The 2016 Tech 50: Mazy Dar

< The 2016 Tech 50

44
Mazy Dar
Chief Executive Officer
OpenFin
Last year: 46

OpenFin has found a sweet spot with its open-source technology for financial desktop applications, and major Wall Street firms are flocking to it. “There’s never been a time in financial services when this number of companies were all using the same technology to deploy and run their applications,” says CEO Mazy Dar. Founded in New York in 2010 (and now with a second office in London), OpenFin developed software, based on Google’s Chromium and the HTML5 web-browser standard, that lets programmers take advantage of the most-advanced, user-friendly interfaces across all operating systems, desktops and mobile devices. The number of bank and trading-platform customers doubled over the past year, to 30, and they, in turn, have used OpenFin’s HTML5 container to deploy applications to 44 sell-side and more than 250 buy-side firms. Both ICAP and Goldman Sachs Group spin-off REDI Holdings announced this year that they will be incorporating OpenFin technology in their next-generation trading platforms. Those firms, along with Barclays, Citi, CME Group and others, are represented on an advisory board that OpenFin set up in December in conjunction with the open-sourcing of its technology under an Apache 2.0 license. “Most people are not wondering if it’s the right technology but instead are focused on implementing it and working with it,” says Dar, 40, who has a BA in computer science and French literature from Cornell University, started his career as a programmer with SBC Warburg (now part of Swiss bank UBS) and was chief strategy officer of credit derivatives firm Creditex Group, which Intercontinental Exchange acquired in 2008. He stresses the importance of communication and collaboration with clients because they are the best source of ideas about innovations and problems that need solving. One of the latter is the need for interoperability, or compatibility between old and new systems. “It might be the most important thing that we do,” Dar says.

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The 2016 Tech 50

1. Catherine Bessant Bank of America Corp. 2. Jeffrey Sprecher Intercontinental Exchange 3. Lance Uggla Markit 4. Phupinder Gill CME Group 5. Shawn Edwards and Vlad Kliatchko Bloomberg 6. R. Martin Chavez Goldman Sachs Group

7. Robert Goldstein BlackRock 8. Adena Friedman Nasdaq 9. Deborah Hopkins Citi Ventures 10. Daniel Coleman KCG Holdings 11. Stephen Neff Fidelity Investments 12. David Craig Thomson Reuters

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. Blythe Masters Digital Asset Holdings 18. David Rutter R3CEV

19. Neil Katz D.E. Shaw & Co. 20. Lee Olesky Tradeweb Markets 21. Richard McVey MarketAxess Holdings 22. Seth Merrin Liquidnet Holdings 23. Robert Alexander Capital One Financial Corp. 24. Brad Katsuyama IEX Group

25. Antoine Shagoury State Street Corp. 26. David Gledhill DBS Bank 27. Lou Eccleston TMX Group 28. Andreas Preuss Deutsche BÖrse 29. Dan Schulman PayPal Holdings 30. Scott Dillon Wells Fargo & Co.

31. Mike Chinn S&P Global Market Intelligence 32. Craig Donohue Options Clearing Corp. 33. Gary Norcross Fidelity National Information Services 34. Steven O’Hanlon Numerix 35. Sebastián Ceria Axioma 36. Michael Cooper BT Radianz

37. Tyler Kim MaplesFS 38. Neal Pawar AQR Capital Management 39. David Harding Winton Capital Management 40. Chris Corrado London Stock Exchange Group 41. Brian Conlon First Derivatives 42. Jim Minnick eVestment

43. Stephane Dubois Xignite 44. Mazy Dar OpenFin 45. Yasuki Okai NRI Holdings America 46. Kim Fournais Saxo Bank 47. Jock Percy Perseus 48. Robert Schifellite Broadridge Financial Solutions

49. Brian Sentance Xenomorph Software 50. Pieter van der Does Adyen