Building a Global Data and Analytics Powerhouse

Catherine Clay, Executive Vice President and Global Head of Data and Access Solutions at Cboe Global Markets, speaks to Finance Magnates about the company’s newly created Data and Access Solutions division and how it is positioned to scale alongside Cboe’s continued global expansion.

Why did Cboe Global Markets create its Data and Access Solutions division?

Catherine Clay: Cboe’s Data and Access Solutions division was created to bring our data, Analytics and real-time global market data businesses into one team.

The division provides our clients with seamless access to all of our capabilities – including global indices, analytics and execution platforms, as well as data, market and risk analytics – in one optimized and holistic global offering.

The creation of this division comes at an exciting time as Cboe continues to emerge as a global market operator and extend its products, services and technology offerings into new markets and geographies.

Yet as the trading environment becomes increasingly globalized, our clients also want greater efficiency and reduced fragmentation in how they access their trading resources.

Sourcing has become a challenge as market participants are often required to connect to multiple access points to receive separate, yet complementary, information.

Data and Access Solutions is positioned to move in lockstep with the continued global expansion of Cboe’s exchange business.

We are streamlined to ease those pain points for our clients in accessing and analyzing data by delivering pre-trade, at-trade and post-trade tools all in one place.

In addition, the new division has unified our global sales teams so clients can now access all of our services through a single point of contact.

What was the history of Cboe’s data and analytics businesses before becoming the Data and Access Solutions division today?

Catherine: Our data and analytics business – Cboe Information Solutions – is a result of several strategic acquisitions: LiveVol and DataShop in 2015, Silexx in 2017 and Hanweck, FT Options and Trade Alert in 2020, in addition to our existing Cboe Global Indices business.

Each of these acquired firms were best-in-breed companies and have brought together an exceptional team of quantitative, technical and business expertise.

Collectively, these companies also helped to round out Cboe’s set of solutions to further meet our clients’ needs throughout the entire trading lifecycle.

Cboe Information Solutions’ comprehensive suite of data, analytics, indices and execution services helped to optimize the customer experience – from pre-trade, at-trade to post-trade – by providing insights, alpha opportunities, portfolio optimizations and seamless workflows.

On the other hand, Cboe’s broader acquisition of Bats Global Markets in 2017 helped to bring together the pieces for our global market data business.

With Bats, Cboe became one of the world’s largest exchange holdings companies and expanded its business into U.S. and European equities, ETPs and global foreign exchange (FX), in addition to its legacy options and futures businesses.

Today, Cboe operates thirteen exchanges across U.S. and European equities, options, futures and FX, and offers a wide range of real-time, historical and derived data sets, as well as proprietary market data feeds from all those markets.

The current environment has shown that understanding risk has never been more important.

We continue to see heightened demand from our customers for historical data sets, sophisticated analytics and more robust market intelligence, and Data and Access Solutions is positioned to solve for those needs.

Tell us about Cboe’s planned expansion into Asia Pacific and what that means for Data and Access Solutions.

Catherine: Asia Pacific represents an important region that is new to Cboe and will complement our extensive global presence, which already covers most of the major markets in North America, Europe and across many securities-related asset classes, derivatives and clearing.

With our planned acquisition of Chi-X Asia Pacific, we expect to gain a significant presence in the region and boots on the ground to further engage with customers there.

From Data and Access Solutions’ perspective, we are excited about opportunities to move with Cboe into these new markets and geographies and further build out our business globally.

For example, with the addition of Australia and Japan to our current presence in the U.S., Canada and across 18 European countries, we’ll be able to offer data from all major markets around the world and create a truly global equity market data offering.

The move into Asia Pacific also enables us to further enhance customer access to Cboe’s unique proprietary product set, such as index options and futures products, where we see growing customer demand and plan to support the data and analytics needs there.

As Cboe continues to grow by expanding into new geographies and asset classes globally, we expect to gain new sources of data into our stack, which will feed into the entire ecosystem for Data and Access Solutions, help us create new indices and products, and ultimately drive more trading on Cboe’s markets.

What are some of your data and analytics offerings that cater to the Asia Pacific region?

Catherine: We continue to see rising retail participation in the markets globally. This has led to a lot of collective thinking at Cboe about how to best serve this new generation of investors – whether it is through offering enhanced investor education through our Options Institute, broadening access to our markets, or delivering new products and solutions that are tailored to suit retail investors.

In Asia Pacific, we continue to see growing customer demand for non-domestic equities in particular. In response, Cboe this year launched early trading hours on our EDGX Equities Exchange to provide the global retail community access to our U.S. equities market at a time that suits their needs.

Our U.S. equities market data feeds, such as our flagship Cboe One product, were enhanced to support early trading hours on EDGX.

We also see new retail traders becoming more interested in “beyond the basic” derivatives strategies, as they begin to move into more sophisticated products.

These include Mini Cboe Volatility Index (VIX) futures, which along with the standard VIX futures, are available during both our regular and global trading hours sessions, enabling investors around the world to trade their views and manage risk around the clock.

To cater to growing investor demand globally for derivatives trading, Cboe plans to extend global trading hours for both VIX and S&P 500 Index (SPX) options to nearly 24 hours a day, 5 days a week, later this year – same as our VIX futures products.

Data and Access Solutions will be focused on providing data and analytics to serve investors during these expanded global trading hours, with plans to eventually support the entire product suite.

In addition, we are currently exploring innovative ways to bring options market data and analytics to a broader market segment as interest in the asset class continues to surge with both our retail and institutional clients globally.

As an integrated team, what’s next for Data and Access Solutions?

Catherine: As a unified group, we plan to continue integrating our products and technology stack, incorporate new asset classes and ultimately build out a scaled, global distribution network.

But first, we are starting by solving for some of the plumbing for our clients, which is foundational to the experience that they will have with us.

For example, we are harmonizing legal agreements with clients globally and making sure that our entitlement systems are the same for any product.

Next is the ideation around our global market data strategy and what we might bring to the market, including potential ways to strategically bundle our product suite. We believe this will deliver unrivaled, transparent market intelligence to further simplify global market complexities for our customers.

In addition, our real-time market data business has been ahead in terms of having a cloud distribution strategy, which now provides a nice tailwind for the rest of the analytics business.

We’ve also entered the crypto space through our licensing agreement with CoinRoutes. We think crypto traders will need the same solutions as market participants in other asset classes – thus giving Cboe the opportunity to potentially provide tools around best execution, margin modeling, portfolio analytics and volatility.

As always, we will continue to listen to our customers and work with them to develop smart and innovative solutions that address their needs.

Working as an integrated team over the past few months has allowed us to unleash a lot of creative thinking and to take a more collaborative approach to client relationships.

We’re excited to leverage the strengths of each team and look forward to further executing on our vision of building out a global data and analytics powerhouse.

To learn more about the full suite of products and services offered by Cboe Data and Access Solutions, visit Data and Access Solutions (cboe.com)