In 1945, Cantor's founders had a vision to create a world-class brokerage service for Wall Street's fixed income inter-dealer community. Today, Cantor Fitzgerald has reached well beyond this original vision, and has established itself as a leading global financial services provider, offering an impressive array of products and services in the equity and fixed income capital markets.

Cantor Fitzgerald gained a reputation early for providing exceptional service and unmatched expertise to clients. After creating a significant foothold in the fixed income business, Cantor Fitzgerald launched an Institutional Equities and Sales and Trading division in 1965, offering large block trading and services to asset managers, pension funds and portfolio managers.

Cantor continued to build its relationships and harness its expertise on both its inter-dealer fixed income and institutional equity businesses, eventually expanding by opening offices abroad, in London in 1983 and Tokyo in 1986. Cantor's London office would become one of Cantor's earliest technology innovations as developers there created the first screen-based brokerage service for the fixed income markets, in 1983.

In 1991, Howard W. Lutnick was named President of Cantor Fitzgerald, and immediately began to focus on leveraging Cantor's reputation for technological innovation. In 1996, he spearheaded Cantor's creation of the technology and systems that would become eSpeed, Inc., and began testing this technology with its bond brokers.

In 1999, Cantor announced its intentions to migrate the company's robust inter-dealer and voice brokering global fixed income business to the eSpeed electronic trading platform. In December of 1999, eSpeed became a publicly traded, and separately run, business in its own right.

Through out the nineties, Cantor Fitzgerald also continued to grow its Institutional Equities Sales and Trading division, adding Investment Banking services in November of 2000.

On September 11, 2001 tragedy struck. Headquartered between the 101st and 105th floors of One World Trade Center, Cantor Fitzgerald and eSpeed would suffer incalculable losses when the attacks on the World Trade Center would claim the lives of 658 of its employees, and destroy the company's headquarters. The tragic events would alter the lives of Cantor's employees and families forever.

On September 19, 2001, Cantor Fitzgerald made a pledge to distribute 25% of the firm's profits and committed to paying for 10 years of healthcare for the benefit of the families and loved ones of its former Cantor Fitzgerald, eSpeed and TradeSpark employees (profits which would otherwise be distributed to the partners of Cantor Fitzgerald). Cantor Fitzgerald has distributed this 25% of its profits every quarter since, and will continue to do so until September 11, 2006.

Driven by this commitment to the families and loved ones of the friends and colleagues who were lost, the focused partners and employees of Cantor Fitzgerald began work on rebuilding the company. Now more than ever, the firm would need to succeed. The decision was made to forgo a rebuild of the inter-dealer business in the US. It was decided that the entire US business would be rebuilt on the foundation of Cantor's reputable Institutional Equities Sales and Trading business. Cantor would maintain its inter-dealer business in Europe, as it also continued to migrate inter-dealer fixed income business to the eSpeed system.

Throughout 2000 and 2002, Cantor Fitzgerald expanded and strengthened its Institutional Sales and Trading franchise worldwide by increasing its presence in Investment Banking and Portfolio Trading, adding Risk Arbitrage and relative value investing, and by launching Institutional Fixed Income Sales and Trading, Market Commentary and Asset Management.

Today, Cantor Fitzgerald is a leading financial services provider that offers clients an array of financial products and services in the equity and fixed income capital markets. These products and services include sales and trading, investment banking, market commentary and market data.

Cantor Fitzgerald spun off its wholesale voice brokerage business to create BGC Partners L.P. BGC provides brokerage services to wholesale fixed income, interest rate, foreign exchange and derivative markets worldwide. BGC, named for fixed income brokerage innovator, B. Gerald Cantor, offers a full range of voice brokerage services including price quotes, execution, straight-through-processing, and clearing and settlement.

While Cantor Fitzgerald has evolved from a small inter-dealer bond broker to a global financial services powerhouse, it still holds true to the same values of focus, resiliency and commitment that it was founded on.