< The 2015 Tech 50: Racers to the Edge

CME Group’s Phupinder Gill is known simply as Gill — even on quarterly earnings calls — because of the difficulty that people have pronouncing his first name. Investors, however, have had little trouble with Gill’s performance since he took over as CEO of the world’s largest exchange operator in May 2012. The Chicago-based company’s shares soared nearly 110 percent on his watch through June, powered by a 13 percent rise in pro forma net income over the past two years. “Technology is essentially the core of almost everything that we do at CME Group,” says Gill, 54, who grew up in Singapore and came to the U.S. in the early ’80s to get his BA in finance and MBA from Washington State University. At the center of that technology sits the Globex electronic trading platform, a sophisticated matching engine that enables investors in more than 150 countries to trade, 24 hours a day, futures and options in everything from currencies, interest rates and equity indexes to agricultural commodities and energy products. With approximately 70 percent of CME’s $3 billion in annual revenue coming from the U.S., Gill is focused on growing internationally through partnerships with the likes of Brazil’s BM&FBovespa, the Dubai Mercantile Exchange and Bursa Malaysia Derivatives. “The value proposition to them in many cases is internationalization and the introduction to clients who need the products that they have,” he explains. “The value to us is, the Globex matching engine becomes simply the Bloomberg of the futures industry.” Gill is also looking to participate in the current fintech boom. CME has taken stakes in six early-stage companies through Liquidity Ventures I, a fund it created in 2013 to invest in start-ups involved in big-data analytics, cryptocurrency, machine learning, next-generation computing, payments and security.

See the full story, “The 2015 Tech 50: Racers to the Edge.”

 
The 2015 Tech 50

1. Jeffrey Sprecher Intercontinental Exchange 2. Catherine Bessant Bank of America Corp. Model Portfolios to Deliver Alternative Asset Exposure Sponsored by BlackRock April 29, 2025 3. Phupinder Gill CME Group 4. Lance Uggla Markit 5. Robert Goldstein BlackRock

6. Shawn Edwards & Vlad Kliatchko Bloomberg 7. R. Martin Chavez Goldman Sachs Group 8. Deborah Hopkins Citi Ventures 9. Stephen Neff Fidelity Investments 10. Adena Friedman Nasdaq OMX Group

11. David Craig Thomson Reuters 12. Daniel Coleman KCG Holdings 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. Christopher Perretta State Street Corp. 18. Antoine Shagoury London Stock Exchange Group 19. Kevin Rhein Wells Fargo & Co. 20. Neil Katz D.E. Shaw & Co.

21. Lee Olesky Tradeweb Markets 22. Richard McVey MarketAxess Holdings 23. Seth Merrin Liquidnet Holdings 24. Robert Alexander Capital One Financial Corp. 25. Frank Bisignano First Data Corp.

26. John Marcante Vanguard Group 27. Joseph Squeri Citadel 28. Lou Eccleston TMX Group 29. Claude Honegger Credit Suisse 30. Chris Corrado MSCI

31. David Gledhill DBS Bank 32. John Bates Software AG 33. Michael Cooper BT Radianz 34. Gary Scholten Principal Financial Group 35. Sunil Hirani trueEX Group

36. Hauke Stars Deutsche BÖrse 37. Brian Conlon First Derivatives 38. Jim Minnick eVestment 39. Lars Seier Christensen & Kim Fournais 40. Tyler Kim MaplesFS

41. Jim McGuire Charles Schwab Corp. 42. Steven O'Hanlon Numerix 43. Sebastián Ceria Axioma 44. Yasuki Okai NRI Holdings America 45. Stephane Dubois Xignite

46. Mazy Dar OpenFin 47. Brian Sentance Xenomorph Software 48. Mas Nakachi OpenGamma 49. John Lehner BNY Mellon Technology Solutions Group 50. Jock Percy Perseus