Traders Magazine visited TMX Group at its new New York City office in Lower Manhattan on November 18.
It was a wide-ranging discussion that covered the office itself, the exchange operator’s ongoing expansion in the U.S. market, and the broader business.
TMX executives present were John McKenzie, CEO of TMX Group, and three TMX business heads: Peter Conroy, CEO of Global Insights; Tom Hendrickson, President of VettaFi; and Heidi Fischer, President of AlphaX US.
What follows is a Q&A with John McKenzie, edited for length and clarity.
Talk a bit about the new office?
JOHN: It was only two years ago that I was down here having dinner with all of our New York staff, and we fit around a table in a restaurant. There were eight of us. It’s been extraordinary going from there to here, in terms of the investments we’ve made in the US market. We now have a full-fledged headquarters in New York, with multiple business lines. This office is a microcosm of our global strategy, in terms of building out in a lot of different areas.
We have our energy team from Trayport here, to continue to build out the US market for energy screens. Our data team is here, including new US businesses that we’ve acquired – Wall Street Horizons for corporate actions, and now VettaFi, which does advanced investor analytics. And we have AlphaX US, our ATS marketplace, on the ground here.
The New York office can support about 200 people, but we are a mixture of in-office and remote. This will be the fourth-largest of our 10 offices, behind Toronto, London, and Montreal, and we expect New York to be one of the fastest-growing offices.
All the business pieces in New York are under the execution of what we call TM2X, which is our aspiration to kickstart the next doubling of the franchise, to grow globally and build long-term relevance. It took 14 years to grow from half a billion to a billion. We expected the next billion in five to seven years – we’re almost five years into the strategy and we’re almost there.
Our execution strategy is firing well. More than half of the business of TMX is outside of Canada, and the two largest growth areas are the US and Europe. We’re also looking to continue to shift the business into more recurring data and information revenue.
What have been highlights in your five years as CEO?
JOHN: Much of what we built into the plan, from business, results, and people standpoints, have been achieved. We’re twice the size in terms of people. Our geographic reach is twice what it was before. We were growing 3% to 4% prior to this, we’ve been growing high single digits and more recently low doubles. Our price-to-earnings used to trail US exchanges by six or seven, but now we trade at a premium.
Last year, we put three franchises – Trayport, VettaFi, and Datalinx into one place, Global Insights. We did this to get the value of cross-selling across different pieces, and going deeper with clients by being better able to provide more of an enterprise solution.
From a parent company standpoint, we’re thrilled with AlphaX US. The team has hit every milestone that we were looking for, in terms of delivery times, regulatory approvals, tech build out, client adoption, and market share. And the bonus is that the prove-out of this platform is the test bed of our next-generation platform for TMX at large. So Heidi Fischer and her team have taken the best pieces of DNA of our equity platform and our derivatives platform, delivered it in a new architecture through the cloud, and this now becomes the framework for how we modernize our marketplaces in the future.
Also, this was just our first step into US marketplaces. This was never meant to be the end-all be-all, one ATS with one book. It was always our first entry in, and we’ve got a lot of great ideas on what we’d like to do over the next few years.
Overall, the question for us is: what’s next? I think the biggest challenge, and this is what keeps me up at night, is the pace of change in the industry. What got you here isn’t necessarily what’s going to get you to the next level. The challenge, whether it’s cybersecurity, or AI, or 24-hour trading, or tokenization, is making sure that we are ready, and that it’s actually a meaningful trend and not a fad.
What were the primary accomplishments in 2025 and what are the initiatives for 2026?
JOHN: Building out here in the US market, for both years. We knew we could compete in the US, but having the organization have the courage to build it and see its success is a massive highlight for us, and we’re going to keep building.
The second piece is about replatforming the clearing and settlement infrastructure for the Canadian marketplace. We’re probably ahead of DTC now in terms of doing the technology reload for clearing, which is critical, because it allows us to do more for the trading community such as supporting collateral management and new product creation in post trade. This part of the franchise was more of a sleepy utility, but now it’s part of the growth story.
Will TMX continue to be acquisitive?
JOHN: We’ve been pretty busy on that front, with a combination of some larger-scale deals and a number of tuck-ins. I expect we’ll continue to do that. The nice thing is now we have platforms like VettaFi and Trayport, where we can acquire new products and capabilities and distribute them to the client base. We’ve also built a corporate solutions business alongside our capital raising business that helps issuers with everything they need to be public companies. That’s another solution where we can acquire capabilities and then distribute them.
How do you determine what to invest in, and what might be ‘shiny new things’?
JOHN: That’s a good question, because with some changes you don’t know whether they’re real changes or if they’re just the technology of the day. For instance, when we talk about tokenization, we’re talking about the next evolution of blockchain, which is a conversation we’ve been having for 15 years in terms of what will be the meaningful use case. Another example is 24-hour markets. It’s not clear there’s demand for that today, but should the market move, we want to be able to move fast. It’s a similar situation with private markets.
So we’re continuing to invest where we think there’s opportunity. With tokenization, we’re looking at capabilities there because we have the clearing house as well. We can actually build from the clearing house side to create the ability to house and clear private markets, private companies, through tokenized securities. We’re building strategies around that, but that is more of a build than an investment.
In terms of the investment area, we’re very much focused on things that we can bring into our ecosystem and scale up. So a bit less on the speculative side, we’re bringing in more indices that we can scale up across our network. We’re bringing in new data assets that we can scale up. Everything we invest in has to have an integration and scale-up strategy to it, and that’s where we will deploy capital.
How are you engaging with retail investors?
JOHN: That’s on our market information and education side. The vehicles we have through VettaFi give us the ability to talk to an audience, particularly around the ETF market, and the properties we have through TMX Money, which is essentially our Yahoo finance platform, allow us to get more insights and research out to a retail audience.
We have landing pages to help people understand ETFs, structured products, and Canadian Depository Receipts. We see our role in the education and access piece for retail, and then having more retail-oriented products.
Any additional thoughts?
JOHN: We’re continuing to invest in the listed market. We’re seeing IPOs again, and we’re continuing to invest not just on the capital raising side, but also the ability to support companies that are capital raisers, whether public or private.
So when you look at our three pillars – global insights, global markets and capital formation – 44% of the capital formation revenue comes from what we call corporate solutions, which is everything we do to facilitate companies to raise money. This incudes transfer, agency, trust capabilities, employee plans, and disclosure tools – all that is now almost half, and it’s our objective to be more than half. There’s been a trend of companies staying private longer and raising more private money, and we’re building up more capabilities to serve those companies, and build relationships for if and when they do go public.
