The 2014 Tech 50: Seth Merrin

< The 2014 Tech 50: Moving Out of the Lab and Into the Cloud

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Seth Merrin
Chief Executive Officer
Liquidnet Holdings
Last year: 17

Institutions like BlackRock and Goldman Sachs Group have come up short in their attempts to run electronic platforms for corporate-bond trading. MarketAxess Holdings earns increasing profits at it, but the vast majority of the potential liquidity is still up for grabs, and Seth Merrin, founder and CEO of 13-year-old, buy side–centric equities pool Liquidnet, is setting his sights on it. In March, New York–based Liquidnet Holdings announced its acquisition of Vega-Chi, which launched Europe’s first multilateral trading facility for convertible bonds in 2010, adding European and U.S. high yields in 2012. With that technology, Merrin envisions “building out the largest institutional-sized liquidity pool dedicated to corporate bonds.” Liquidnet’s 740 member firms, he notes, “own 85 percent of the corporate bonds in the U.S. and Europe. They will come together to create a marketplace for bonds.” A serial entrepreneur, Merrin, 54, founded Merrin Financial, which introduced buy-side order management systems in the 1980s, and co-founded application-integration-software company VIE Systems in the 1990s. He is enhancing Liquidnet in other ways, notably with liquidity and transparency controls that have “systematized our clients’ access and [data] preferences.” In June, however, the Securities and Exchange Commission cited Liquidnet for shoddy information practices and penalized the firm $2 million. In April, Bob Garrett, formerly head of equity trading and prime services technology at Wells Fargo Securities, assumed the newly created position of head of technology.

The 2014 Tech 50

1 Dave Cross	1	3 IAN CURCIO 2011	4 FayFoto/Boston	5 Teri Pengilley
Thomas Secunda Bloomberg	Jeffrey Sprecher Intercontinental Exchange	Catherine Bessant Bank of America Corp.	Stephen Neff Fidelity Investments	Lance Uggla Markit
6	7	8 Photographer:Charlie Simokaitis	9	10 Mark McQueen
Robert Goldstein BlackRock	David Craig Thomson Reuters	Phupinder Gill CME Group	Anna Ewing NASDAQ OMX Group	R. Martin Chavez Goldman Sachs Group
11	12	13	14	15 Christopher Elston
Deborah Hopkins Citi Ventures	Dan Mathisson Credit Suisse	Daniel Coleman KCG Holdings	Michael Spencer ICAP	Michael Bodson Depository Trust & Clearing Corp.
16	17	18 Todd Plitt	19	20
Joe Ratterman BATS Global Markets	Dominique Cerutti Euronext	Ron Levi GFI Group	Gaurav Suri D.E. Shaw Group	Charles Li Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing
21 Larry Lettera/ Camera 1	22	23	24 XT	25
Lou Eccleston S&P Capital IQ	Lee Olesky Tradeweb Markets	Richard McVey MarketAxess Holdings	Seth Merrin Liquidnet Holdings	Antoine Shagoury London Stock Exchange Group
26 Production	27 Wayne R. Martin	28	29 Thorsten Jansen	30 Adam B. Auel
Christopher Perretta State Street Corp.	Kevin Rhein Wells Fargo & Co.	Peter Carr Morgan Stanley	Hauke Stars Deutsche Börse	Robert Alexander Capital One Financial Corp.
31	32	33 Paul Elledge	34	35 Stephen Brashear
David Gershon SuperDerivatives	Chris Corrado MSCI	Joseph Squeri Citadel	Tanuja Randery BT Global Services	John Bates Software AG
36	37	38	39 Photo Credit: Kevin Irby	40
Gary Scholten Principal Financial Group	David Gledhill DBS Bank	Simon Garland Kx Systems	Cristóbal Conde FinTech Innovation Lab	Jeff Parker EidoSearch
41	42 Jeff Smith Photo	43	44	45
Kim Fournais & Lars Seier Christensen Saxo Bank	Kenneth Marlin Marlin & Associates	Tyler Kim MaplesFS	Jim McGuire Charles Schwab Corp.	Jim Minnick eVestment
46	47	48 tomohisa ichiki	49 David Poultney	50 A.E. Fletcher Photography
Steven O’Hanlon Numerix	Sebastián Ceria Axioma	Yasuki Okai Nomura Research Institute	Niki Beattie Market Structure Partners	Mas Nakachi OpenGamma