The WFE's Women Leaders 2022 - Vivian Yiu, Chief Operating Officer, Cboe FX

Member: Cboe Global Markets

Nominee’s name: Vivian Yiu

Nominee’s job title: Vice President, Cboe FX Chief Operating Officer

1. - Brief description of nominee’s role/job:

Vivian Yiu currently serves as the chief operating officer of Cboe FX at Cboe Global Markets. Cboe FX operates fully electronic trading platforms in New York and London for FX spot and non-deliverable forward products. Based in the New York office, she oversees 25 members of Cboe FX’s technology team and a global 24x5 trade desk. Working closely with the head of Cboe FX, her main responsibilities are for product strategy, budget planning, the execution of business initiatives, operations excellence and risk management.

2. - Short bio (career highlights, education, interests/hobbies):

Prior to her role as COO of Cboe FX, Vivian was vice president and head of markets planning & initiatives at Cboe. She was responsible for shaping the group’s strategic direction, including the features, pricing and positioning of Cboe US Markets’ product offerings in equities, futures, options and foreign exchange, as well as developing strategic and adaptive responses to competitive, regulatory and market structure developments.

Vivian joined Cboe Global Markets in February 2017 with Cboe’s acquisition of BATS Global Markets. Vivian joined BATS in January 2014 via its acquisition of Direct Edge, where she was director of product strategy, focusing on pricing strategy and smart order routing offerings.

Before Direct Edge and BATS, Vivian served as vice president in equities electronic trading product management at Lehman Brothers (and then Barclays Capital after its acquisition) and before Lehman Brothers she was vice president in equities futures front office technology at Goldman Sachs, where she started her career in finance.

She holds an MBA from New York University’s Leonard N. Stern School of Business and a BS in Operations Research from the School of Engineering and Applied Science at Columbia University. She also has executive business certifications from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and holds Series 7 and Series 63 licenses.

In her free time she loves to take long walks with her dogs, dabbles with some cooking, practises yoga and most of all loves travelling to new countries with her family.

3. - What were your professional highlights and challenges of 2021 (ie why should you be on this list):

In the first full year of my job as COO of Cboe FX, I led my team to deliver on three major initiatives. Firstly, a new exchange-hosted algo offering that aims to meet the growing demand for algorithmic execution in the FX market and which generated lots of positive industry attention when it launched. Secondly, my team introduced a new market data product, Cboe FX Replay, which has already started generating non-transaction revenue for Cboe FX and has a healthy pipeline of prospective subscribers. Thirdly, we kicked off an exciting organic growth initiative to build out a U.S. Treasuries trading platform that aims to attract high quality order flow and to reduce the market impact of large transactions, and which we plan to launch in the second quarter of 2022.

We also achieved a record market share of 16.7% for Cboe FX in 2021, and a record average daily volume for our non-deliverable forward offering, which increased four-fold from 2020 to over $400 million in 2021.

Outside of day-to-day work, I was involved in Cboe’s diversity efforts by serving as co-chair of Cboe’s Diversity Leadership Council and vice-chair of Cboe’s Women’s Initiative Mentorship Committee. The highpoint for me was launching the Women’s Mentorship Program. It now has over 60 pairs of mentors/mentees and has received excellent feedback from its participants. I also initiated bystander intervention training at Cboe, with more than 200 Cboe associates attending and learning techniques on how to intervene safely in harassment situations.

4. - What and who inspires/has inspired you to achieve your professional success:

I am blessed to have been brought up in Hong Kong, in a culture where almost all women work and where many women have achieved extraordinary professional success. As a child in Hong Kong, it never occurred to me that gender could be a barrier in the workplace. When I came to the United States to attend college and to start my career, I brought this mentality with me and I think it has given me the confidence to go after professional opportunities wherever I see them.

5. - What advice do you have for other women who aspire to be in leadership positions:

The main advice I would give is to always be authentic; people want to work with people, not robots, so be yourself and don’t try to hide your personality. Also, give up on trying to be perfect; it’s not possible in the first place and you will exhaust yourself trying to get there. Thirdly, I would say don’t wait to be noticed if you want a promotion or new position; the onus is on you to raise your hand and grab the opportunities in front of you.