Eleven years is plenty of time to learn that a bar chart is rarely just a bar chart. Somewhere behind the clean rise and fall of a line sit exchanges, feeds, software, interfaces, developers and customers who need the number before it becomes old news. Colleen Sheeren joined Barchart in 2015 as a marketing associate. She arrived to explain a company built around those hidden mechanics. Over time, the company grew broader, her title grew larger, and the sentence required to describe the place became strangely harder to write.
Today, Sheeren is Barchart's chief marketing officer. She oversees strategic marketing at the Chicago company, including digital work, events, advertising, public relations and the Barchart Impact advertising program. The promotion came in December 2023, after a run as head of marketing. It looks tidy in a biography: associate, manager, department head, C-suite. Careers only look that orderly when written backward.
The more revealing version begins with a problem Sheeren has described herself. Almost everyone knows Barchart for something different. A retail investor may know the website and its market pages. A developer may know the APIs. A commodities team may live in cmdtyView. A grain elevator, brokerage or financial platform may use technology that customers never see. Each audience has met the company. None necessarily has met the entire company.
“They're all right. They're just seeing a different piece of the same company.”Colleen Sheeren
The pleasant-surprise problem
This puzzle was already visible in 2018, when Sheeren became head of marketing. At the time, she said that firms across financial services, commodities and media were often pleasantly surprised to discover the extent of Barchart's capabilities. Pleasant surprise sounds like a compliment. For a marketer, it is also a small alarm bell. If customers are startled by the range, the range has not yet become part of the reputation.
Sheeren made expanding that reach a core objective. Her remit included advertising, social media, digital marketing and event management. It also included the less glamorous work of creating a common mental picture. Product teams naturally speak in features. Customers speak in jobs to be done. Corporate positioning has to stand between them, fluent in both, while refusing to turn into a brochure with fifty-seven bullet points.
The scale sharpens the paradox. Barchart says its consumer site reaches more than four million active users a month and draws more than forty million monthly views. That is an enviable front door. It is also only one door. Behind it sits a business selling global data and tools through APIs and platforms, serving investing, trading and risk-management workflows. Visibility in one category can cast a shadow over everything next to it.
One Barchart, four familiar entrances
A career with a widening lens
Sheeren came to Barchart after working as a marketing associate at a Chicago-based investment advisory firm. She had earned a Bachelor of Arts in Business Management from Saint Ambrose University. The public record does not offer a cinematic origin story, and there is something useful about that. Her career is legible through responsibility rather than reinvention. She stayed close to one complicated business and kept being trusted with more of it.
Internal promotions are sometimes mistaken for the absence of change. Here, the opposite is more accurate. The subject under Sheeren's care expanded from campaigns and events to the identity of the company itself. A new employer can provide a clean slate. A long tenure provides layers: memories of which messages worked, which product grew from where, which customers call the same feature by another name, and which corporate phrases sound elegant in a meeting but dissolve on contact with ordinary speech.
Her sequence of promotions also mirrors a change in altitude. An associate is asked to make the work happen. A manager coordinates the work. A department head decides what the work should be. A chief marketing officer has to connect that choice to the direction of the business. Sheeren crossed each of those thresholds at Barchart, so the company did not merely see her arrive at the answer. It saw how she handled the questions that came before it. There is no public ledger for accumulated judgment, but four titles across the same organization provide a clean proxy for growing trust.
The timing matters, too. She joined when Barchart was already an established market-data name and FinTech Exchange was just beginning. By the time she entered the C-suite, the portfolio publicly stretched across data feeds, APIs, software, media and digital experiences for financial and commodity markets. Her professional education therefore happened alongside the business's own expansion. She did not need to study an old brand and propose a fashionable rewrite. She had watched the reasons for a rewrite accumulate, product by product and audience by audience.
That accumulated context is now part of her executive tool kit. Barchart's leadership description gives her responsibility for day-to-day strategic marketing and oversight of advertising and event planning. The company's CMO announcement added brand recognition, public relations and communicating Barchart's products and message to clients and market participants. This is marketing as translation, but also as editing. Someone has to decide which details deserve the front page and which belong in the footnotes.
The event was part of the message
One of Sheeren's early proving grounds was FinTech Exchange. Barchart launched the annual gathering in 2015, the year she joined. By the time of her 2018 promotion, she was playing a lead role. The event brought together more than 500 professionals annually and featured organizations ranging from IBM, Google and Amazon Web Services to CME Group, Cboe, Trading Technologies and Kraken.
The guest list told a story a product catalog could not. Established exchanges shared the frame with cloud providers and startups. Financial infrastructure met software, trading and new markets. Sheeren said being involved from the beginning was extremely rewarding, and she hoped the event would keep contributing to Chicago's growth as a financial-technology hub. That ambition placed Barchart inside a community rather than above it. A company can claim thought leadership in a press release. Convening the people who might disagree with one another is a more persuasive method.
Events also reveal a practical streak in her portfolio. Brand is often discussed as if it floats several feet above the actual business. FinTech Exchange required rooms, speakers, schedules, promotion and a reason for busy people to attend. The idea had to survive contact with name badges. Sheeren's documented work has consistently sat in that overlap between the conceptual and the logistical: brand recognition on one side, day-to-day execution on the other.
“Everything we build starts with data.”Colleen Sheeren
Three words after eleven years
In 2026, Sheeren set out Barchart's latest answer to the identity problem. For years, she wrote, the company had described itself as a market-data provider. The phrase remained accurate, but no longer held the whole picture. Data powers products, drives workflows and helps businesses make decisions. So the new campaign says it with almost comic directness: “Barchart is Data.”
Three words can look easy once someone else has found them. Their simplicity is earned by everything they leave out. The line does not make a visitor memorize the distinction between a feed, a platform, a website and a mobile app. It gives those things a common material. It also returns the company to its name without letting the name trap it. The chart is one expression of the data, not the boundary of the business.
The phrase also performs a useful bit of grammar. “Data” is broad enough to cover the catalogue, while “is” makes a commitment. There is no thicket of adjectives, no promise to revolutionize every market before lunch. For a business that trades in precision, the restraint fits. Sheeren's 2018 language was about helping more firms discover the breadth. Her 2026 language is about giving that breadth a center. The objective endured; the expression became cleaner.
Sheeren's explanation did not stop at product architecture. She pointed to the behavior after a sale: support staff who know clients by name, developers who join customer conversations, and builders who remain close to users. It is a notable choice for a marketer discussing a data company. The machinery matters. So does the fact that a person answers when the machinery meets a customer's real problem.
There is no grand personal mythology in Sheeren's public profile. The more grounded story is enough. She joined at an associate level, helped build an industry gathering, took charge of marketing, and eventually entered the executive team. She has spent more than a decade discovering that breadth is both a commercial strength and a writing problem. Her work now is to make a company with many correct descriptions feel coherent without making it smaller.
A chart succeeds by arranging complexity so a pattern becomes visible. Sheeren's assignment is not so different. The inputs are products, audiences, habits, old perceptions and new ambitions. The line through them has to be honest, memorable and useful. Eleven years into the job, she has chosen a line short enough to fit above the graph.