The 2014 Trading Technology 40: Kevin Covington

35

Kevin Covington

CEO

ITRS

Last year: 39

An application-monitoring vendor at its start in 1997, ITRS Group has evolved into a premier problem solver for more than 110 customers, including banks, brokerages, hedge funds, exchanges and system vendors. The London-based company’s Geneos offering keeps tabs on system performance and alerts users to vulnerabilities — an antidote for the financial markets’ epidemic of technology glitches. “We have been evangelizing about this for a long time,” says Kevin Covington, a former BT Group executive who has been CEO of 120-employee, Carlyle Group–backed ITRS since 2011. System reliability is “fundamental to orderly markets.” Geneos helps “market participants to understand what is going on internally and at the edges of the enterprise,” adds the 55-year-old. It delivers “real-time alerts to issues that arise, enabling appropriate action to resolve the problems or, hopefully, to avoid them entirely.” The proliferation and fragmentation of markets, and the securities industry’s complex web of interconnectivity, only make more acute the need for what Covington calls instrumentation, or end-to-end visibility, for information technology oversight, risk management and reporting purposes. Recent milestones included an extensive NYSE Euronext implementation of Geneos in the U.S. and a deal to integrate the Geneos dashboard with trading solutions supplier Ullink. The ITRS plug-in uniquely encompasses managed and hosted services and “clearly gives us an edge,” says Ullink CEO Laurent Useldinger.

See also Covington’s profile in the 2013 Trading Technology 40.