The 2016 Tech 50: Phupinder Gill

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Phupinder Gill
Chief Executive Officer
CME Group
Last year: 3

Financial industry CEOs typically don’t throw their caution to the winds of technological change. They are content to wait and see, hedge their bets or adopt fast-follower strategies. Phupinder Gill plays it differently. “We have to be on the bleeding edge to understand emerging technologies,” says the CEO of CME Group, the $3.3 billion-in-revenue parent of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, Chicago Board of Trade, New York Mercantile Exchange, Commodity Exchange and a leading central counterparty clearing operation. The 55-year-old, who has been CEO since 2012, is no wild-eyed radical. He says it’s a given that CME is leading-edge by virtue of Globex, the pioneering electronic trading platform that was launched in 1992 and handles 89 percent of average daily volume (which totaled 14.9 million contracts in May, up 6 percent year-over-year). He believes change is evolutionary rather than revolutionary but says that “evolution will be constant” and its cumulative effects make familiarity with the bleeding edge imperative. Gill and CME go there via formal vehicles — an innovation lab and a strategic investment fund, CME Ventures — as well as through awards and other programs that encourage rank-and-file engagement in innovation. Gill has visited London fintech incubation space Level39 as part of “trying to figure out what all this means.” And he meets regularly with Rumi Morales, executive director of CME Ventures, whose portfolio ranges from big data (Powerlytics) to cybersecurity (Fortscale and SparkCognition) to quantum computing (1QBit) and includes cryptocurrency and distributed ledger companies Digital Asset Holdings, Digital Currency Group and Ripple. “The technologies are evolving, and many things are connected,” says Gill, a Singapore native and Washington State University MBA, who was president of CME Group and its predecessor, CME Holdings, for eight years before becoming CEO. “We have several use cases of blockchain across the firm to help us understand if it actually makes life more efficient.”

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The 2016 Tech 50

1. Catherine Bessant Bank of America Corp. 2. Jeffrey Sprecher Intercontinental Exchange 3. Lance Uggla Markit 4. Phupinder Gill CME Group 5. Shawn Edwards and Vlad Kliatchko Bloomberg 6. R. Martin Chavez Goldman Sachs Group

7. Robert Goldstein BlackRock 8. Adena Friedman Nasdaq 9. Deborah Hopkins Citi Ventures 10. Daniel Coleman KCG Holdings 11. Stephen Neff Fidelity Investments 12. David Craig Thomson Reuters

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. Blythe Masters Digital Asset Holdings 18. David Rutter R3CEV

19. Neil Katz D.E. Shaw & Co. 20. Lee Olesky Tradeweb Markets 21. Richard McVey MarketAxess Holdings 22. Seth Merrin Liquidnet Holdings 23. Robert Alexander Capital One Financial Corp. 24. Brad Katsuyama IEX Group

25. Antoine Shagoury State Street Corp. 26. David Gledhill DBS Bank 27. Lou Eccleston TMX Group 28. Andreas Preuss Deutsche BÖrse 29. Dan Schulman PayPal Holdings 30. Scott Dillon Wells Fargo & Co.

31. Mike Chinn S&P Global Market Intelligence 32. Craig Donohue Options Clearing Corp. 33. Gary Norcross Fidelity National Information Services 34. Steven O’Hanlon Numerix 35. Sebastián Ceria Axioma 36. Michael Cooper BT Radianz

37. Tyler Kim MaplesFS 38. Neal Pawar AQR Capital Management 39. David Harding Winton Capital Management 40. Chris Corrado London Stock Exchange Group 41. Brian Conlon First Derivatives 42. Jim Minnick eVestment

43. Stephane Dubois Xignite 44. Mazy Dar OpenFin 45. Yasuki Okai NRI Holdings America 46. Kim Fournais Saxo Bank 47. Jock Percy Perseus 48. Robert Schifellite Broadridge Financial Solutions

49. Brian Sentance Xenomorph Software 50. Pieter van der Does Adyen