Business Description

CME Group enables clients to trade futures, options, cash and over-the-counter (OTC) products, optimize portfolios and analyze data - empowering market participants worldwide to efficiently manage risk and capture opportunities. CME Group provides primary price discovery and referential pricing information through its market data in a variety of formats, including real-time, historical and derived data for customers in both listed and cash products. CME Group also offers industry-leading research and analytics tools to provide customers with market education resources. In addition, it operates one of the world's leading central counterparty clearing providers. Our principal executive offices are located at 20 South Wacker Drive, Chicago, Illinois 60606, our telephone number is 312-930-1000 and our website is cmegroup.com . The graphic below provides a brief overview of key events within CME Group's history: DESCRIPTION OF BUSINESS CME Group exchanges offer the widest range of global benchmark products across interest rates, equity indexes, foreign exchange (FX), and agricultural, energy and metals commodities. We also offer cash and repo fixed income trading via BrokerTec, and spot and OTC FX trading via EBS. Additionally, we operate one of the world’s leading central counterparty clearing providers. Derivatives Exchange Business: Our broad set of products offered on our derivatives exchanges (CME, CBOT, NYMEX and COMEX) are important risk management tools for our clients around the globe. We believe our customers value the diversity of our products, liquidity, price transparency and technological capabilities. Market liquidity - or the ability of a market to absorb the execution of large purchases or sales quickly and efficiently - is key to attracting and retaining customers and contributing to a market's success. Our products provide a means for hedging, speculation and asset allocation related to the risks associated with, among other things, interest rate sensitive instruments, equity ownership, cryptocurrency ownership, changes in the value of foreign currency and changes in the prices of agricultural, energy and metal commodities. The following highlights our key products: • Interest Rates — SOFR, U.S. Treasury and Federal Funds. • Equity Indices — E-mini S&P 500, E-mini Nasdaq 100 and E-mini Russell 2000. 5 Table of Contents • Foreign Exchange — Euro, Japanese yen, British pound and Australian dollar. • Agricultural Commodities — corn, soybean, wheat and livestock. • Energy — WTI crude oil, natural gas and refined products. • Metals — gold, copper and silver. • Cryptocurrencies — Bitcoin, Ether, Solana and XRP. CME Group products are traded primarily through CME Globex, as well as by open outcry in Chicago for SOFR options and through privately negotiated transactions. We strive to provide the most flexible and scalable platforms to support the operational and capacity needs of our business along with the delivery of innovative technology solutions to the marketplace. Our CME Globex electronic trading system operates our central limit order book (CLOB) markets. The CME Globex platform is accessible through a wide variety of vendor-provided and custom-built trading systems that benefit from our open application programming interface approach. For electronic and privately negotiated markets, we offer brokers and customers the CME Direct platform for arranging, executing, recording and risk-managing trades across all six major asset classes. We also provide the functionality to connect to CME Direct on a mobile device through our CME Direct Mobile application with full trading and on-the-go order management capabilities. Together, our platforms offer: • certainty and flexibility of execution; • extensive capabilities to facilitate complex and demanding trading; • direct market access; • open access, price transparency and anonymity; • convenience and efficiency; • connectivity through highly secure, resilient and low-latency network options; • access to market data; and • global distribution, including connectivity through high-speed international telecommunications hubs in key financial centers. We maintain comprehensive business continuity and disaster recovery plans, as well as facilities designed to enable timely recovery and resumption of our markets in the event of a business disruption or disaster. We also maintain incident and crisis management plans that address responses to disruptive events.…