. Kevin Rhein Wells Fargo & Co. 20. Neil Katz D.E. Shaw & Co.

21. Lee Olesky Tradeweb Markets 22. Richard McVey MarketAxess Holdings 23. Seth Merrin Liquidnet Holdings 24. Robert Alexander Capital One Financial Corp. 25. Frank Bisignano First Data Corp.

26. John Marcante Vanguard Group 27. Joseph Squeri Citadel 28. Lou Eccleston TMX Group 29. Claude Honegger Credit Suisse 30. Chris Corrado MSCI

31. David Gledhill DBS Bank 32. John Bates Software AG 33. Michael Cooper BT Radianz 34. Gary Scholten Principal Financial Group 35. Sunil Hirani trueEX Group

36. Hauke Stars Deutsche BÖrse 37. Brian Conlon First Derivatives 38. Jim Minnick eVestment 39. Lars Seier Christensen & Kim Fournais 40. Tyler Kim MaplesFS

41. Jim McGuire Charles Schwab Corp. 42. Steven O’Hanlon Numerix 43. Sebastián Ceria Axioma 44. Yasuki Okai NRI Holdings America 45. Stephane Dubois Xignite

46. Mazy Dar OpenFin 47. Brian Sentance Xenomorph Software 48. Mas Nakachi OpenGamma 49. John Lehner BNY Mellon Technology Solutions Group 50. Jock Percy Perseus