Chris Isaacson is Chief Operating Officer at Cboe Global Markets.
What were the key theme(s) for your business in 2024?
In 2024, Cboe was well-positioned to capture several long-term secular growth trends that we believe will continue well into 2025. Chief among these was the sustained growth in U.S. options trading, with the industry achieving record volumes for the fifth consecutive year in 2024. Simultaneously, we saw an increasing appetite for exposure to the U.S. markets from investors globally. In response to this demand, Cboe continued to grow its footprint across the U.S., Europe and APAC to better meet our customers where they are. We also continued to innovate and expanded our proprietary S&P 500 Index (SPX) and Cboe Volatility Index (VIX) product suites with new product launches, further enhancing the functionality and accessibility of our offerings for a wider range of customers.
As Cboe executed its business strategy throughout 2024, our leading-edge technology remained key to our success. Cboe’s technology powers every facet of our business, as evidenced by the incredible work delivered by our team this year – whether enhancing our market infrastructure to support the seamless rollout of multiple new products, features, and services, optimizing connectivity to facilitate greater access to our markets for investors outside the U.S., or strengthening the resiliency of our platforms to provide stable and efficient trading environments throughout all types of market conditions. Technology is key to how we meet customer demand and deliver on our business objectives.
What was the highlight of 2024?
One of the year’s achievements was our ability to navigate a volatile market environment while delivering record-breaking performance. Amid heightened volatility driven by ongoing geopolitical tensions, elections around the globe, and macroeconomic uncertainty, all Cboe’s markets continued to operate smoothly, maintaining greater than 99.9% uptime (with 25 of 27 markets at 100% uptime) while handling elevated trading volumes and record levels of message traffic. The resiliency of our markets, especially during the most volatile periods, is testament to the work and planning Cboe puts into business continuity.
At the same time, we executed a comprehensive slate of initiatives to further enhance the performance, resiliency, scalability and telemetry of our exchanges. In equities, we began deploying Dedicated Cores, beginning with our U.S. markets. Dedicated Cores was a standout success and exceeded even our own high expectations in improving performance for customers. In derivatives, we introduced a new architecture to access our options markets and deployed it one of our four options exchanges. This has given our customers a more consistent experience when quoting and accessing liquidity. On any given day, Cboe processes 100 billion quotes and orders across its four options markets, and this new enhancement has made messaging much more efficient. It’s also worth noting we improved the insights our customers have into their trading on our markets with the introduction of a new timestamping service which has been rolled out in our U.S. equity markets and is coming to our other global markets soon.
Expectations for 2025?
A key milestone in early 2025 will be our final technology migration in Canada, with Cboe Canada transitioning to Cboe’s proprietary technology platform. This migration marks the culmination of a multi-year effort to unify our markets under a single, globally consistent, yet locally optimized technology stack. Cboe is well-known for its capacity to release new software updates every week across our global exchanges – a capability we view as a major competitive differentiator. This capability, combined with having all of our equity, options, and futures exchanges now on a common tech platform, significantly benefits Cboe and our customers. We can develop and deploy changes with greater speed and flexibility, while maximizing opportunities for our clients to utilize new capabilities.
Beyond this, we will continue to harness our technology to expand the reach of our products, data and services into new markets, while delivering a state-of-the-art trading environment for our customers. This includes powering the newly rebranded Cboe Data Vantage business to new heights by delivering our data, access, analytics, and insights closer to customers. We’re also excited to introduce a new brand identity for our exchange technology platform: Cboe Titanium, or Cboe Ti for short. Much like its namesake, Cboe Ti represents lightweight strength, durability and exceptional resilience, offering a robust and future-proof foundation for our markets.
Trends underway that will be important?
We expect several emerging trends will continue to reshape the industry. The evolution of technology, increasingly globalized markets, 24-hour trading, and shifting investor behaviors will demand continuous innovation from exchanges. We see significant new opportunities with the democratization of data, continued smart adoption of cloud services, clearing, and data and analytics. Artificial intelligence will also play an increasingly transformative role in our business and operations. After numerous successful AI use cases were rolled out in 2024, we plan to launch even more new initiatives in 2025, empowered by our AI Center of Excellence, which fosters Cboe’s adoption of emerging technologies like generative AI. Cboe is extremely well-positioned to capitalize on many trends and we will continue to strengthen our global technology, team and capabilities to meet the evolving needs of our customers around the world.
