The 2015 Trading Technology 40: Kevin Kometer

February 02, 2015

#1 Kevin Kometer, Chief Information Officer, CME Group

< The 2015 Trading Technology 40: Going with the Flow

Kevin Kometer

Chief Information Officer

CME Group

Last year: 2

CME Group went through a reorganization last year, in part to hold the line on expenses. But it’s not because business is hurting. The big Chicago-based derivatives exchange operator’s net income through nine months rose 5 percent year-over-year, to $821 million, on $2.3 billion in revenue. The full year’s average daily volume climbed 9 percent, to a record 13.7 million contracts, the vast majority executed on the Globex electronic platform. On October 15, CME’s systems handled 39.6 million contracts across all venues — 12.6 million more than on the previous record day of May 29, 2013 — with nary a blip. All that is a testament to the capacity and agility of the technology infrastructure over which CIO Kevin Kometer has been presiding since 2008. Reliability and resilience — what Kometer, 50, terms “unparalleled predictability and consistency, posttrade as well as on the trading side” — now supersede low latency as the top performance objectives because, he says, customers require it. In fact, the reorganization is predicated on the idea that future growth will come from understanding and solving customers’ problems, rather than pushing out “solutions looking for problems.” One change in CME’s IT group was the creation of a “unified architecture team” under Ari Studnitzer, a top Kometer lieutenant, to bring that “singular focus on the customer” into systems development and innovation. CME’s first implementation of field-programmable gate array technology, as a pilot in an order-entry gateway last year, was just such a problem-solver: “It improved the ‘tails’ — predictability and consistency — by 99 percent without reducing median latency.”

See also Kometer's profiles in the 2013 Trading Technology 40 and the 2012 Trading Technology 30.

The 2015 Trading Technology 40