The 2014 Trading Technology 40: Billy Hult

17

Billy Hult

President

Tradeweb Markets

Last year: 23

Wall Street joint venture Tradeweb Markets’ 1998 introduction of an electronic marketplace for U.S. Treasury securities marked the start of the multidealer fixed-income trading era. A couple of dozen bond and derivative products later, with customers in 55 countries, still consortium-owned but with Thomson Reuters the controlling shareholder, New York–based Tradeweb continues to push industry boundaries while honing its competitive and technological edge. Given the lack of clarity of regulatory reforms for over-the-counter transactions, notably the swaps execution facility , or SEF, mandate, Tradeweb president Billy Hult says he has been wrestling with “how you innovate around a market that is still uncertain.” But that did not paralyze Hult and the rest of the management team, led by CEO Lee Olesky. Tradeweb opened two SEFs in October — a disclosed, request-for-quote market and an anonymous central limit order book — “providing customers the greatest flexibility in the ways they can access liquidity,” Hult said at the time. The 44-year-old, who came from Société Générale to Tradeweb in 2000 and has been president since 2008, had a hand in several product introductions and launched the firm’s interdealer electronic trading platform in 2009. Plans for 2014 include a run at the MarketAxess Holdings–led corporates segment and the build-out of Tradeweb Direct (formerly Tradeweb Retail) following the November acquisition of BondDesk Group (previously led by Howard Edelstein, No. 26 last year) in what Hult terms “a bet that fixed income on the retail level will evolve more electronically.”

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