CME Group taps Tim McCourt as Head of Financial & OTC Products as Sean Tully retires
“We appreciate the leadership Sean provided over the past decade for our financial products businesses, which included the successful migration to SOFR derivatives that now serve as the leading tool for hedging short-term interest rates. We are fortunate to have Tim McCourt, who has extensive experience across financial products, to lead these important business lines that allow our clients to manage risk in key asset classes.”
CME Group has appointed Tim McCourt to serve in an expanded role as Senior Managing Director, Global Head of Financial & OTC Products, following the retirement of Sean Tully, Senior Managing Director, Interest Rates and OTC Products.
Tim McCourt served as Global Head of Equity & FX Products since February 2022, when he was promoted to the Management Team. Going forward, he will oversee the company’s interest rates, equity index, foreign exchange and cryptocurrency futures and options markets, as well as the company’s BrokerTec cash treasuries platform and EBS spot FX platform.
McCourt joined CME Group in 2013 as Executive Director, Equity Index Products.
Tim McCourt leadership to help clients manage risk in key asset classes
Terry Duffy, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer at CME Group, said: “We appreciate the leadership Sean provided over the past decade for our financial products businesses, which included the successful migration to SOFR derivatives that now serve as the leading tool for hedging short-term interest rates. We are fortunate to have Tim McCourt, who has extensive experience across financial products, to lead these important business lines that allow our clients to manage risk in key asset classes.”
CME Group has recently reported a record single-day trading volume of 66.2 million contracts across its markets, including a record 41.9 million interest rate contracts and a record 17.8 million equity index contracts. In addition, the company reported a record 15.5 million SOFR futures trades and a record 6.2 million SOFR options trades.
McCourt led CME Group’s launch of event contracts on Bitcoin futures
As Global Head of Equity and FX Products at CME Group, Tim McCourt led the launch of CME Group’s event contracts on Bitcoin futures earlier this month in a move that further expands the derivatives trading giant’s digital asset offering. In his previous role the firm also launched options on Ether futures.
The company has recently rolled out euro-dominated bitcoin (BTC) and ether (ETH) futures contracts, the first of their kind crypto derivative product on a regulated exchange. The new contract size for bitcoin futures equals 5 BTC while the ether product is sized at 50 ether per contract. Both contracts are cash settled, similar to the exchange’s existing dollar-denominated crypto futures, and will be priced off at the CME CF Bitcoin-Euro Reference Rate and CME CF Ether-Euro Reference Rate.
These indexes were developed in partnership with Crypto Facilities to serve as once-a-day reference rates of the euro-denominated price of bitcoin and ether. The index references pricing data using transactions and order book activity from several cryptocurrency exchanges.
In October 2022, CME Group tapped CryptoQuant as the official provider of on-chain data for CME Group’s Datamine, an on-demand platform that allows traditional financial institutions to access detailed historical data. Traditional financial institutions and hedge funds can get digital asset data from CryptoQuant via the CME Group Datamine service.
