A TMX Group sign, the company that runs the Toronto Stock Exchange, is seen in Toronto, June 23, 2014.Mark Blinch/Reuters
For the second straight time, the board of TMX Group Inc. has reached outside Canada for a chief executive.
That's leaving Canada's financial community trying to get up to speed on just who it is that TMX has hired. Lou Eccleston, the new boss, comes from S&P Capital IQ. Before that his roles included running sales and global product strategy at Bloomberg LP, the hugely successful seller of financial data systems. So he will get the notion of providing data and customer service, at least based on his résumé. And data is his thing.
Despite being all about information and having worked at financial media giants, he has kept a relatively low profile in the media. There's not that much out there that's publicly available to help people get a sense of the person now running one of the most key pieces of Canadian financial infrastructure.
Here's what we could find:
Over the years he has been mooted for some CEO roles, but has not gotten them. He was in the running to head S&P, according to Marketwatch.
At Thomson Financial, he was "widely credited" with creating the Thomson One system, which was designed to battle Bloomberg's terminal, after leaving Bloomberg. According to this 2006 article, he believed he had a shot at replacing Michael Bloomberg when he stepped down over a decade ago as CEO.
He believes there is room for smaller niche players in data.
Here Mr. Eccleston is talking about S&P Capital IQ, his last job. There are some lessons here in his views on pulling together a lot of different assets and making them work together. That's something TMX could use.