< The 2016 Trading Technology 40

As recently as 2008, BATS Global Markets — then BATS Trading — was an alternative trading system making the transition to full exchange status. Almost overnight, in January 2009, BATS was the third-largest exchange company in notional value traded, and it was upward from there, with virtually every leap assisted by, if not dependent on, the technology Chris Isaacson had been developing since the firm’s start in 2005. In early 2015, BATS completed the integration of the Direct Edge exchanges it had acquired the year before, and from September through November it was the world’s biggest equity exchange operator, according to World Federation of Exchanges data. In December, BATS’s U.S. equity market share was 21 percent, up from 20.8 percent a year earlier; BATS Chi-X Europe remained No. 1 in its markets at 23.7 percent, rising from 22 percent; the opening of a second U.S. options market pushed BATS’s share of that asset class to 10.1 percent from 6.3 percent a year earlier; and foreign exchange platform Hotspot, acquired last March from KCG Holdings, boosted its market share to 12.7 percent from December 2014’s 11.6 percent. Lenexa, Kansas–based BATS Global Markets filed in December for an IPO, conjuring memories of its most glaring failure, the March 2012 systems crash that aborted the previous IPO attempt. Isaacson, 37, global CIO since 2014 after seven years as COO, has his sights set on market-structure and regulatory developments that promise “greater transparency and efficiency across the trading landscape.” These include technology-enabled agency trading in forex, Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID II) preparations in Europe and “across all markets innovation and optimization in clearing and settlement with the potential use of blockchain technology.”

 
2016 Trading Technology 40

1. Raymond Tierney III Bloomberg 2. Richard Prager BlackRock Open Architecture and Next-Gen Technology Help Support Model Delivery Sponsored by BlackRock April 24, 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