IMC Brand Guidelines: Two Amsterdam Floor Traders, 1989, and a Global Market Maker

The Amsterdam options floor, 1989.

IMC was founded in Amsterdam in 1989 by two traders working on the floor of the city’s options exchange. English Wikipedia names them as Robert Defares and René Schelvis and gives the firm’s original name as International Marketmaker’s Combination; the initials became the brand. The same article calls the trading business IMC Financial Markets and notes that it is often referred to as IMC Trading. IMC’s own history page tells the founding in one line: the firm, it says, started with two floor traders on the Equity Options Exchange in Amsterdam.

The company’s account of itself turns on the move from shouting to software. Its “Who we are” page says trading floors once ran on hand signals and shouted orders until electronic trading changed everything, and that IMC built its own automated trading systems, which it says made it one of the first firms in the industry to do so. Its timeline says that by 2000, when most firms were still trading over the phone, IMC was already moving to screen-based trading, and that in 2010 it developed what it calls its Global Options Automated Trading system. These are the company’s own claims.

Expansion follows the same timeline. IMC says it opened its second office, in Chicago, in 2000, entering the US market; its third, in Sydney, in 2002; then Hong Kong in 2006, Seoul in 2020 and Mumbai in 2021. In 2022, it says, it opened a London office and acquired a crypto trading firm based in Zug, Switzerland. Its website now describes ten global offices, more than 2,070 employees, more than seventy nationalities and more than 120 trading venues.

Options, ETFs and the NYSE floor.

English Wikipedia describes IMC as a proprietary trading firm and market maker across equities, bonds, commodities and currencies, and cites a 2024 Financial Times article as singling out its activity in options and ETFs. Traders Magazine reported in May 2014 that IMC Chicago was acquiring the Goldman Sachs Designated Market Maker rights on the New York Stock Exchange, which would make it the DMM for more than 630 securities and about 400 operating companies; at the time, the magazine said, IMC described itself as providing liquidity in more than 200,000 securities on over 100 exchanges. A later announcement carried by the magazine in October 2020 confirmed that IMC had been a DMM on the NYSE since 2014, and described it as a Lead Market Maker in more than 150 ETFs and more than 500 options classes.

The firm also offers its prices directly. IMC’s timeline says that in 2018 it set up a sales desk so that buy-side firms could reach its liquidity through block trading, and its website has a section on accessing that liquidity. In May 2026 it announced that it had joined the Talos Provider Network to offer institutional crypto liquidity to Talos clients. In April 2026 IMC said it had been named Top Market Maker and Top Principal Trading Group at the 2026 HKEX Awards in Hong Kong, and in December 2023 that it had been named Market Maker of the Year at the FOW International Awards; both come from the company’s announcements.

Recruitment is the other half of the brand. IMC runs Prosperity, a global trading-simulation challenge for STEM students, which returned for a fourth edition from April 2026; the firm’s announcement of the 2025 edition said it had been dubbed “the world’s most elaborate trading challenge.” Its culture pages list values such as “Dare to continuously innovate” and “Keep both feet on the ground.” Since 1998 it has run the IMC Weekend School, which it calls its first charitable foundation, and in February 2025 it became primary sponsor of the Team Liquid Chess team.

How trading firms present themselves.

Proprietary trading firms and electronic market makers sell little to the public, so their identities are built for a narrow audience: the students, engineers and researchers they hope to hire, and the institutions they trade with. Their websites read less like consumer marketing and more like careers sites, with pages on departments, open roles, interviewing and benefits placed as prominently as any description of the business.

Recruiting shapes the tone. Jane Street, for example, keeps a Puzzles page that posts a new problem every month or two, and its events include meet-ups built around puzzles and technical talks. Coding challenges, internship programmes and scholarships do similar work, signalling that the firm values problem solving before it values a finance background.

The trading floor is the other recurring image. Firms describe offices in several financial centres and present their floors as places of shared work rather than private desks, while technology pages talk about low-latency networks, compilers and research. Blogs and podcasts carry much of the explanation, letting engineers and researchers speak for the firm instead of an advertising campaign.

The marks themselves tend to be modest: a plain name, a simple geometric symbol or a word set in capitals, used consistently across careers pages, legal notices and the regulated subsidiaries that carry the brand in each market. For designers, the category is a study in restraint, where credibility comes from clarity, consistency and a careful choice of tone rather than from colour or spectacle. The palettes in these guides are our own unofficial interpretations.

An Amsterdam head office with a US parent.

IMC’s corporate structure changed at the start of 2024. In a release dated 21 December 2023, the firm said it had created a new US holding company, IMC Global Holdings LLC, which would become the global parent of the IMC group from 1 January 2024. It explained that the largest part of its operations and the greatest number of its employees were already in the United States, and that most of its peers were US-based. It also said its headquarters would remain in Amsterdam, that day-to-day operations and its two-tier structure of a Management Board and a Supervisory Board would not change, and that the Dutch central bank, De Nederlandsche Bank, had granted the required declaration of no objection.

Growth has continued on both sides of the Atlantic and in Asia. In October 2025 IMC said it had expanded its Hong Kong office in Central and planned to grow its local team, and in August 2026 it announced a new New York office to serve as the hub for its Americas systematic equities business. English Wikipedia lists the company as private and names co-founder Robert Defares as chief executive and chairman.

For a design guide, IMC shows how the initials of a trading-floor partnership became a compact global name. Compare Optiver, an Amsterdam options firm founded three years earlier, and Flow Traders, another Amsterdam trading firm. For this guide we use a floor green, an amber and a stone grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep IMC’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.