Site: www.cboe.com
Founded: 1973
Clients: Investors, traders
Value proposition: Options exchange, technology solutions for trading, investing
The executive team: Catherine Clay, senior vice president, global head of information solutions.
Cboe provides trading and investment solutions for investors around the world. It’s trading venues include the largest options exchange in the United States and the largest stock exchange by value traded in Europe.
We recently spoke with Catherine Clay, senior vice president, global head of information solutions, about how Cboe manages its new technological endeavors and internal processes.
Clay has been in the finance industry for 25 years. She began as a derivatives trader in 1994, trading equity and index options. Following her 12-year trading career, she founded a FinTech company called LiveVol, which Cboe acquired in August 2015. LiveVol started as an equity and index options technology and services provider and expanded into other asset classes. In her current role at Cboe, Clay runs a group called Information Solutions, which includes derived data and analytics, index calculation services and execution platforms.
Cboe Vest
Cboe has been branching out into investment solutions to elevate its offerings for clients. One such investment is Cboe Vest, an innovative company that uses derivatives in target-outcome wealth management strategies.
“Cboe Vest constructs financial products that give consumers the ability to have a known outcome, and some protection using derivatives in a package, whether it’s a mutual fund or ETF, or UIT,” Clay says.
She adds that Cboe Vest is getting a lot of traction from the idea that wrapping derivatives in a product makes it much easier to show end-clients how it works. Cboe applauds the use of derivatives in wealth management strategies that offer a protection layer for clients.
Software Development Process
Cboe has a disciplined software lifecycle. According to Clay, most of Cboe’s current processes were introduced overhauled after the company’s 2017 acquisition of Bats Global Markets, a global stock exchange operator known for its exceptional technology. Today’s Cboe engineering team is very collaborative and works in an agile environment with daily stand-ups and weekly sprints.