(Previously Ranked 20) A theoretical physicist by training, David Gershon was global head of foreign-exchange exotic options at Barclays Capital in London before leaping into entrepreneurship in 2000. The London- and New York–based company he founded, SuperDerivatives, started with an online FX options benchmarking service that injected transparency into an opaque corner of the financial markets.
Gershon then systematically extended his concept to other asset classes, including equities and commodities, tapping into the demand for over-the-counter products and attracting blue-chip banks, corporations, fund administrators and auditing firms as clients. But the 45-year-old CEO didn’t stop there. He packaged solutions for such needs as multi-asset portfolio revaluations, front-office pricing and analytics, position management, data management and, most recently, hedge accounting — all marketed and delivered through offices on five continents. “
We open offices to support our clients,” he notes, but “all products are sold on the Internet, so we don’t need a lot of implementation teams.” Gershon believes the Web-based strategy has been crucial to cost-efficiency; SuperDerivatives’ growth has been fueled by a “thirst for accuracy in derivatives pricing,” and investments in recent years in multi-asset solutions are paying off because “they are now very expensive to develop in-house.”
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