< The 2015 Trading Technology 40: Going with the Flow
15
Nicholas Themelis
Chief Information Officer
MarketAxess Holdings
Last year: 18
MarketAxess Holdings has an answer for the bond market’s liquidity woes: Open Trading, a protocol introduced in 2012, “provides all participants a way to interact with each other for the first time,” says Nicholas Themelis, chief information officer of the New York–based company. “We’re changing the world.” The anonymous, all-to-all trading functionality may be compelling — “those connectivity points [among dealers and money managers] just didn’t exist in the past,” the 51-year-old explains — but the take-up is gradual. MarketAxess, which according to research firm Greenwich Associates handles 86 percent of electronic trading in corporate bonds, is executing just 6 percent of its transactions through Open Trading. “Why couldn’t it be 15 percent or 40 percent?” asks the upbeat Themelis. His answer: While “lots of companies are talking” about structural fixes, “we’re proving this works. We’re able to leverage the community we’ve built and connect liquidity pockets wherever they may be.” Formed in 2000 and a public company since 2004, MarketAxess reported a record $767 billion in total trading volume last year; its $475 billion U.S. high-grade volume accounted for 14.5 percent of that part of the market. Themelis, who joined MarketAxess in 2004 and previously held regional CIO positions at Barclays Capital and Lehman Brothers Holdings, is currently focusing on the first-quarter launch of Open Trading in Europe and on growing demand for data services. “Participants want more data and context around the market before they are comfortable putting in a price,” he notes.
See also Themelis’s profile in the 2013 Trading Technology 40.
The 2015 Trading Technology 40
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |
| Kevin Kometer CME Group | Richard Prager BlackRock | Raymond Tierney III Bloomberg Tradebook | Jonathan Ross KCG Holdings | Charles Vice Intercontinental Exchange |
| 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 |
| Chris Isaacson BATS Global Markets | Bradley Peterson Nasdaq OMX Group | Brad Levy MarkitSERV | Dan Keegan Citi | Ronald DePoalo Fidelity Institutional |
| 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 |
| Gerard Beatty Goldman Sachs Group | Gerald O’Connell CBOE Holdings | Brenda Hoffman TMX Group | Billy Hult Tradeweb Markets | Nicholas Themelis MarketAxess Holdings |
| 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 |
| Bina Kalola Bank of America Merrill Lynch | Gil Mandelzis EBS-BrokerTec (ICAP) | Steven Randich Financial Industry Regulatory Authority | Jerry Dobner GFI Group | Michael Liberman BlueMountain Capital Management |
| 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 |
| Bill Chow and Richard Leung Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing | Jamie Selway Investment Technology Group | Brad Katsuyama IEX Group | John Mackay (Mack) Gill MillenniumIT | Jamil Nazarali Citadel Execution Services |
| 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 |
| Robert Cornish International Securities Exchange | Tyler Moeller andJoshua Walksy Broadway Technology | Rishi Nangalia REDI Holdings | Manoj Narang Tradeworx, Thesys Technologies | Oki Matsumoto Monex Group |
| 31 | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35 |
| Alasdair Haynes Aquis Exchange | Veronica Augustsson Cinnober Financial Technology | Stu Taylor Algomi | Luís Otávio Saliba Furtado BM&FBovespa | Tal Cohen Chi-X Global Holdings |
| 36 | 37 | 38 | 39 | 40 |
| Donal Byrne Corvil | R. Cromwell Coulson OTC Markets Group | Alfred Eskandar Portware | Richard Korhammer SR Labs | Hazem Dawani OptionsCity Software |
