CEO Letter - February 2020

By: , Feb 2020

Dear Colleagues,

Welcome to the February issue of Focus.

We are delighted to continue The WFE’s 2020 Series, a special feature we started last month with 16 executives from exchanges, CCPs and regulators around the world giving their viewpoints on the year ahead, for their business, country, and region.

This month, we are pleased to welcome three more contributors as follows:

  • Ignacio Solloa, Chief Executive Officer, BME Clearing
  • Terry Duffy, Chairman & Chief Executive Officer, CME Group
  • Khalid Abdullah Al Hussan, Chief Executive Officer, Saudi Stock Exchange (Tadawul) 

We also feature another executive in the magazine - José Antonio Martínez, Chief Executive Officer, Santiago Exchange - who tells us about the importance of Investor Relations in creating sustainable markets. In his article, he outlines the projects underway at the exchange designed to improve corporate governance, care for the environment, and generate a better quality of life for society in general.

This issue also includes a Q&A with Mario Palhares, Director, B3 on the firm’s success in the ETF market. The 22 ETFs listed on B3 reached BRL 26.6 billion of AuM in the year 2019, a huge jump of 126% versus 2018, and Mario outlines some of the factors behind that impressive growth.

Brad Peterson, Executive Vice President and Chief Technology & Information Officer and Lars Ottersgård, Executive Vice President and Head of Market Technology, Nasdaq, write about their most recent report entitled Nasdaq Decodes: Tech Trends 2020, a report which looks at the technology trends they think are having the most impact on our industry, and their outlook for the year ahead.

In February, the WFE published a benchmarking paper examining the organisational structures for enterprise and operational risk within market infrastructures. We believe that this paper will serve as a foundation of how market infrastructures are establishing and directing their enterprise risk functions, in addition to showcasing the actions of the industry, in order to share practices as a step towards agreeing and harmonising practices globally.

The WFE Research Team’s monthly insights piece focuses on one of the WFE’s flagship indicators: equity market capitalisation. The article examines how this indicator can be analysed and/or implemented in wider analyses based on its statistical properties.

And finally, we hope you enjoy the infographic outlining the WFE’s four business priorities for 2020, providing a visual snapshot of our key focus areas for the year ahead. Thank you.