Richard Heckinger

Richard Heckinger is a Board Director of Demand Derivatives Corp.  He was formerly Vice President and Senior Policy Advisor, Financial Markets Group, at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. He started his career in financial markets at the Chicago Board Options Exchange in 1973. His career has included executive positions and project management of financial market operations, products and risks.  He has a wide range of international experience including Vice President, Operations and Director of the Montreal (Stock) Exchange and its options clearing corporation, respectively.  After serving as Clearing House Manager, he was Vice President, Financial Marketing at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) which included a four-year posting as Executive Director of CME’s London Representative Office. Following the market crisis in 1987 he was recruited to be the Chief Operating Officer of the Stock Exchange of Hong Kong (SEHK), In that position he was responsible for the development of a screen-based trading system for equities, fixed income and unit trusts (mutual funds).  Equity options trading was introduced soon after.  He served as a Council (board) Member of SEHK as well as a Member of the Board of Directors of its subsidiary, the Hong Kong Securities Clearing Corporation (HKSCC). He subsequently became Chief Executive of HKSCC, also continuing as a Board Member.  He oversaw the project to migrate securities settlement and custody from paper and check-based manual processes to a centralized clearing and depository book-entry structure that exceeded international standards.  After six years in Hong Kong he joined State Street Corp. in Boston as Senior Vice President, Global Operations where he was responsible for corporate-wide management for the conversion of all operations, funds, trusts, custody, payments systems and corporate affairs to the Euro. Following that successful conversion project, that comprised 17 business units and world-wide (90 countries) customer relationships, he was responsible for collective investments on State Street’s Global Link platform in its treasury area.  Returning to Chicago he was Head of the U.S. Representative Office for Deutsche Boerse AG and several of its subsidiaries including Eurex. Following that he joined the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago where he worked on market risks, infrastructure and regulations related to the financial crisis and its aftermath.  He retired from the Fed in 2015.  

Throughout his career he has served on international committees, including a Federal Reserve Bank of New York working group, the OTC Derivatives Regulators’ Forum, SWIFT, and the International Securities Services Association (ISSA).  He has spoken at numerous conferences on financial market topics as well as authored papers on financial market topics.  Presently, he is a Contributing Editor to the Central Banking Journal, Associate Editor of the Journal of Financial Market Infrastructure and a Member of the Editorial Advisory Board of the Global Commodities Applied Research Digest.

He has a Master of Philosophy degree in Economics from the London School of Economics, a B.A. degree in Mathematics from the Illinois State University and completed the Advanced Management Course at the University of Chicago.