Under the leadership of Craig Donohue, CME Group expanded and transformed its business through corporate restructuring, electronic trading, mergers and acquisitions, global strategic investments, and extensions into new businesses, including OTC clearing, index services and technology offerings.
He was instrumental in designing and achieving CME’s demutualization and initial public offering, which made CME the first publicly-traded financial exchange in the United States. He served as Chief Executive Officer of CME from 2004 until 2012. During that time, CME Group’s market capitalization increased by 550 percent. Throughout his career at CME he played an important role in transforming CME from a century old, trading floor-based business model to a modern, global electronic powerhouse, with electronic trading now comprising the vast majority of total trading volumes.
He led the successful completion of more than $20 billion in mergers and acquisitions, including CME’s historic merger with the Chicago Board of Trade in 2007 and the acquisition of both the New York Mercantile Exchange and Commodity Exchange Inc. in 2008. He aggressively led the company’s global expansion, with approximately $1 billion of strategic investments and commercial partnerships with leading exchanges and clearinghouses in Brazil, Mexico, Japan, India, Singapore, Malaysia, Korea, Dubai and South Africa. During this time, he has also globalized the organization, significantly expanding the workforce outside of the U.S. and developing infrastructure and operating presence across four continents.
