CME Group Outlook for 2025
What changed in your business over the past year and what was your biggest achievement?
Last year, our clients had to navigate accelerating economic and geopolitical uncertainty all around the world. As a result, they turned to CME Group to manage their risk, driving record volumes of 26.5 million contracts a day in 2024 and double-digit volume growth across every asset class. It’s been more than a decade since we’ve seen growth in every single sector like that. It’s an example of the importance of risk management. As we start 2025, we are focused on providing the products, liquidity and efficiencies our clients need in this market environment.
What is your most important project this year (regulatory or otherwise)?
Like every year, our team works to deliver efficiencies to our clients. Whether it’s expanding our cross-margining programs or launching new services like our new FXSpot+ offering to connect futures and cash liquidity, we’re always searching for new efficiencies for our client base. For example, we deliver an average of $20 billion in average daily margin savings in interest rates alone. Those are huge, real savings that market participants around the world depend on to hedge and pursue opportunities and they’re unmatched by any other exchange.
What are you most excited for in 2025?
Our industry is evolving and we are looking to meet our clients' needs today and in the future. We have a number of innovative solutions in the pipeline for this year. These build on the offerings we had in 2024 such as Bitcoin Friday futures - the most successful crypto launch in CME Group history - and credit futures, which help clients navigate credit exposure as corporate debt issuance continues to expand. Growth outside of the United States has been a big focus as well. We see sustained demand for our benchmark products internationally.
It’s also encouraging to see more producers and commercial participants managing their risk in our markets - not only in commodities but across every asset class. In addition, retail traders now represent our fastest-growing client segment, and we recently announced a partnership to launch futures trading with Robinhood. Futures and options may not have been part of retail traders’ toolkit in the past, but smaller-sized contracts, expanded data and analytics and a broader range of educational tools are all key to making our products more accessible to retail clients.
What are your biggest opportunities?
Market data is a big opportunity for us. New clients, especially sophisticated retail traders, use it to understand pricing and analyse trends in key markets. Our Q3 2024 market data revenue was $178 million, up by 6 percent year-on-year, and we’ve seen a big increase in institutional clients using our data to build new products and indices. Also on the data side, creating new benchmark indices is a key focus for us and builds on the success of Term SOFR, the global benchmark for new US dollar lending, with more than $8 trillion in loans from 90-plus countries referencing this rate.
In addition, options have never been more important with data-driven policy-making by central banks and increased event risk from intense weather, global conflict and shifts in trade policy. We’ve introduced additional expiries so clients can have even more precise tools to manage their event risk.
What do you see as the key themes and trends for your exchange and market infrastructure in 2025?
Uncertainty is here to stay, so the need for market participants to manage risk is a theme we’re going to see in markets throughout 2025 and beyond.
In terms of infrastructure, cloud computing is another trend we are watching and helping to lead. At CME Group, we’re a few years into our partnership with Google Cloud, which will allow us to unlock a tremendous amount of value for our clients. Our data products already operate in the cloud. This gives clients more efficient access to a range of data sets and analytics tools. We are currently completing the migration of clearing applications into the cloud, as well as building a new, industry-first specialised platform for our futures and options markets. I really believe these changes will transform derivatives markets - expanding access to market participants of all kinds all over the world.
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The views, thoughts and opinions contained in this Focus article belong solely to the author and do not necessarily reflect the WFE’s policy position on the issue, or the WFE’s views or opinions.