< The 2016 Trading Technology 40

Institutional brokerage Convergex needed more than just management tweaking when Eric Noll was named CEO, in November 2013. Within weeks Convergex would agree to pay more than $150 million to put accusations of trading misconduct and overcharges behind it. Noll then went to work on focusing and redefining the privately held, New York–based company as an agency brokerage; it currently has more than 3,000 clients worldwide. “We don’t do anything but execute transactions in the marketplace,” says Noll, 53, who was executive vice president of transaction services at Nasdaq OMX Group from 2009 to 2013 and one of the leaders of quantitative brokerage Susquehanna International Group for 15 years before that. “We don’t do any market making, research, investment banking or lending. We are to a large extent conflict-free in that we don’t accept payment for order flow.” The 520-employee organization’s simply stated objective is to “build out the electronic algo that works best on behalf of institutional investors.” The firm offers algorithms for more than 40 markets and runs one of the only U.S.-registered dark pool for options. Convergex’s Millennium alternative trading system does nothing but capture midpoint, or between-the-match, spreads for equity trading and has, in effect, a built-in speed bump. “It routes to our data center,” Noll explains. “That gap, if you will, prevents latency arbitrage from occurring in equity execution.” Noll, who earned an MBA from Vanderbilt University’s Owen Graduate School of Management, observes that institutional investing’s technological advancements have been mainly “on the front end — around execution, venues, speed, communication. There hasn’t been a lot of attention paid to what I call the plumbing, or what happens after the trade has occurred.” One likely route to making posttrade plumbing safer and more efficient, he says, “is going to be the blockchain and seeing how it works in the back-office space.”

 
2016 Trading Technology 40

1. Raymond Tierney III Bloomberg 2. Richard Prager BlackRock Private Markets Investment Outlook Q2 2025: Opportunities Amid Uncertainty Sponsored by Schroders Capital May 1, 2025 3. Chris Isaacson BATS Global Markets 4. Jonathan Ross KCG Holdings 5. Bradley Peterson Nasdaq

6. Brad Levy Markit 7. Dan Keegan Citi 8. Ronald DePoalo Fidelity Institutional 9. Raj Mahajan Goldman Sachs Group 10. Ari Studnitzer CME Group

11. Mayur Kapani Intercontinental Exchange 12. Gerald O’Connell CBOE Holdings 13. Nicholas Themelis MarketAxess Holdings 14. Gil Mandelzis EBS BrokerTec (ICAP) 15. Bill Chow and Richard Leung Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing

16. Rob Park IEX Group 17. Philip Weisberg Thomson Reuters 18. John Mackay (Mack) Gill MillenniumIT 19. Robert Cornish International Securities Exchange 20. Paul Hamill Citadel Securities

21. Eric Noll Convergex 22. Tyler Moeller and Joshua Walsky Broadway Technology 23. Rishi Nangalia REDI Holdings 24. Veronica Augustsson Cinnober Financial Technology 25. Alasdair Haynes Aquis Exchange

26. Manoj Narang Mana Partners 27. Gaurav Suri Arcesium 28. Robert Sloan S3 Partners 29. Anton Katz and Stephen Mock AQR Capital Mgmt 30. Stu Taylor Algomi

31. D. Keith Ross Jr. PDQ Enterprises 32. Donal Byrne Corvil 33. Alfred Eskandar Portware 34. R. Cromwell Coulson OTC Markets Group 35. Masayuki Hosaka Rakuten

36. Peter Maragos and David Karat Dash Financial 37. Amar Kuchinad Electronifie 38. Jennifer Nayar SR Labs 39. Dave Snowdon Metamako 40. Dan Raju Tradier