Luc Fortin and the problem with closing time

Eight o’clock in the evening is an unusual hour to begin a Canadian trading day. In September 2021, Montréal Exchange made it part of the schedule. The new opening time let investors in Hong Kong and Singapore trade Canadian derivatives during their own working hours. Montreal could be settling into dinner while a portfolio manager on the other side of the world was getting down to business. Geography had acquired a rather inconvenient opinion about office hours.

Luc Fortin helped bring about that change. As president and chief executive of the exchange and TMX’s global head of trading, he was pursuing international participation in Canadian markets. The extended session offered 20.5 hours of trading, with a separate half-hour pre-opening period. It was a specific answer to a specific problem: investors with Canadian exposure needed a way to respond while Canada’s conventional business day was still hours away.

Today, his title is President and Chief Executive Officer, TMX Global Markets and Post Trade. The remit takes in equities, derivatives and fixed income, as well as the clearing businesses that sit behind completed trades. It is a mouthful of a title for work whose usefulness can be expressed quite simply. A market needs to be available when people need it, and a transaction needs machinery that can carry it through.

A banker changes sides

Fortin arrived at Montréal Exchange in June 2016, bringing more than 25 years of capital markets experience. Before that, he had led institutional client businesses at HSBC Bank Canada, covering rates and credit, derivatives, foreign exchange and money markets. Earlier senior positions at TD Bank and TD Securities gave him a long view of the Canadian financial industry from inside banking.

The distinction matters. A bank’s institutional team encounters investors through their transactions and their requirements. An exchange has to consider the venue those investors share, including participants whose interests do not always agree. Fortin’s move brought experience of the customer’s side of that relationship into the operation of the marketplace itself. He had spent years working with the people an exchange hoped to attract.

His initial assignment was managing director, derivatives trading, with responsibility for business growth, product delivery, client experience and daily market operations. By November 2016, he had become Montréal Exchange’s president and CEO. In January 2018, his responsibilities widened to global trading at TMX. The progression moved him from a particular derivatives business toward decisions spanning several kinds of market.

His education includes a Bachelor of Commerce from the University of Ottawa and the TD Securities Leadership program at Ivey Business School. That combination fits the professional path: commercial training, years leading client-facing teams, then responsibility for institutions where the operating detail carries consequences well beyond an individual desk. His career offers a useful corrective to the idea that every financial innovation begins with a new arrival. Sometimes the person changing the timetable has spent decades learning why customers care about it.

London first. Then the next morning.

The push toward longer hours happened in stages. In 2018, Montréal Exchange extended its session to include London’s trading day. Canadian derivatives could become part of a European investor’s morning routine. The exchange was moving its availability toward the client, rather than requiring the client to rearrange an entire day around Montreal.

The Asia-Pacific expansion followed in September 2021. Its practical benefits included acting on Canadian market exposure, adjusting interest-rate risk and pursuing strategies across markets during local working hours. Derivatives are contracts tied to an underlying asset or measure. A futures contract can help an institution manage a particular exposure; access to the contract becomes more useful when it coincides with the time the institution needs to act.

There is an appealing lack of theatre in this sort of change. No investor has to fall in love with a new concept of Canada. The exchange simply has to be open. Yet making that happen requires technology and operations to be ready across participating firms. The 2021 launch was postponed from its earlier planned date to give industry members time for testing. A longer session is also a longer obligation.

The distinction between ambition and actual demand runs through Fortin’s explanation of the strategy. By 2023, he said that international participants accounted for more than half of the exchange’s activity and that clients had asked for extended hours. He also left further expansion conditional on demand. The commercial logic was customer-led: make Canadian products usable within an international working day, then judge the next step by what participants require.

The recruiting conversation that revealed the plan

Another part of Fortin’s approach becomes visible in a conversation with Rizwan Awan. Awan had spent nearly two decades in technology-oriented trading roles on the sell side, including at BMO Capital Markets. An introduction to Fortin in autumn 2020 opened a route into TMX.

Fortin described a plan to organize the markets business around functions, allowing teams to serve clients more coherently across asset classes. Awan took on equities trading alongside products and services across TMX Markets. Client relationship management and operations became other functional units, led at the time by Todd Hargarten and Sabia Chicoine. The underlying businesses retained their identities.

An institutional customer might use more than one market. An organization arranged entirely around separate business units can make that customer repeat the same conversation several times. Fortin’s proposed arrangement addressed that mismatch. Products, operations and relationships could work across the structure, while the exchanges and other businesses continued their particular jobs. The organizational chart was being asked to acknowledge how a customer actually works.

Awan’s account also provides a small, credible glimpse of Fortin as a colleague. Spending time with Fortin and TMX CEO John McKenzie changed his earlier impression of the exchange group as a sleepy institution. He described energy and determination in those discussions. It is a portrait drawn through recruitment and work, with a concrete consequence: Awan joined. In a story full of trading sessions and clearing systems, one introduction helped put a consequential piece of the team in place.

What happens after the applause

A trade is often presented as the decisive moment. The order finds a match; a price appears; everyone seems entitled to move on. Clearing and settlement supply the less photogenic work that follows. The parties’ obligations must be managed, and the transaction must reach completion. The vocabulary is dry because the business has very little room for improvisation.

In 2021, Fortin’s responsibilities expanded to include oversight and strategic direction of CDCC and CDS. CDCC is Canada’s derivatives clearing house. CDS handles equity and fixed income clearing. Adding both to his remit connected the marketplace’s commercial ambitions with institutions responsible for handling the consequences of its activity.

At the 2023 Boca derivatives conference, he described post-trade in mechanical terms. The image is modest, which suits the subject. Wheels receive much of the attention until the mechanism behind them ceases to cooperate. Growth in a market must also be accommodated by the systems supporting it.

That remit brings an executive close to questions of counterparty exposure, collateral and the movement of securities and money. The same international reach that expands an exchange’s opportunity can add dependencies across institutions and jurisdictions. For Fortin, market access and post-trade belong in the same professional field of view. A client’s experience includes what happens after execution, even if the closing bell makes the better photograph.

“Post-trade is the grease that makes the wheels go round.”

Luc Fortin · Boca, 2023

New contracts, familiar collaborators

The product record adds another dimension to his work. In 2020, Fortin and his team launched four derivatives products: cannabis futures, CORRA futures, Two-Year Government of Canada Bond futures and S&P/TSX 60 ESG futures. The list ranges from a developing equity sector to tools linked to interest rates, government bonds and an equity index. It shows how an exchange’s product decisions can address quite different forms of exposure.

The credit belongs to the team as well as its leader. An exchange product needs participants willing to use it and institutions able to support it. Announcing a contract is one milestone; establishing a market around it takes continuing work. Fortin’s earlier experience with institutional clients gives that process a recognizable connection to his banking career.

On May 4, 2026, he joined representatives of FTSE Russell for a market-opening ceremony marking the launch of futures on the FTSE Canada bank credit spread index. The event brought together the index provider, market makers and banking partners. Here was the collaborative part of market infrastructure in public view: different organizations contributing different pieces to a new contract.

His wider connections include board service at CDCC, CDS and the U.S. equity-options businesses BOX Holdings Group and BOX Market, alongside Finance Montréal’s Board of Governors. The Bank of Canada also lists him among the market representatives on its Canadian Fixed-Income Forum. These are settings where the practical concerns of one institution can meet those of the wider market. His professional territory reaches beyond the exchange’s own screens.

The clock is still on the agenda

The question of when a market should be open continued into 2026. A June episode of TMX’s podcast featured Fortin in conversation with John McKenzie, recorded at the equities trading conference in Toronto. The discussion covered a framework for extended hours, tokenization and digital assets, and the position of Canadian markets internationally. The subject had broadened from one derivatives session to a wider set of market-design questions.

In August, another episode carried his conversation with Walt Lukken, president and CEO of the Futures Industry Association, from the Canadian Annual Derivatives Conference in Quebec City. Canada’s place in a changing global financial environment remained part of the discussion. Fortin was again moving between domestic infrastructure and international participants, the two sides of the work that his career had brought together.

Longer hours are a particularly good way to understand that career because they look simple from a distance. Put a different time on the opening schedule. Let another region participate. Behind that change sit clients, technology teams, operations, clearing arrangements and people who must test whether the proposed improvement works in practice. The clock face gives no hint of the meetings.

Fortin crossed from banking into the exchange in 2016. Since then, his responsibilities have widened from derivatives trading to markets and the infrastructure after the trade. The through-line is access: finding a workable route between a Canadian institution and the people who want to use it. For an investor starting the day in Asia, the result can be pleasantly unremarkable. The market is open. There is work to do.