< The 2015 Trading Technology 40: Going with the Flow
15
Nicholas Themelis
Chief Information Officer
MarketAxess Holdings
Last year: 18
MarketAxess Holdings has an answer for the bond market’s liquidity woes: Open Trading, a protocol introduced in 2012, “provides all participants a way to interact with each other for the first time,” says Nicholas Themelis, chief information officer of the New York–based company. “We’re changing the world.” The anonymous, all-to-all trading functionality may be compelling — “those connectivity points [among dealers and money managers] just didn’t exist in the past,” the 51-year-old explains — but the take-up is gradual. MarketAxess, which according to research firm Greenwich Associates handles 86 percent of electronic trading in corporate bonds, is executing just 6 percent of its transactions through Open Trading. “Why couldn’t it be 15 percent or 40 percent?” asks the upbeat Themelis. His answer: While “lots of companies are talking” about structural fixes, “we’re proving this works. We’re able to leverage the community we’ve built and connect liquidity pockets wherever they may be.” Formed in 2000 and a public company since 2004, MarketAxess reported a record $767 billion in total trading volume last year; its $475 billion U.S. high-grade volume accounted for 14.5 percent of that part of the market. Themelis, who joined MarketAxess in 2004 and previously held regional CIO positions at Barclays Capital and Lehman Brothers Holdings, is currently focusing on the first-quarter launch of Open Trading in Europe and on growing demand for data services. “Participants want more data and context around the market before they are comfortable putting in a price,” he notes.
See also Themelis's profile in the 2013 Trading Technology 40.
The 2015 Trading Technology 40
1
2
3
4
5
Kevin Kometer
CME Group Richard Prager
BlackRock Raymond Tierney III
Bloomberg Tradebook Jonathan Ross
KCG Holdings Charles Vice
Intercontinental Exchange 6
7
8
9
10
Chris Isaacson
BATS Global Markets Bradley Peterson
Nasdaq OMX Group Brad Levy
MarkitSERV Dan Keegan
Citi Ronald DePoalo
Fidelity Institutional 11
12
13
14
15
Gerard Beatty
Goldman Sachs Group Gerald O'Connell
CBOE Holdings Brenda Hoffman
TMX Group Billy Hult
Tradeweb Markets Nicholas Themelis
MarketAxess Holdings 16
17
18
19
20
Bina Kalola
Bank of America Merrill Lynch Gil Mandelzis
EBS-BrokerTec (ICAP) Steven Randich
Financial Industry Regulatory Authority Jerry Dobner
GFI Group Michael Liberman
BlueMountain Capital Management 21
22
23
24
25
Bill Chow and Richard Leung
Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing Jamie Selway
Investment Technology Group Brad Katsuyama
IEX Group John Mackay (Mack) Gill
MillenniumIT Jamil Nazarali
Citadel Execution Services 26
27
28
29
30
Robert Cornish
International Securities Exchange Tyler Moeller andJoshua Walksy
Broadway Technology Rishi Nangalia
REDI Holdings Manoj Narang
Tradeworx,
Thesys Technologies Oki Matsumoto
Monex Group 31
32
33
34
35
Alasdair Haynes
Aquis Exchange Veronica Augustsson
Cinnober Financial Technology Stu Taylor
Algomi Luís Otávio Saliba Furtado
BM&FBovespa Tal Cohen
Chi-X Global Holdings 36
37
38
39
40
Donal Byrne
Corvil R. Cromwell Coulson
OTC Markets Group Alfred Eskandar
Portware Richard Korhammer
SR Labs Hazem Dawani
OptionsCity Software