The 2015 Tech 50: Lou Eccleston

< The 2015 Tech 50: Racers to the Edge

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Lou Eccleston
Chief Executive Officer
TMX Group
Last year: 21

Given the increasingly high-tech nature of the exchange business, it seems only fitting for a market operator like Canada’s TMX Group to hire an accomplished financial technologist as CEO. But the choice was still something of a leap — a cross-border one — for Lou Eccleston, who took the helm last November after Thomas Kloet retired. A hard-charging trading and market data industry executive earlier in his career, Eccleston spent 14 years with Bloomberg, beginning in 1988, including six years as head of Bloomberg Tradebook. Then, in four years with Thomson Financial, he served as president of global sales, marketing and services and president of the banking and brokerage group. As of 2008 he was with McGraw Hill Financial; in his last four years there, as president of S&P Capital IQ, he created a Google-style innovation lab and characterized the culture as that of “a $1 billion start-up.” Eccleston hasn’t lost that spark. In June he launched the eXplore TMX Innovation Lab “to leverage our existing technology and human capital to incubate and develop new solutions for our clients.” He says, “We need to act like the little guy” and “People will view us as an entrepreneurial company.” The 58-year-old is wrangling with a highly diversified business portfolio, ranging from the flagship Toronto Stock Exchange and TSX Venture Exchange to energy and derivatives markets to technology assets like TMX Atrium and a microwave network it bought last year. Having recently completed a six-month organizational assessment, Eccleston says that “technology-driven solutions” and “a client-focused culture” will be among TMX’s hallmarks. “Building on the strong foundation that we have,” he adds, the emphasis will be on defining a well-integrated “TMX the company,” as opposed to “TMX the group of companies.”

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The 2015 Tech 50