< The 2016 Trading Technology 40
39
Dave Snowdon
Co–Chief Technology Officer
Metamako
PNR
Like Level39 in London and other financial technology innovation hubs around the world, Sydney’s Stone & Chalk is primarily populated by software entrepreneurs hoping to bring their apps, analytics and other tools to the attention of buyers and investors. By contrast, Metamako is a hardware company that was already making waves in the trading industry when it announced its move into Stone & Chalk last summer. Founded three years ago by Dave Snowdon and his co-CTOs Scott Newham and Charles Thomas, and building on their financial market engineering experience, Metamako develops high-performance network devices specifically for firms that depend on low latency. It’s not just about raw speed, as in the nanosecond-measured two-way communications verified in benchmark testing of the company’s FPGA (field-programmable gate array) devices. Market players are looking for “deterministic latency,” a predictability that is “more important than latency,” Snowdon, 35, asserts. “Determinism will help provide a fairness improvement to the markets.” Signs that Metamako is delivering on its motto of “simplifying networks, reducing latency and increasing flexibility”: It has doubled its original team size, to 16, and opened offices in London and New York. Fintech start-ups have a hard time making their first sales, especially to large financial institutions. Metamako found “early adopters” at high frequency trading firms willing to experiment with offerings when they were “still half-baked,” Snowdon explains. Now doors have opened at banks, brokerages and exchanges, and in the telecommunications industry. Those users are considering additional ways to apply the technology, such as in security and systems monitoring. Network monitoring is a prerequisite for compliance with Europe’s Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID II), which Snowdon notes had to be delayed in part because of technological shortcomings. MetaWatch, a Metamako application launched in November, addresses part of the problem with “highly accurate time-stamping and data capture, he says.”
2016 Trading Technology 40Click below to view profiles
1. Raymond Tierney III 2. Richard Prager 3. Chris Isaacson 4. Jonathan Ross 5. Bradley Peterson |
6. Brad Levy 7. Dan Keegan 8. Ronald DePoalo 9. Raj Mahajan 10. Ari Studnitzer |
11. Mayur Kapani 12. Gerald O’Connell 13. Nicholas Themelis 14. Gil Mandelzis 15. Bill Chow and Richard Leung |
16. Rob Park 17. Philip Weisberg 18. John Mackay (Mack) Gill 19. Robert Cornish 20. Paul Hamill |
21. Eric Noll 22. Tyler Moeller and Joshua Walsky 23. Rishi Nangalia 24. Veronica Augustsson 25. Alasdair Haynes |
26. Manoj Narang 27. Gaurav Suri 28. Robert Sloan 29. Anton Katz and Stephen Mock 30. Stu Taylor |
31. D. Keith Ross Jr. 32. Donal Byrne 33. Alfred Eskandar 34. R. Cromwell Coulson 35. Masayuki Hosaka |
36. Peter Maragos and David Karat 37. Amar Kuchinad 38. Jennifer Nayar 39. Dave Snowdon 40. Dan Raju |
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