ANALYSIS: CME sees technology, education supporting retail push
11th June, 2025|Radi Khasawneh
CME Group sees technology and education as key factors in the US group's efforts to grow further its expanding retail segment, according to a senior executive.
Speaking to FOW, the Chicago-headquartered exchange group’s chief commercial officer sees technology as a key catalyst for the next phase of retail adoption, backed by its education work with retail brokers.
“The digitisation of the client experience has been critically important and has driven the higher level of engagement we are now seeing from these retail accounts,” Julie Winkler said in an interview. “Retail brokers have built really advanced technology and education platforms that help us to build and support engagement with our markets.
“Each of them has a different level of digital maturity and different user profiles, and there is a heavy level of customisation across our different partners. A huge part of that is creating appropriate guardrails and coaching to guide trading in the best way.”
CME, like other major global exchanges, has invested in its education offering. The Chicago-based exchange group currently offers more than 80 courses, or 700 lessons, to users across 12 different languages.
“We are also seeing some dramatic increases in data usage coming from this non-professional base,” Winkler added. “That has been transformative and there is huge attention on the data that they use from us. These brokers know exactly where the data is going, who is using it and how best they can leverage it for their users to trade.
“Our top 20 or 30 partners use our real-time market data to build awareness and funnel those users into different platforms. The additive nature of the data they are deploying, the technology to widen access through mobile and the community aspect behind that are all really helping this increase in usage we are seeing.”
The US group has delivered in recent years various smaller sized contracts aimed at retail traders. CME listed its first micro E-mini S&P 500 futures in 2019 and passed the one billion contract mark for the retail-focused product four years later. Trading volume in the equity contract hit a record 41.8 million contracts in April, according to FOW data, 79% higher than the same month in 2024.
On the technology front, the exchange agreed in November 2021 a comprehensive ten year partnership that included the migration of CME's vast trading data resources, its matching engines and clearing business to Google Cloud.
In June last year the firms announced the creation of a Google Cloup Platform region based in the Chicago suburb of Aurora as well as a co-location facility. These efforts will also help CME extend its global retail reach, Winkler said.
“As we think about servicing clients in regions like the Asia Pacific, we can use the data teams we have built to develop and distribute new tools in a far less time-consuming way,” she said.
“For example, we will roll-out a new trading simulator later this year and we can work with regional trade associations to meet regional requirements for new customers to have spent time in that sort of test environment. We are far better enabled to repurpose that through the partnership we have in place with Google, and through all of our efforts to upgrade the customer facing analytics workflow.”
