Thank you and good morning. My name is Joe Ratterman, Chief Executive Officer of BATS Global Markets, Inc. (“BATS”), and one of the founding employees. I am pleased to be here and want to thank Chairman Johnson, Ranking Member Crapo, and the entire Banking Committee for inviting me to testify on matters related to the U.S. equity market structure.
This Committee has played a leading role in the development of the securities laws over the past 80 years, and I appreciate the attention to these timely and important issues related to our capital markets.
BATS was a start-up less than a decade ago, formed in 2005 in response to a competitive void that emerged in the U.S. equity markets. The NYSE and NASDAQ had acquired the first generation of efficient, technology-oriented exchange competitors, namely Archipelago, Inet (which reflected the merger of Instinet and Island), and Brut. In the face of this exchange duopoly, BATS stepped into the competitive void, launching as a small alternative trading system (“ATS”) from a north Kansas City storefront in January 2006. In January of this year, we merged with Direct Edge, an innovative exchange operator that was similarly formed in 2005 to enhance competition among markets.
Click here for full details.
