The 2016 Tech 50: Steven O’Hanlon

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< The 2016 Tech 50

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

From its founding in 1996, Numerix has gained renown for its quantitative models and analytics — so much so that it was chosen in 2009 to provide derivatives valuations for postbankruptcy Lehman Brothers Holdings. As the vast and complex Lehman portfolio continues to be unwound, what Numerix president and CEO Steven O’Hanlon termed “the largest valuation deal in history” still produces revenue for the New York–based software company. Meanwhile, with 270 employees and more than 700 customers worldwide, Numerix has transcended its heritage as a derivatives-pricing shop, though it still thrives in that capacity. Under O’Hanlon — an enterprise software industry veteran who took a senior sales role at Numerix in 2002, became president and COO in 2004, and CEO in 2013 — the company completed a top-to-bottom information technology overhaul in time to meet both pre- and postcrisis spikes in demand for derivatives data and related services. That positioned Numerix for a “pivot to risk” in 2009, O’Hanlon said at the time, delivering enterprisewide, cross-asset risk analytics faster and more comprehensively than legacy technologies could. Today the 58-year-old talks about transformation not as something vaguely aspirational but rather as a set of harsh realities facing the financial industry, as well as a new phase of reinvention for Numerix. “Every major firm has a transformation process,” O’Hanlon explains, with “groups and teams looking at the impact of regulations like the fundamental review of the trading book [market risk management framework], how they might scale up in some areas and reduce costs in others and leverage technology more effectively. Numerix is at the table in those discussions.” The selection of Numerix Oneview by a central bank, the Reserve Bank of New Zealand, for trade valuation and risk analytics in treasury systems, announced in April, is a case in point. “It is a scary path,” O’Hanlon says of banks’ strategic and IT reassessments. “But they have to take it, and it has to be truly transformational.”

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The 2016 Tech 50