< The 2015 Tech 50: Racers to the Edge

Fourteen years ago Seth Merrin, a serial entrepreneur who had gained renown for inventing trade order management systems in the 1980s, introduced Liquidnet, an even farther-reaching, technology-based breakthrough for the buy side. A peer-to-peer network for institutional equity trades, built to handle large blocks that were difficult to execute on exchanges, the trailblazing dark venue now spans 43 markets on five continents, and Merrin, 55, has set out to conquer another world: fixed income. “The corporate bond market is broken,” says the founder and CEO of New York–based Liquidnet Holdings. He believes that tight liquidity, bank capital constraints and inevitably rising interest rates will create “perfect storm” conditions that are ideal for Liquidnet’s brand of “electronification.” In March 2014 the company acquired Vega-Chi, a successful European bond-trading platform, as the foundation of Liquidnet Fixed Income, which is expected to launch this quarter, promising simple, anonymous and fast order matching — and potentially the kind of centralized, deep liquidity pool that the bond market lacks. Merrin looks to Liquidnet’s membership of 800 asset managers with a combined $14 trillion under management as the key to assembling the critical mass that will do for bonds what the institutional platform did for equities. Merrin envisions Liquidnet as a full-service broker-dealer, offering access to liquidity in any way a customer may want and, like a Global Positioning System, “not just telling them where to go but how best to get there.”

See the full story, “The 2015 Tech 50: Racers to the Edge.”

 
The 2015 Tech 50

1. Jeffrey Sprecher Intercontinental Exchange 2. Catherine Bessant Bank of America Corp. Fireside Chat: Fixed Income Market Structure Evolution Sponsored by Jane Street May 15, 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