A Conversation with Distinguished Business Leader Gary Katz ’81, former President and Chief Executive Officer of the International Securities Exchange
Gary Katz, '81, is the former president and chief executive officer of the International Securities Exchange (ISE), one of the world’s leading options exchanges. He also served as ISE’s chief operating officer prior to that.
Katz is one of the principal developers of the unique options market structure—an auction market on an electronic platform used by all ISE exchanges—and is named as inventor or co-inventor on six patents that the company received or applied for relating to its proprietary trading system and technology.
Before co-founding ISE, Katz served as president and co-founder of K-Squared Research, LLC, a financial services consulting firm, from 1997 to 1998. From 1986 until 1997, he held several positions in the Options and Index Products Division at the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). During his tenure at NYSE, Katz also was a co-founder of the Options Industry Council, a trade group dedicated to promoting the equity options sector through the education of the investing public. Prior to 1986, he was an actuary with the Equitable Life Assurance Company and an associate of the Society of Actuaries.
Katz formerly was an adjunct professor of statistics at the Stern School of Business, New York University, where he conducted classes in business mathematics applications and also taught classes in options strategies and pricing at the New York Institute of Finance. He has an MS in statistics with distinction from New York University and a BA from Queens College.
Katz is a board director of Interactive Brokers (IB), one of the premier securities firms that conducts its broker dealer business in over 100 market destinations worldwide. In its broker dealer agency business, IB provides direct access (“online”) trade execution and clearing services to institutional and professional traders for a wide variety of electronically traded products, including stocks, options, futures, forex, bonds, CFDs, and funds worldwide. He is also chairman of the board of Farmer’s Pantry LLC, a subsidiary of United Snacks of America and a start-up in the consumer goods industry.
In addition, Katz is a board director of Sales Tax Recovery Services, LLC (STRS), a financial services company that facilitates the recovery of sales tax paid to states by combining information from credit card issuers and merchants to close information gaps on purchases where the consumer never paid their credit card bill.
Katz lives on Long Island with his wife, Shelley. They have two married daughters and twin sons, one of whom is on the autism spectrum and the other who will soon complete his undergraduate studies at Queens College.