< The 2015 Tech 50: Racers to the Edge

After retaking the helm of the financial information empire that he founded in 1981, Michael Bloomberg formed an executive committee consisting of himself; Peter Grauer, the company’s chairman since Bloomberg’s first run for New York City mayor, in 2001; and co-founder and longtime global head of financial products and services Thomas Secunda (No. 1 the past three years). It is to them that CTO Shawn Edwards and global head of R&D Vlad Kliatchko report. They are both 46-year-old, 12-year Bloomberg veterans who fit the mold of a collaborative, agile, open-plan-office culture and finish each other’s sentences, though in different accents. The Russian-born Kliatchko has mathematics and computer science degrees from St. Petersburg State University; as head of R&D since 2012, he oversees the bulk of Bloomberg’s 4,000-plus technologists, who are dispersed globally, including in a San Francisco space that opened in May. “Ability to find talent is the only constraint” to adding staff faster, Kliatchko says. Edwards, who has bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering from Columbia University and headed R&D before the CTO office was formed in 2008, runs smaller teams focused on “advanced, exciting, forward-looking opportunities,” lately on the analytics frontier in machine learning and natural language processing. Their division of labor is “a traditional CIO/CTO split,” Edwards explains, but is “highly fluid,” as are movements of people between their teams. “Technology leadership is part of the culture,” Kliatchko says, as it has been since Bloomberg invented early network protocols and other systems that couldn’t be bought off the shelf. Today the company — even as it prototypes keyboard designs with 3-D printers — blends in-house innovation with participation in such open-source communities as Linux, OpenStack and Solr. “That’s a big change in our profile the past several years,” says Edwards. Secunda calls Edwards and Kliatchko "great technologists" and stresses "they are leading a team of more than 4,000 great technologists who epitomize our culture of constant innovation."

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The 2015 Tech 50

1. Jeffrey Sprecher Intercontinental Exchange 2. Catherine Bessant Bank of America Corp. Robeco Fundamental Equities: High-conviction Strategies to Target Alpha Sponsored by Robeco July 8, 2025 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