Bryan Harkins is President, IEX Group.

What were your highlights of 2025?

Market participants continued to be attracted to IEX’s best-in-class execution quality. This is demonstrated by a substantial increase in our displayed market share, which has grown 4x since the summer of 2024  (June 2024 to Dec 2025.)

Even as IEX’s displayed trading volume has grown, our dark order types have continued to perform as well as ever. In fact, IEX captured over 25% of all on-exchange midpoint notional volume and nearly half of all on-exchange midpoint block trades. IEX currently represents 6% of U.S. exchange market share, excluding off exchange trading. We are also closing the year with all-time market share highs, with back-to-back record months in November (3.4%) and December (3.6%).

Additionally, we were very pleased by the SEC’s review and approval of our IEX Options proposal. IEX has spent years building markets that protect investors and liquidity providers from latency arbitrage, and we appreciate the significant support we received from investors, brokers, market makers, and stakeholders who wrote supportive letters to the SEC prior to our approval. We remain dedicated to innovating for performance and superior execution quality and look forward to taking the next steps towards launching our options exchange.

What are your expectations for 2026? 

Our expectation is that dark trading will remain a key part of trading strategies in 2026, but the way firms evaluate execution quality and venue allocation is shifting. Historically, firms relied on short-term markouts and metrics like fill and hit rates. As tools and trading evolve, market participants are taking a more nuanced view of which dark venues best support their strategies, using different kinds of venues to access midpoint liquidity and evaluating them across broader performance horizons.

Traders are now seeking tools that let them engage liquidity on different terms depending on strategy, urgency, and time horizon. Markouts may span multiple intervals, with greater focus on long-term impact and holistic venue performance, including unique features like price improvement. To support this shift, IEX has introduced an additional signal designed to detect quote imbalance, giving traders more control over how and when they access liquidity as they broaden the metrics they use. Our focus remains on providing tools that adapt to varied strategies, algo phases, and an increased scrutiny on impact to an order’s parent level performance.

Lastly, in 2025 we made substantial progress in our readiness to launch an options venue, and a successful launch remains one of our top priorities for 2026. IEX Options is designed to foster competition and deliver better prices for investors, and we look forward to making it available to the market.

What are your clients’ pain points and how have they changed from 1 year ago? 

US equity markets are dynamic and constantly changing, with market participants often modifying their strategies to adapt to this fast-paced environment. At IEX, we stay laser focused on making our exchange the venue of choice across a range of market participants. Over the past year clients are getting even more granular when evaluating their venue of choice. In some cases, gravitating to certain venues that are better to trade at particular times or venues whose business model or fee structure are most beneficial to the trading strategies they are running.Ultimately, exchanges that understand their clients’ desire to be flexible and adaptive to new market developments are the ones who will gain market share.