The 2015 Trading Technology 40: Kevin Kometer

#1 Kevin Kometer, Chief Information Officer, CME Group

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< The 2015 Trading Technology 40: Going with the Flow

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Kevin Kometer
Chief Information Officer
CME Group
Last year: 2

CME Group went through a reorganization last year, in part to hold the line on expenses. But it’s not because business is hurting. The big Chicago-based derivatives exchange operator’s net income through nine months rose 5 percent year-over-year, to $821 million, on $2.3 billion in revenue. The full year’s average daily volume climbed 9 percent, to a record 13.7 million contracts, the vast majority executed on the Globex electronic platform. On October 15, CME’s systems handled 39.6 million contracts across all venues — 12.6 million more than on the previous record day of May 29, 2013 — with nary a blip. All that is a testament to the capacity and agility of the technology infrastructure over which CIO Kevin Kometer has been presiding since 2008. Reliability and resilience — what Kometer, 50, terms “unparalleled predictability and consistency, posttrade as well as on the trading side” — now supersede low latency as the top performance objectives because, he says, customers require it. In fact, the reorganization is predicated on the idea that future growth will come from understanding and solving customers’ problems, rather than pushing out “solutions looking for problems.” One change in CME’s IT group was the creation of a “unified architecture team” under Ari Studnitzer, a top Kometer lieutenant, to bring that “singular focus on the customer” into systems development and innovation. CME’s first implementation of field-programmable gate array technology, as a pilot in an order-entry gateway last year, was just such a problem-solver: “It improved the ‘tails’ — predictability and consistency — by 99 percent without reducing median latency.”

See also Kometer’s profiles in the 2013 Trading Technology 40 and the 2012 Trading Technology 30.


The 2015 Trading Technology 40

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Kevin Kometer
CME Group
Richard Prager
BlackRock
Raymond Tierney III
Bloomberg Tradebook
Jonathan Ross
KCG Holdings
Charles Vice
Intercontinental Exchange
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Zef Nikolla

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Chris Isaacson
BATS Global Markets
Bradley Peterson
Nasdaq OMX Group
Brad Levy
MarkitSERV
Dan Keegan
Citi
Ronald DePoalo
Fidelity Institutional
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Mark McQueen

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Margaret Fox

Gerard Beatty
Goldman Sachs Group
Gerald O’Connell
CBOE Holdings
Brenda Hoffman
TMX Group
Billy Hult
Tradeweb Markets
Nicholas Themelis
MarketAxess Holdings
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Steve Randich

Martin H. Simon

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Todd Plitt

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A.E. Fletcher Photography

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
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Photographer:http://www.digitalh

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Dennis Degnan

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Paul Elledge

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
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Picasa

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SENATE BANKING

Andrew Harrer

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Takashi KATO

Robert Cornish
International Securities Exchange
Tyler Moeller andJoshua Walksy
Broadway Technology
Rishi Nangalia
REDI Holdings
Manoj Narang
Tradeworx,
Thesys Technologies
Oki Matsumoto
Monex Group
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unknown

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Douglas Kurn

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Luludi/LUZ

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William Neumann Photography

Alasdair Haynes
Aquis Exchange
Veronica Augustsson
Cinnober Financial Technology
Stu Taylor
Algomi
Luís Otávio Saliba Furtado
BM&FBovespa
Tal Cohen
Chi-X Global Holdings
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Donal Byrne
Corvil
R. Cromwell Coulson
OTC Markets Group
Alfred Eskandar
Portware
Richard Korhammer
SR Labs
Hazem Dawani
OptionsCity Software

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