CME Group’s Julie Winkler on innovation on the trading floor

The journey of Julie Winkler, chief commercial officer (CCO) at CME Group, began more than two decades ago, when she first fell in love with the industry. "I became enamoured with the financial markets when I visited a trading floor as a junior in college," she recalls. "It brought together everything I was learning in economics and finance and derivatives, and it came together in such a unique environment."

After joining the Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT) as an investigator, Winkler spent several years immersing herself in the intricacies of price discovery and the rise of electronic trading. "I spent a couple of years with the guys in the pits, really watching what they were doing and understanding the importance of price discovery and how that worked within our marketplace," she says.

As her role evolved, she found herself drawn to the research and product development side of the business, where she learned the importance of listening to customers. "We would go out to the market with a new product idea and we would try to validate some of the features or cash market characteristics so that these could be reflected in our derivatives contracts.” This experience taught Winkler the value of balancing diverse perspectives.

Of course, there have been challenges aplenty. One of the most significant hurdles Winkler faced in her career was the integration of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) and CBOT teams after the 2006 merger. It created the CME Group we know today – but the transition was not easy.

"I was taking the lead for innovation efforts at the time, and trying to stay on top of all the changing client needs was a very challenging time,” she recalls. “But actually, it became a great accelerator for my own career. I gained confidence through those challenges and, ultimately, the team found success together."

Winkler took on the role of CCO at CME Group in 2016, a transformational position that has given her a unique vantage point to drive the company’s growth and innovation.

"The role has changed over the years, but being able to work with the clients is central to our team," she explains. With 11,000 client meetings and 90,000 client touchpoints in 2024 alone, engagement is central to strategy – and the company is now taking steps to expand that engagement across new segments.

Winkler’s responsibilities now span a dizzyingly wide range of areas, including global sales, product marketing, data services, analytics, international strategy and the company’s innovation lab. "I manage everything that might help drive growth for the firm and which is focused on our clients," she says.

One of her proudest achievements has been the set-up of the commercial go-to-market team, which she describes as a "re-imagination" of the organisation. "I wanted to create a team that really could come together in new ways, so we changed the structure of the global sales team, where those resources were deployed," she says. "We added a global sales operations and enablement team. We brought in a group of data scientists to help us build out new models to help us understand our customer data and deliver those internal and customer insights back to our sales team."

The results of this effort have been impressive, with the team contributing to US$2.4 billion in new revenue for the company. "Collectively, not only have we helped the group grow across all of our product lines, but we’ve really had our hands all over that US$2.4 billion in new revenue, because nobody was doing that before," she says.

Looking ahead, Winkler is excited about the opportunities presented by the company’s international strategy and the growing importance of data, cloud and AI in the industry. CME Group is leveraging data and digital tools to better understand and engage with clients, including using digital data to identify new prop firms and retail traders interested in their products.

"We are the first exchange to make our data available within Google Cloud through Pub/Sub," she reveals. "We have built a calculation engine for our index and benchmark business within the cloud. This is a major innovation for the industry, and really all industries. The cloud is not known historically for being able to process low latency-type capabilities, so it has been a lot of fun for the team to work directly with the engineers at Google and work with people who are so advanced from an engineering perspective to help solve this."

Winkler’s leadership has also been instrumental in the company’s growing focus on the retail market. Last year, the company saw more than 230,000 new traders come to CME, a 20% increase from the previous year. "Retail is now our fastest-growing client segment," she says. "For most firms that were focused on this customer segment, Covid provided an opportunity for people to gain exposure to this – whereas in the past, I don’t think futures and options were necessarily part of an active retail trader’s toolkit."

CME is now expanding its network of global distribution partners, working with more than 100 different brokers and platforms to reach retail investors – and launching futures on platforms such as Robinhood. The group is also restructuring its client coverage model to better serve the needs of retail customers, which differ from their traditional institutional client base.

Emerging markets is another area of focus, and the group is leveraging the rise in non-US trading hours to support this growth – with 24/7 accessibility helping to serve emerging-market clients competitively. Half of CME’s top 10 largest trading days have occurred in 2024 or 2025, reflecting growing demand from international clients who want to trade products around the clock.