Eileen Smith, SVP of Data and Analytics at Cboe Global Markets, speaks with Clyde Gillard, North America AI GTM Leader at HPE, in the first of a three-part interview series, discussing her career trajectory, organizational data transformation, tackling the ever-growing data challenge, and managing extreme data volumes.

Shedding light on an exemplary trajectory, Smith shares that she has been with Cboe for 39 years, starting when it was the Chicago Board Options Exchange. She elaborates that it began as a single exchange trading listed options in 1973, later introducing index options in 1983.

Over the decades, the company has grown significantly, and so have Smith’s roles — from research and product development to technology, and now leading the Data and Analytics team.

Transforming data at Cboe

After nearly four decades at Cboe, Smith has witnessed and led a profound shift in how data is managed and accessed across the company. She reflects on the evolution from siloed, fragmented systems to a unified, self-service platform.

Smith explains that Cboe runs 27 exchanges globally, which run “in their own environments.” Before the transformation, “all the data resided in each environment separately.” The trading data alone was scattered across 27 environments and different databases, not to mention all other forms of data, she adds.

In 2020, the company launched an effort to consolidate this fragmented ecosystem, says Smith. “We decided to get all the data from all of our markets and the other data we need into a single data platform.” The platform began on-premises, but the cloud migration happened in 2022.

Previously, Smith says, things were siloed, and certain skills of SQL and coding were necessary to get at the data. Now, the data is democratized and in everyone’s hands. She further notes that the role of data at Cboe has evolved rapidly. In a recent senior leadership meeting, she observed that data is now part of every conversation — not just something presented by the data analytics team.

Global business and technology leaders across the company use the same centralized source, apply it in the same way, and, when discussing the same topic, reference the same numbers.

From raw data to actionable insights

Smith credits a part of Cboe’s data transformation success to a strong technical foundation. “One great thing underpinning it is that we have a single trading platform called Cboe Titanium, and it generates very similar data out of all of our markets,” she says

While Cboe Titanium provided a consistent base, Smith notes that it generates basic data. To build on this, her team created another application that does data mining and surfaces crucial information to understand the markets.

Consequently, now there is data that is bespoke and can be used for different business applications, says Smith.

Balancing consistency and market nuance

Adding on, Smith emphasizes that “all of the markets are different, but they’re all similar.” The approach was to start with a shared base.

Initially, the idea was to consult each business unit individually about their data needs. Smith explains, “We kind of put a kibosh on that early on and said, ‘Look, this is a good set of data that we’re going to create. We’re going to make it appropriate for that particular market, but we’re not going to just create a whole bunch of different things.” The result is a unified dataset that serves multiple purposes, she adds.

From on-prem limits to cloud elasticity: Tackling Cboe’s ever-growing data challenge

Moving ahead, Smith reflects on the early days of Cboe’s data platform and the decision to move to the cloud. “When we started on-prem, it just became too constrained too quickly,” she says. “We were going to have to throw hardware at it, and we felt that the elasticity of the cloud is a lot more useful for what we have.”

She shares that Cboe has a huge volume of data that is not always used, so maintaining constant storage and processing capacity is not necessary. “The elasticity is a really good way to deal with it,” Smith elaborates.

Cboe’s U.S. options markets generate hundreds of billions of quotes every day. Smith acknowledges that not all of this information is needed in raw form. Instead, the focus has been on summarizing and presenting data so that people can use it without wading through massive datasets.

Customers still receive the full stream in real time, but internal tools help distill the data for practical use.

Looking back, Smith says one thing hasn’t changed. “The size of our data and the speed of our data grow with the size of the hardware and the capabilities of the hardware,” she says. Each time the team thinks the volume is enormous, “it doubles, it triples, it goes 10x, it goes 20x.” That is a persistent challenge, says Smith.

Wrapping up, Smith states that building Cboe’s data platform has drawn heavily on her own extensive experience and that of her colleagues. Together, they applied years of knowledge to shape how the company views and prioritizes data. But, she stresses, the process is never static.

A source that seemed valuable two years ago may still be relevant, yet now it might require more information, new summaries, or additional context, maintains Smith. “It’s constantly evolving,” she says, noting that this continual change is part of the appeal.

For Smith, the ongoing evolution keeps the work fun and engaging. The ultimate aim is to deliver ever-better data for internal teams and, increasingly, to create opportunities to monetize it externally, she concludes.

CDO Magazine appreciates Eileen Smith for sharing her insights with our global community.