The 2014 Trading Technology 40: Steven O’Hanlon

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Steven O’Hanlon

President and CEO

Numerix

Last year: 35

Start-ups are Steven O’Hanlon’s life: He has raised venture capital, gone through IPOs and helped consummate sell-offs, notably that of communications product company Network Express to Cabletron Systems in 1996 for $110 million. Although his current affiliation with quantitative software shop Numerix began in 2002 — five years after the company was formed — O’Hanlon is still in a start-up state of mind. As president under chairman Gregory Whitten, a former Microsoft Corp. executive who’d invested in New York–based Numerix, O’Hanlon honed the firm’s pricing and valuation specialty, a timely play in view of the growing demand for derivatives transparency and analytics both pre- and postcrisis. Having added the CEO title a year ago, the enterprise software veteran is executing what he calls a pivot to risk, initially focusing on the burgeoning area of counterparty risk management. “Now we are a preeminent pricing and risk company,” declares the 55-year-old, whose firm has 220 employees and 700 customers worldwide, half of them served through nearly 100 partners, including Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters. CrossAsset Server, introduced in March 2013, is Numerix’s flexible, scalable and cloud-enabled engine for extending its high-performance-analytics capabilities. “We are evolving to be much better at solution-selling,” says O’Hanlon, stressing his company’s willingness to partner with those that have complementary strengths (as it has done in a showcase deployment for Singapore’s DBS Bank). The CEO also is eyeing acquisitions.

See also O’Hanlon’s profile in the 2013 Trading Technology 40.