The 2015 Tech 50: Michael Cooper

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Michael Cooper
Chief Technology Officer
BT Radianz
PNR

Cloud computing has been all the rage for five or six years; by now it is less a buzzword than a mainstream component of system architectures. However, the computing utility or shared infrastructure concept had earlier incarnations, one example being Radianz, a cloud in all but name when it began life 15 years ago as a Reuters Group affiliate. Acquired by the U.K.’s BT Group in 2005, what is now BT Radianz has bridged the pre- and postcloud eras to become a critical communications backbone for the financial industry and “more than just a service provider,” says Michael Cooper, CTO of the unit and of the financial technology services group within BT Global Banking and Financial Markets. Telecommunications is the core business of £17.9 billion-in-revenue ($27.3 billion) BT, but with thousands of financial market participants and more than 400 application and service providers on Radianz — a who’s who of brokerages, data companies, order and execution management systems and trading venues — the specialized network occupies a neutral ground that brings credibility to its dealings with clients. “We not only support their plans and strategies, we also can offer insight into where the market structure is going, how regulations are evolving and how people should respond to them,” explains Cooper, 52, who after joining the original Radianz team in 2001 headed up customer solutions, created a business technology group for BT Global Financial Services and became CTO in 2010. “Arguably, we take friction out of the market by virtue of our ubiquity.” Although cloud technology “lowers barriers to entry and achieving scale,” Cooper notes, there is a downside: The same benefits can be exploited by hackers. He cochairs one of the industry committees trying to stay a step ahead of such threats, the FIX Trading Community Cyber Security Working Group.

See the full story, “The 2015 Tech 50: Racers to the Edge.”

The 2015 Tech 50