SGX taps CME director Matthew Judge to run Europe

Matthew Judge, the former senior director of sales at CME Group in London, is set to join Singapore Exchange as its new head of Europe just five months after the former SGX European head left the firm.

Judge, who worked in sales at CME in London for almost 18 years, left the US exchange group in recent weeks and is set to join SGX’s London-based team early next year, according to sources.

Judge will become SGX’s head of Europe while Craig Cohen, the Asian exchange’s head of North America sales, will lead SGX’s US business, sources have said.

The appointments follow the departure from SGX of Alex Lenhart, the exchange’s former chief representative in the UK and US who left in June.

A spokesperson for Singapore Exchange declined to comment on the moves.

Judge joined CME Group’s London-based business in 2004 as a director in account management for the US exchange’s main trading system Globex before being promoted to senior director of client development and sales in 2010, a position he held for more than 11 years.

Chicago-based Cohen joined SGX in 2018 after two years in prime brokerage sales as Jefferies and almost a decade in prime sales at JP Morgan.

Lenhart, who joined SGX from investment bank Credit Suisse in 2016, left the Asian exchange in the middle of this year to become head of sales at London-based digital asset derivatives trading firm GFO-X.

Singapore Exchange has for years been looking to promote its Singapore-based markets to traders in the key international centres including those in the US and Europe.

SGX reached an agreement at the start of this month to invest $200 (£146m) in a consortium-based takeover of Chicago-based fintech Trading Technologies.

SGX and Transaction Network Services made available in May various low latency services within the SGX data centre to encourage more international trading on the exchange’s Singapore market.