The 2016 Tech 50: Chris Concannon

< The 2016 Tech 50

16
Chris Concannon
President and Chief Executive Officer
Bats Global Markets
Last year: 16

Bats Global Markets’ first attempt at an IPO, on March 23, 2012, was an embarrassment. A technical breakdown forced the company to abort the offering on its own exchange. The demons were exorcised on April 15, 2016, when 15.3 million Bats Global Markets shares began trading on BZX Exchange, one of the Lenexa, Kansas–based company’s four equity platforms. “The IPO was not the finish line,” says Chris Concannon, 48, president since December 2014 and CEO since March 2015. Investors clearly have agreed, pushing the $19 offering price as high as $29 on May 31 before it fell to $25 as of early July. In the context of the company’s business accomplishments, the IPO was almost an afterthought. Founded in 2005 as an alternative trading system and licensed as a U.S. exchange in 2008, Bats is now No. 2 in U.S. equity market share and No. 1 in Europe, runs two fast-growing U.S. options markets and owns foreign exchange platform Hotspot, whose acquisition from KCG Holdings was engineered by Concannon last year. In early May, Bats reported that its first-quarter operating income had virtually doubled, to $62 million, from a year earlier. The company also claimed a market-leading 26.2 percent share of trading in exchange-traded funds — it has been No. 1 since February 2014 — with 14 listings added in the first quarter, bringing the total to 70. On April 1, Bats acquired news and data provider ETF.com as part of its plan to be “a major player across the entire ETF ecosystem,” says Concannon, a graduate of Catholic University’s Columbus School of Law, onetime Securities and Exchange Commission staff attorney, former head of transaction services at Nasdaq and president and COO of Virtu Financial. “I have always loved the exchange business,” he says, adding, “The growth of fintech services will undoubtedly redefine the costs of investing.” He believes blockchain, or distributed ledger, “will play a role in the future of the financial services sector,” but “we are at the very beginning of the discovery process.”

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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