Edward T. Tilly

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Edward T. Tilly Occupation Chief Executive Officer Employer Clear Street Location Chicago LinkedIn Profile Website http://www.clearstreet.io Edward T. Tilly is a Chicago-born financial markets executive who spent more than three decades at the Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE), first as a floor clerk, then as a market maker and designated primary market maker, and ultimately as chairman and chief executive officer of Cboe Global Markets, before joining the fintech firm Clear Street as chief executive officer in 2024. On May 18, 2026, Clear Street announced that Tilly would step down as CEO starting June 1, while remaining on the company’s board. Tilly joined the company in a move to institutionalize operations and lead the firm down the path to an IPO. Clear Street is reportedly now scrapping its plans to go public. Background Early Career: Fossett Corporation and the CBOE Trading Floor Tilly graduated from Northwestern University in 1987 and immediately joined the trading operation of entrepreneur and adventurer Steve Fossett, taking a stock clerk position on the Chicago Board Options Exchange trading floor. In that role, he took stock orders from market makers and routed them to Fossett's stock desk, gaining ground-level familiarity with the mechanics of options trading at a time when the CBOE was the dominant venue for equity options in the United States. Fossett was among the first to deploy DOT (Direct Order Transfer) machines that sent orders electronically from the CBOE to the New York Stock Exchange, making his firm an early exemplar of the electronic trading disruption that would define the next two decades. Tilly worked under Tom Asher at the Fossett operation; Asher would later become vice chairman of the exchange and serve on the CBOE's board of directors. The mentorship Tilly received during those formative years shaped his understanding of the intersection between trading technology and floor-based liquidity — a perspective he carried into his executive career. Market Maker and Designated Primary Market Maker at CBOE Tilly became a CBOE member and floor trader in 1989, transitioning from clerk to market maker and eventually to designated primary market maker (DPM). The DPM designation carried significant responsibilities: DPMs were obligated to maintain continuous two-sided quotes in their assigned options classes, contributing to price discovery and liquidity in the market. During the 1990s and early 2000s, the CBOE's open-outcry model was under growing pressure from fully electronic rivals, and Tilly's front-row view of that structural shift informed his later decision to move into management rather than remain a floor trader. As a CBOE member, Tilly served on the board of directors from 1998 to 2000 and again from 2003 to 2006, and chaired the CBOE Floor Directors Committee from 2004 to 2006. He also served on the Exchange's Executive, Compensation, and Governance Committees. The highest member-elected position at the exchange, member vice chairman, was his from 2004 to 2006, reflecting the respect his trading peers accorded him before he crossed over to full-time management. CBOE Executive Vice Chairman (2006–2011) In August 2006, CBOE chairman and CEO William Brodsky recruited Tilly onto the exchange's executive management team as executive vice chairman, ending his career as a floor trader and beginning his role as a full-time exchange executive. The timing was consequential: the CBOE was navigating a pivotal conversion from a member-owned exchange to a publicly traded corporation (its initial public offering came in 2010), while simultaneously contending with growing competition from all-electronic venues such as the International Securities Exchange and the NASDAQ Options Market. During this period, Tilly worked alongside Brodsky in articulating the exchange's product and technology strategy. The CBOE had introduced VIX futures in 2004 and VIX options in 2006, expanding the exchange's franchise well beyond equity options and into volatility as an asset class. Tilly's closeness to both the trading floor and the product innovation process, bridging the perspectives of the practitioner and the administrator, established him as the natural successor to the CEO role. CBOE Holdings: President and Chief Operating Officer (2011–2013) In November 2011, CBOE Holdings named Tilly president and chief operating officer, succeeding Edward J. Joyce. In that role Tilly oversaw day-to-day exchange operations, managing the integration of the C2 Options Exchange, CBOE's all-electronic subsidiary, and advancing the company's product suite ahead of a formal CEO transition. CBOE Holdings had gone public in June 2010 with a market capitalization of roughly $2 billion; the pressure to deliver growth in both revenue and product relevance would define the next phase of his leadership. Cboe Global Markets: Chief Executive Officer (2013–2023) Tilly was named chief executive officer of CBOE Holdings in May 2013, succeeding Brodsky. His decade at the helm was defined by aggressive geographic and product expansion that transformed a Chicago floor-centric options exchange into a multi-asset global exchange operator. By the time he departed in September 2023, Cboe Global Markets' market capitalization had grown from approximately $2 billion to more than $18 billion. Acquisition of Bats Global Markets The most transformative transaction of Tilly's tenure was the September 2016 announcement of CBOE's agreement to acquire Bats Global Markets for approximately $3.2 billion in a cash-and-stock deal, which closed Feb. 28, 2017, at a final valuation of approximately $3.4 billion. Bats, founded in 2005 by high-frequency trader David Cummings, was the second-largest U.S. equity operator with average daily volume of 1.52 billion shares in 2016, and commanded roughly 20.6 percent of U.S. equities market share. It also operated pan-European equities markets and a global foreign exchange platform. The deal was strategically significant on two levels. First, it broadened CBOE's business from a primarily options-focused exchange to a multi-asset operator across equities, options, exchange-traded products, and foreign exchange. Second, Tilly moved quickly to migrate all of CBOE's markets onto Bats' proprietary trading technology platform, delivering projected annual cost efficiencies of $50 million within three years of closing. Former Bats CEO Chris Concannon joined the combined entity as president and chief operating officer, and in October 2017 the company was rebranded Cboe Global Markets, with "Cboe" made titlecase and pronounced "See-bo" to signal the organization's expanded identity. With the close of the Bats transaction on Feb. 28, 2017, the board unanimously elected Tilly to the additional role of chairman, replacing William Brodsky, who retired from the chairmanship. Product Innovation: Bitcoin Futures, VIX, SPX Options, and 0DTE Under Tilly’s leadership, Cboe was an early mover into listed bitcoin derivatives, launching Cboe’s original cash‑settled bitcoin futures in December 2017 alongside a regulated spot reference rate provided by Gemini Trust Company, LLC. The XBT contracts were cash-settled against Gemini's daily bitcoin auction price, and their launch preceded the competing CME Group contract by one week. The Cboe website briefly crashed from traffic at launch, and more than 124,000 contracts traded in the first weeks of trading, representing over $1.5 billion in notional value. The contracts gave institutional and institutional investors a regulated way to gain price discovery and hedging exposure to bitcoin, but Cboe stopped listing new bitcoin futures in 2019 after limited liquidity and commercial traction; in subsequent years, regulatory and enforcement issues emerged around Gemini’s operations and disclosures, underscoring some of the challenges Cboe had faced in partnering with a third‑party crypto venue for its initial digital‑asset push. Tilly later steered Cboe back into the asset class by pursuing a broader platform play. In October 2021, Cboe agreed to acquire Eris Digital Holdings, LLC (ErisX), a U.S. digital‑asset spot market, regulated futures exchange and clearinghouse, with the goal of building a vertically integrated Cboe‑branded digital business spanning spot, derivatives, and clearing. The transaction closed in May 2022, and ErisX was rebranded as Cboe Digital, bringing its spot and derivatives markets, clearing services and technology under Cboe’s umbrella and marking a second, more expansive digital‑asset strategy during Tilly’s tenure. It was overseen by ErisX chief executive Thomas Chippas and he reported into Cboe’s senior management team. Soon after the acquisition closed, Cboe recorded a non‑cash goodwill impairment of about $460 million related to ErisX, effectively writing down most of the value of the deal amid a sharp downturn in digital asset markets and weaker‑than‑expected trading volumes, which contributed to a quarterly net loss on a GAAP basis. While Tilly and other executives continued to express confidence in the long‑term prospects of Cboe Digital and brought in outside equity partners to share risk and support development, the business remained relatively small in terms of average daily volume and revenues compared with Cboe’s established options and equities franchises. In April 2024, after Tilly’s departure, Cboe announced a strategic reshaping of its digital assets unit that included shutting down the Cboe Digital Spot Market, citing persistent regulatory uncertainty around spot crypto in the United States and financial underperformance of the spot business, while continuing to offer crypto derivatives and clearing by folding those activities into its core derivatives infrastructure. Expansion of Index and Volatility Franchise Tilly also extended Cboe's dominance in index options and volatility products. He secured a renewal of the CBOE's exclusive license with Standard & Poor's for S&P 500 Index (SPX) options through 2032, a commercially critical arrangement that kept Cboe's highest-volume and most profitable product class protected from competition. The exchange expanded trading hours for VIX and SPX options to give global participants near round-the-clock access, and in 2022 and 2023, Cboe added Tuesday and Thursday expiration days to its short-term index options, helping fuel the explosive growth of zero-days-to-expiration (0DTE) options contracts. By the third quarter of 2022, 0DTE contracts accounted for more than 40 percent of S&P 500 total options volume, nearly doubling from six months earlier. In April 2023, just months before his departure, Tilly oversaw the launch of the VIX1D Index — a one-day volatility index designed to capture the near-term sentiment dynamics that the 30-day VIX could not fully reflect. Global Expansion: Europe and Asia Pacific Cboe's international footprint grew substantially under Tilly. In December 2019, Cboe announced an agreement to acquire the remaining 80 percent of EuroCCP, Europe's largest clearing house for equity trades, which it did not already own; the transaction closed July 1, 2020, giving Cboe full ownership of a central counterparty for the first time and establishing a post-Brexit Amsterdam-based clearing hub. EuroCCP was subsequently rebranded Cboe Clear Europe in November 2022, by which point it cleared approximately 95 percent of all European equity trades. In March 2021, Cboe announced a definitive agreement to acquire Chi-X Asia Pacific Holdings, an alternative market operator in Australia and Japan, creating what Tilly described as a "single point of entry into two key capital markets" in the Asia Pacific region. Chi-X Australia was, at the time, the country's second-largest securities exchange, with an 18.4 percent total market share. Together, the EuroCCP and Chi-X deals reflected Tilly's consistent thesis that an exchange group's long-term value derived from geographic diversification, multi-asset coverage, and proprietary product innovation, a strategy that rewarded investors with a more than ninefold increase in enterprise value during his decade as CEO. World Federation of Exchanges Tilly served as vice chairman of the World Federation of Exchanges (WFE) from 2018 to 2021, before the WFE membership elected him chairman at the organization's 60th Annual General Meeting, held virtually in September 2021 and hosted by the Shenzhen Stock Exchange. As chairman, Tilly worked with WFE CEO Nandini Sukumar and the organization's 250 member exchanges and clearinghouses on issues including market integrity, systemic stability, and the development of emerging markets. His two-year term concluded in September 2023, coinciding with his resignation from Cboe.. Clear Street After a roughly nine-month hiatus following his resignation from Cboe, Tilly joined Clear Street, a New York-based cloud-native financial technology firm, as president in July 2024, reporting to the board of directors. Co-founded by CEO Chris Pento in 2018, Clear Street aims to replace legacy capital markets infrastructure with a cloud-native prime-brokerage platform offering custody, clearing, and execution services. By September 2024, Pento announced he would step down as CEO at year's end, and Tilly assumed the role of chief executive officer effective Jan. 1, 2025. Clear Street had valued itself at approximately $2 billion by mid-2024. Clear Street chairman and co-founder Uri Cohen described Tilly as "fundamentally a seasoned capital markets entrepreneur," citing his experience with large transactions, product development, and global organizational leadership. Education Tilly earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in economics from Northwestern University's Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, graduating in 1987. He is identified in Northwestern alumni records as a WCAS (Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences) 1987 graduate. His formal education in economics provided a theoretical foundation for the statistical and risk management-based approach to trading he later described as the reason he was drawn to options markets in the first place. Tilly continued his professional development through deep immersion in exchange governance, serving on the CBOE's board of directors across two separate periods (1998–2000 and 2003–2006) and on key board committees before transitioning to management. He later served on the board of the Options Clearing Corporation (OCC) during his tenure as a Cboe executive. He remains on the Board of Visitors of Northwestern University's Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences and serves on the board of directors of Northwestern Memorial HealthCare. Controversies Resignation from Cboe Global Markets On Sept. 19, 2023, Cboe Global Markets announced that Tilly had resigned as chairman and CEO following the conclusion of an investigation led by the board of directors and outside independent legal counsel, launched in late August 2023. The board determined that Tilly had not disclosed personal relationships with colleagues, which it said violated Cboe's policies and "stands in stark contrast to the company's values." The conduct was determined to be unrelated to and not impacting the company's strategy, financial performance, technology and market operations, reporting, or internal controls. Fredric Tomczyk, a Cboe board member since 2019 and former president and CEO of TD Ameritrade Holding Corporation, was appointed CEO effective immediately. William Farrow III, the board's lead director, was named non-executive chairman. Cboe's stock reached a record high on the day of the announcement, suggesting investors did not view the leadership transition as a strategic setback. According to regulatory filings, Tilly forfeited approximately $10 million in equity awards as a result of his departure and was not entitled to severance payments totaling $8.8 million. The circumstances of Tilly's departure did not prompt regulatory action or allegations of trading-related misconduct. The investigation and its outcome were entirely confined to the question of disclosure of personal relationships under Cboe's internal policies. John Lothian News Interviews The Need for a Better Dialogue with Regulators - Ed Tilly, Cboe In this video from JLN’s Industry Leader Series, Cboe Global Markets Chairman, President and CEO Ed Tilly talks about why the Transaction Fee Pilot is a misguided effort in search of a problem, specifically raising the issue of why such a plan does not address the boom in dark pool trading. Tilly also addresses Cboe nearing the end of the Bats technology integration and gives an outlook for the exchange’s asset classes in 2019. Taking the Reins: CBOE’s Ed Tilly Makes The Transition to CEO It has been half a year since Ed Tilly took over as CEO of the CBOE from Bill Brodsky, who moved to the newly created role of executive chairman. With six months under his belt, John Lothian News Publisher John Lothian sat down with him to talk about his new job, new initiatives from the CBOE and the challenges facing the industry. Getting Shorter: CBOE’s Ed Tilly Introduces Short-term VIX and Industry Taxes In Part 2 of this interview, Tilly talks about the CBOE extending the VIX trading hours to access trading from European traders and how he expects the VIX will someday be open the same hours as the CME’s Globex S&P 500 futures. He also talked about the CBOE’s new VXST short-term VIX contract, which will offer traders a much more sensitive instrument to be able to trade short-term events. He spoke about the meeting the industry had with the chairman of the SEC about problems that have plagued the markets in recent months. Lastly, he spoke about the impact of the Camp Proposal, a piece of proposed legislation from Rep. Dave Camp (R-MI), a member of the House Committee on Ways & Means, that could have a big impact on the options business and its customers. Camp’s proposal includes several provisions that would change the tax treatment for strategies used in options trading. Some believe it could severely harm the listed options business in the United States. Ed Tilly spoke to John Lothian News at FIA Boca 2022 for the JLN Industry Leaders video series. MarketsWiki Education Videos Ed Tilly – Staying Ahead of the Technology Curve In this video from MarketsWiki Education’s Intern Recruiting event in Chicago, Ed Tilly, chairman and CEO of Cboe Global Markets, discusses how changes in technology force you to adapt to stay ahead of the curve. Tilly breaks down what's going on in the exchange space and how the Cboe has changed over the years. With the explosion of screen trading and the end of open outcry trading, exchanges have had to roll with the punches and make sure customers are happy.  Tilly’s goal is to bring transparency and liquidity to the marketplace References

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