< Wall Street’s Nerds: The World’s Most Powerful Trading Executives
36. Jennifer Nayar
Chief Executive Officer
Vela Trading Technologies
Last year: 38
SR Labs, a Wall Street systems and consulting house founded in 2007, raised its profile with the July 2014 acquisition of Wombat Financial Software from Intercontinental Exchange’s NYSE Technologies. Jennifer Nayar, a trading technology veteran who had most recently served as chief of staff at Goldman Sachs Group spin-off (and now Thomson Reuters subsidiary) REDI Holdings, became CEO of SR Labs in June 2015. A year later the high-performance trading and market data systems company was renamed Vela Trading Technologies, symbolic of its mission “to simplify how firms interact with the markets and increase efficiency” and “combining the best of our two historic companies’ cultures,” Nayar said at the time.
A November announcement of new data feed handlers indicated the geographic and asset class breadth of Vela’s activities, ranging from the Australian Securities Exchange (derivatives), to the National Stock Exchange of India and the pan-European Aquis Exchange (equities), to Bats Global Markets’ foreign exchange and options platforms. Also in November, Nayar brought on Brian Cassin, formerly of S&P Global and Thomson Financial, and Ollie Cadman from ICE’s Interactive Data Corp. as joint heads of product and strategy. They will be “instrumental in helping Vela continue to create, build, and deliver new and innovative trading and market data software products to the global marketplace,” Nayar, 49, says. In terms of innovation and experimentation, she says the firm is exploring potential enhancements to its consolidated data feed, along with cloud services and opportunities in “adjacent markets” such as energy.
The 2017 Trading Tech 40
1. Richard Prager 2. Chris Isaacson 3. Bradley Peterson 4. Brad Levy 5. Dan Keegan |
6. Glenn Lesko 7. Bryan Durkin 8. Mayur Kapani 9. Mike Blum 10. Raj Mahajan |
11. Ronald DePoalo 12. Nick Themelis 13. Jenny Knott 14. Billy Hult 15. Rob Park |
16. Bill Chow & Richard Leung 17. John Mackay (Mack) Gill 18. Paul Hamill 19. Eric Noll 20. Veronica Augustsson |
21. Tyler Moeller & Joshua Walsky 22. Alasdair Haynes 23. Gaurav Suri 24. Manoj Narang 25. Michael Chin & Neill Penney |
26. Robert Sloan 27. Anton Katz & Stephen Mock 28. Donal Byrne 29. Stu Taylor 30. Alfred Eskandar |
31. Steven Randich 32. R. Cromwell Coulson 33. Peter Maragos 34. John Fawcett 35. Donald |
36. Jennifer Nayar 37. Dan Raju 38. Susan Estes 39. David Mercer 40. Oki Matsumoto |
| |
