The 2016 Trading Technology 40: Mayur Kapani

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Mayur Kapani
Senior Vice President, Technology
Intercontinental Exchange
PNR

If a career in trading technology is long enough, it likely bears witness to some early breakthroughs in market automation. For Mayur Kapani that happened at the Philadelphia Stock Exchange in the mid-1990s: He wrote software that automated the printing of tickets directly from the trading floor, and he had a hand in migrating what is now the Nasdaq-owned PHLX options exchange to a hybrid electronic-human operation. After a decade in Philadelphia, where he rose to vice president of options development, Kapani moved in 2006 to Atlanta-based Intercontinental Exchange as a vice president of its futures exchange. Today, ICE owns seven futures exchanges, and Kapani, senior vice president of technology since 2013, has responsibility for all. Besides overseeing the global tech strategies of ICE and NYSE Group markets, the 47-year-old is involved in start-up businesses like the ICE Trade Vault data repositories and ICE Benchmark Administration, as well as the postmerger integrations of market data company Interactive Data Corp. and European energy-trading-systems provider Trayport. With IDC, which ICE bought for $5.2 billion in December, Kapani is working to accelerate the delivery of fixed-income prices via the Continuous Evaluated Pricing service. “Even for computation-heavy analytics and information [in fixed income], people want it in real time,” he notes. Kapani, who has a bachelor’s of technology degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, says ICE is addressing blockchain in earnest this year. “Many other exchanges and financial institutions are hyped about the technology and looking at blockchain as a technology problem rather than a business problem first,” he says. “We’re looking at where the customer will see value and take that as a use case to implement, rather than the other way around.”

2016 Trading Technology 40