Few other people in the history of the futures industry can say that they had such a decisive influence on the course of its development as Jörg Franke, one of the founders of Deutsche Terminbörse. It was Franke who was tapped to run the exchange when it was still just a small office in Frankfurt, with no staff, no products and no trading floor. And it was Franke who championed the concept of electronic trading to customers in Germany and beyond with extraordinary success. Within two years of its launch in 1990, DTB had become the third largest derivatives exchange in Europe. By 1995 it had overtaken Matif, and by the end of 1997 it had captured more than 50% of the market in the bund futures traded on Liffe. Franke was also the driving force behind the merger of the Swiss and German futures exchanges in 1998 into a new organization called Eurex, which today ranks as the largest futures exchange in Europe and the second largest in the world. Franke left Eurex in 2000. Today he is the chairman of the supervisory board or RTS Realtime Systems, a leading vendor of electronic trading systems for financial markets.