2
Jeffrey Sprecher
Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
Intercontinental Exchange
Last year: 1
Nineteen years ago Jeffrey Sprecher paid $1 for Continental Power Exchange. Growing that test bed for electronic energy trading into Intercontinental Exchange, which in the first quarter of 2016 set records for revenue ($1.2 billion) and net income ($369 million), required quite a few leaps and bounds, not least the 2013 acquisition of NYSE Euronext for $11 billion. But the journey was methodical, if not entirely linear, as Sprecher assembled his global complex of 11 exchanges serving nine asset classes, along with six clearinghouses. Methodical, too, is the ICE chairman and CEO’s approach to the blockchain technology that many financial industry executives are trying to make sense of. “A lot of institutions in financial services are talking about how to deploy blockchain,” Sprecher, 61, says. “But the real value may be in the work toward common standards, a common vernacular.” Among the obstacles that blockchain, or distributed ledger, technology must overcome are laws and processes predicated on the existence of a definitive “golden record” for any transaction, he notes. “We will see an evolution rather than a revolution, but the work being done is interesting, as it has the industry talking about how to take costs out of the settlement system,” he explains. “To do that, the first thing we have to do is agree to a common set of standards.” In the here and now, the New York Stock Exchange in May officially launched Pillar, its unified technology platform for equities and options. “We’re getting better matches, better uptake from the industry, and we’re growing our market share,” Sprecher says. “Equity trading has evolved to the point that people thought more complexity would help. Frankly, we didn’t understand the complexity, and we said, ‘Let’s not do it,’?” opting instead to build a simpler architecture from scratch. ICE is also implementing an instant messaging system — for traders to communicate within the bounds of compliance requirements — and developing clearinghouse risk models. In June, six months after acquiring Interactive Data Corp. for $5.2 billion, ICE combined IDC and other data and analytics assets in an expanded ICE Data Services subsidiary “to offer clients a more complete, consolidated view of the markets,” according to Sprecher.
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The 2016 Tech 50
1. Catherine 2. Jeffrey Sprecher 3. Lance Uggla 4. Phupinder Gill 5. Shawn Edwards and Vlad Kliatchko 6. R. Martin Chavez |
7. Robert Goldstein 8. Adena Friedman 9. Deborah Hopkins 10. Daniel Coleman 11. Stephen Neff 12. David Craig |
13. Michael Spencer 14. Michael Bodson 15. Charles Li 16. Chris Concannon 17. Blythe Masters 18. David Rutter |
19. Neil Katz 20. Lee Olesky 21. Richard McVey 22. Seth Merrin 23. Robert Alexander 24. Brad Katsuyama |
25. Antoine Shagoury 26. David Gledhill 27. Lou Eccleston 28. Andreas Preuss 29. Dan Schulman 30. Scott Dillon |
31. Mike Chinn 32. Craig Donohue 33. Gary Norcross 34. Steven O’Hanlon 35. Sebastián Ceria 36. Michael Cooper |
37. Tyler Kim 38. Neal Pawar 39. David Harding 40. Chris Corrado 41. Brian Conlon 42. Jim Minnick |
43. Stephane Dubois 44. Mazy Dar 45. Yasuki Okai 46. Kim Fournais 47. Jock Percy 48. Robert Schifellite |
49. Brian Sentance 50. Pieter van der Does |