The 2015 Tech 50: Steven O’Hanlon

< The 2015 Tech 50: Racers to the Edge

42
Steven O’Hanlon
President and Chief Executive Officer
Numerix
Last year: 46

Quantitative models are the basic stock-in-trade of Numerix. Attuning them to consequential, often regulatory-mandated turns in business strategy has been critical to the 19-year-old company’s success in serving more than 700 clients around the world, along with some 90 partner organizations like Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters. But agility isn’t automatic. CEO Steven O’Hanlon, who brought his enterprise software industry background to New York–based Numerix 13 years ago, has prided himself on being able to anticipate technological changes and marketplace demands. In 2004, after being promoted to president and COO from head of sales, marketing and support, he ordered a complete overhaul of the analytics and pricing platform. The new platform built in the flexibility to carry Numerix and its clients through the eventual postcrisis derivatives reforms more smoothly than could have the legacy systems. It also enabled O’Hanlon, starting in 2009, to steer Numerix in a new, risk-management-oriented direction. “In 2014 everything jelled,” says the 57-year-old, who became CEO in 2013. “We see an opportunity to disrupt the entire marketplace of risk providers whose platforms date from before the collapse and are no longer adequate.” With demand mounting for enterprisewide views of risk exposure in close to real time, O’Hanlon adds: “You can’t manage risk without pricing data in one place across all instruments. We are unique in our ability to do that for any kind of financial institution, and we are a first-mover. It is no longer acceptable to pull all this together only after damage has occurred.” Numerix is demonstrating global clout in other ways: It has a letter of intent with longtime Singapore customer DBS Bank and Swiss-based technology partners Avaloq and Leonteq to develop a multidealer distribution platform for structured products, initially eyeing Asian markets and potentially expandable to other regions, O’Hanlon says.

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

The 2015 Tech 50

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1. Jeffrey Sprecher Intercontinental Exchange 2. Catherine Bessant Bank of America Corp. 3. Phupinder Gill CME Group 4. Lance Uggla Markit 5. Robert Goldstein BlackRock

6. Shawn Edwards & Vlad Kliatchko Bloomberg 7. R. Martin Chavez Goldman Sachs Group 8. Deborah Hopkins Citi Ventures 9. Stephen Neff Fidelity Investments 10. Adena Friedman Nasdaq OMX Group

11. David Craig Thomson Reuters 12. Daniel Coleman KCG Holdings 13. Michael Spencer ICAP 14. Michael Bodson Depository Trust & Clearing Corp. 15. Charles Li Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing

16. Chris Concannon BATS Global Markets 17. Christopher Perretta State Street Corp. 18. Antoine Shagoury London Stock Exchange Group 19. Kevin Rhein Wells Fargo & Co. 20. Neil Katz D.E. Shaw & Co.

21. Lee Olesky Tradeweb Markets 22. Richard McVey MarketAxess Holdings 23. Seth Merrin Liquidnet Holdings 24. Robert Alexander Capital One Financial Corp. 25. Frank Bisignano First Data Corp.

26. John Marcante Vanguard Group 27. Joseph Squeri Citadel 28. Lou Eccleston TMX Group 29. Claude Honegger Credit Suisse 30. Chris Corrado MSCI

31. David Gledhill DBS Bank 32. John Bates Software AG 33. Michael Cooper BT Radianz 34. Gary Scholten Principal Financial Group 35. Sunil Hirani trueEX Group

36. Hauke Stars Deutsche BÖrse 37. Brian Conlon First Derivatives 38. Jim Minnick eVestment 39. Lars Seier Christensen & Kim Fournais 40. Tyler Kim MaplesFS

41. Jim McGuire Charles Schwab Corp. 42. Steven O’Hanlon Numerix 43. Sebastián Ceria Axioma 44. Yasuki Okai NRI Holdings America 45. Stephane Dubois Xignite

46. Mazy Dar OpenFin 47. Brian Sentance Xenomorph Software 48. Mas Nakachi OpenGamma 49. John Lehner BNY Mellon Technology Solutions Group 50. Jock Percy Perseus