< The 2015 Tech 50: Racers to the Edge

When Brian Conlon left a consulting job with SunGard Data Systems to found First Derivatives in 1996, he didn’t change his line of work. The Newry, Northern Ireland–based company grew up as a financial technology consulting firm. But after accumulating expertise working with market data and trading platforms, First Derivatives in 2008 began to roll out its Delta suite of software applications, which today includes platforms for trading, trade surveillance, data management and analytics. “The company’s heritage is in the capital markets industry, where we’ve been working on a lot of the trouble banks have been facing in dealing with large amounts of real-time and historical data,” notes CEO Conlon, 48. “Banks are faced with millions upon millions of prices and codes coming in every second, changing the value of their portfolio, changing the pricing of their products and changing their risk position.” In what Conlon termed “the most significant development” of the fiscal year ended February 2015, the company last fall bought a controlling interest in Palo Alto, California–based Kx Systems, whose kdb+ time-series databases power trading, risk and other data-intensive functions at top Wall Street firms (and whose chief strategy officer, Simon Garland, was No. 38 last year). Conlon says the Kx technology, thanks to years of collaborative effort among developers and users, has been “sharpened and honed” to the point of being “almost faultless.” First Derivatives reported a 19 percent year-over-year increase in revenue, to £83.2 million ($129 million), and Conlon says he is eyeing big-data-type opportunities in such nonfinancial sectors as utilities, oil and gas, health care, pharmaceuticals and the Internet of Things.

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The 2015 Tech 50

1. Jeffrey Sprecher Intercontinental Exchange 2. Catherine Bessant Bank of America Corp. Gold and Bitcoin Decouple. What's Driving the Divergence's? Sponsored by CME Group April 24, 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