Financial firms and markets have always
been awash in data. Now managing andmaking sense of it has become a businessin itself, and the industry’s top technological innovators are aggregating
data and deploying advanced analytical
tools to set themselves apart.

ARE FINANCIAL SERVICES COMPANIES REALLY INFORMATION
technology companies? They are certainly IT-driven; the biggest banks andbuy-side firms each budget billions of dollars annually for IT and employ
thousands, in some cases tens of thousands, of software engineers andother technologists.
Amid the explosion in what is commonly known as big data, the financial
technology leaders spotlighted in Institutional Investor’s Tech 40 are
underlining the “I” in IT.
This year’s elite include exchange company executives like Nasdaq’s
Adena Friedman, No. 1 following her elevation to CEO and the implementation of a new architecture called the Nasdaq Financial Framework;
Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) chairman and CEO Jeffrey Sprecher (No.
4); and CBOE Holdings president and COO Chris Concannon (No.15). Theyand heads of non-exchange trading venues, such as fixed-income platforms
MarketAxess Holdings (Richard McVey, No. 23) and Tradeweb Markets(Lee Olesky, No. 22), point out that they have been selling data products allalong. But the volumes are unprecedented; customers are demanding more,
better, and faster analytics and insights; and technologies are emerging
and evolving to fill the bill.
Friedman notes that data and computing speed fueled online brokerage
and automated trading, starting in the 1990s. “What is different today is theability to utilize data, to take advantage of greater processing capability andnetwork capacity,” she says.
“It seems like a lot of people are just waking up to the data story — it has
always been a focus of ours,” says Concannon, a former Nasdaq colleagueof Friedman’s who joined CBOE when it acquired Bats Global Markets,
where he was CEO, in February.
Sprecher has described ICE as a “network and content” business.
In 2015, ICE acquired Interactive Data Corp., now part of the ICE Data
Services unit, which accounted for a third of last year’s $5.96 billion intotal revenues. ICE is not alone among Tech 40 companies — others areBloomberg (Shawn Edwards and Vlad Kliatchko, No. 6) and London Stock
Exchange Group (Chris Corrado, No. 31) — in bulking up its index businessthrough acquisitions.
Another major index player, IHS Markit (Lance Uggla, No. 5), is explicitly

a big-data and analytics company; the financial industry–focused Markit
merged last year with IHS to form the $3.5 billion-in-revenues, self-styled“information powerhouse” with 50,000 corporate and government customers.
Mike Chinn (No. 30), president of S&P Global Market Intelligence, draws
a distinction between data and analytics: “A spreadsheet is data. A modelthat gets you to a decision is analytics.”
Michael Spencer (No. 8), who built ICAP into the world’s biggest interdealer brokerage, has sold off the traditional voice business and now runs
NEX Group, a fintech company consisting of two principal parts: the NEX
Markets trading platforms and NEX Optimisation, formerly ICAP’s posttrade risk and information services division, which includes “life cycle
management and information services to optimize portfolios, control risk,and reduce costs.”
Capital markets firms got a head start in complex analytics with thehigh-performance kdb+ database developed by Kx Systems, a subsidiaryof First Derivatives, and now other sectors like aerospace and pharmaceuticals are catching on. “We are making substantial investments in R&D,
marketing, and direct and indirect sales channels to bring our technology
to new markets,” says Kx and First Derivatives CEO Brian Conlon (No. 36).
The Tech 40 ranking was compiled by Institutional Investor editors andstaff, with nominations and input from industry participants and experts.
Four primary sets of attributes were evaluated: achievements and contributions over the course of a career; scope and complexity of responsibilities;
influence and leadership inside and outside an organization; and puretechnological innovation. Ten profiles appear in the following pages, andall 40 can be viewed online at institutionalinvestor.com.
Of the 40 entries, 31 were in the Tech 50 ranking last year. Their 2016
ranks are shown, and the rest are designated “PNR” (previously notranked).		
The Tech 40 was compiled under the direction of Senior Contributing
Editor Jeffrey Kutler. Individual profiles were written by Kutler,
Asia Bureau Chief Allen T. Cheng, and Senior Writers Imogen RoseSmith and Julie Segal.

The Rest of the Tech 40
RANK2016 2017 NAME

TITLE

FIRM

1411

Michael Bodson

President and Chief
Executive Officer

Depository Trust &Clearing Corp.

PNR

12

Terrence Duffy

Chairman and Chief
Executive Officer

CME Group

15

13

Charles Li

Chief Executive Officer

Hong Kong
Exchanges andClearing

PNR

14

Sean Belka

Director of Fidelity Labs

Fidelity Investments

1615

Chris Concannon

President and Chief
Operating Officer

CBOE Holdings

PNR

16

Guy Chiarello

President

First Data Corp.

PNR

17

Steven Lieblich

Chief Technology Officer Citadel

1818

David Rutter

Chief Executive Officer

R3CEV

NEIL KATZ

1719

Blythe Masters

Chief Executive Officer

Digital Asset Holdings

Managing Director

PNR

20

Alfred Spector

Chief Technology Officer Two Sigma
Investments

19

21

Neil Katz

Managing Director

D.E. Shaw Group20

22

Lee Olesky

Chief Executive Officer

Tradeweb Markets

21

23

Richard McVey

Chairman and Chief
Executive Officer

MarketAxessHoldings

2624David Gledhill

Group Chief Information
Officer and Head ofGroup Technology andOperations

DBS Bank

2225

Seth Merrin

Chief Executive Officer

Liquidnet Holdings

25

26

Antoine Shagoury

Global Chief Information
OfficerState Street Corp.

PNR

27

Peter Brown &Robert Mercer

Co–Chief Executive
Officers

RenaissanceTechnologies

27

28

Lou Eccleston

Chief Executive Officer

TMX Group

PNR

29Peter Cherecwich

President, Corporate &Institutional Services

Northern Trust Corp.

3130

Mike Chinn

President

S&P Global Market
Intelligence

40

31

Chris Corrado

Chief Operating Officer
and Chief Information
Officer

London Stock
Exchange Group

38

32

Neal Pawar

Chief Technology Officer AQR CapitalManagement33

33

Gary NorcrossPresident and Chief
Executive Officer

Fidelity National
Information Services

34

34

Steven O’Hanlon

President and Chief
Executive Officer

Numerix

3535

Sebastián Ceria

Chief Executive Officer

Axioma4136

Brian Conlon

Chief Executive Officer

First Derivatives andKx Systems

3737Tyler Kim

Global Head of FundServices

MaplesFS

3638

Michael Cooper

Chief Technology Officer BT Radianz

48

39

Robert Schifellite

President, Investor
Communication
Solutions

Broadridge FinancialSolutions

4240

Jim Minnick

Chief Executive Officer

eVestment

21
D.E. SHAW GROUPLAST YEAR: 19

Innovation is systematic within D.E. Shaw &Co., the $42 billion alternative-investment firm
founded in 1988 by computer scientist and computational finance pioneer David Shaw. Rather thanreacting to the latest trends in the IT world, D.E.
Shaw relies on the continuous experimentationof its decentralized IT teams, whose good ideas
may catch on across the firm. A few years ago, forexample, a more efficient framework for quote
distribution and market-data dissemination wasdeveloped by one group and eventually adopted
by others, says managing director Neil Katz, 45,
who has been with D.E. Shaw since his 1994 graduation from Stanford University. Katz, who earned
degrees in electrical engineering and quantitative
economics, manages a team of more than 250 technologists. They participate in hackathons, including an annual competition in India that exposesdevelopers to technologies that might be useful intheir regular work. There are also occasional hackweeks in New York, where people are encouraged
to work on projects outside their regular priorities.
“We’ve seen some real breakthroughs when people
put aside their normal workflow and turn to whatever side projects interest them,” Katz says.

Reprinted from the July/August 2017 issue of Institutional Investor Magazine. Copyright 2017 by Institutional Investor Magazine. All rights reserved.
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