The 2014 Tech 50: Steven O’Hanlon

July 08, 2014

< The 2014 Tech 50: Moving Out of the Lab and Into the Cloud

Steven O’Hanlon

President and Chief Executive Officer

Numerix

(PNR)

New derivatives regulations vexed financial firms not just because of their operational and compliance burdens but because regulators were slow to issue final rules, causing business plans and related systems changes to be put on hold. It takes a flexible computer architecture to weather such uncertainty and be prepared to pounce on opportunities when they emerge, and Steven O’Hanlon began to crack that code in 2004. Promoted that year to president and COO of New York–based quantitative analytics company Numerix after two years as head of sales, marketing and support, O’Hanlon initiated “a rewrite of the entire underlying platform.” So there were no legacy systems to bog Numerix down as demand for derivatives capabilities soared, particularly after the financial crisis hit. “We had the ability to price any instrument,” says O’Hanlon, 56, president and CEO of the 220-employee, 700-customer organization since February 2013. Postcrisis “we could leverage our infrastructure and go upstream into the risk marketplace.” Drawing on enterprise software and start-up experience, O’Hanlon boosted sales with a partnership strategy: Numerix’s technology is embedded in offerings by Bloomberg, S&P Capital IQ and Thomson Reuters, to name a few. Flexibility is a mantra for O’Hanlon and evident in Numerix’s reliance on Microsoft Corp.’s Azure cloud services and in the CrossAsset Server, released last year and built for a wide range of pricing and risk calculations.

The 2014 Tech 50