The 2015 Tech 50: Seth Merrin

< The 2015 Tech 50: Racers to the Edge

23
Seth Merrin
Chief Executive Officer
Liquidnet Holdings
Last year: 24

Fourteen years ago Seth Merrin, a serial entrepreneur who had gained renown for inventing trade order management systems in the 1980s, introduced Liquidnet, an even farther-reaching, technology-based breakthrough for the buy side. A peer-to-peer network for institutional equity trades, built to handle large blocks that were difficult to execute on exchanges, the trailblazing dark venue now spans 43 markets on five continents, and Merrin, 55, has set out to conquer another world: fixed income. “The corporate bond market is broken,” says the founder and CEO of New York–based Liquidnet Holdings. He believes that tight liquidity, bank capital constraints and inevitably rising interest rates will create “perfect storm” conditions that are ideal for Liquidnet’s brand of “electronification.” In March 2014 the company acquired Vega-Chi, a successful European bond-trading platform, as the foundation of Liquidnet Fixed Income, which is expected to launch this quarter, promising simple, anonymous and fast order matching — and potentially the kind of centralized, deep liquidity pool that the bond market lacks. Merrin looks to Liquidnet’s membership of 800 asset managers with a combined $14 trillion under management as the key to assembling the critical mass that will do for bonds what the institutional platform did for equities. Merrin envisions Liquidnet as a full-service broker-dealer, offering access to liquidity in any way a customer may want and, like a Global Positioning System, “not just telling them where to go but how best to get there.”

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The 2015 Tech 50