Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
SuperDerivatives
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For SuperDerivatives, “2010 was an amazing year — probably the most important for the company,” says chairman and CEO David Gershon. That’s saying a lot. Gershon, 46, formerly head of foreign exchange exotic options at Barclays Capital, founded London- and New York–based SuperDerivatives in 2000 with an online benchmarking service for forex options. He could have ended his niche strategy there but instead tapped into the burgeoning demand for over-the-counter valuations by extending his model across asset classes. What made 2010 special, aside from continued rapid business growth, were significant fourth-quarter platform launches using high-powered cloud and grid computing. Among them: the cross-asset SDX for cash and derivatives trading in currency, interest rate, equity, energy, commodity and credit products, along with tools such as performance backtesting, speech recognition and “free text,” or plain language, querying. The company was also “first to market,” says Gershon, with a multibank live swap execution facility that addresses requirements of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. Another offering, DealX, is “on its way to becoming the main marketplace for FX options,” with interest rate swaps to be added by year-end and energy products by the middle of 2012, Gershon says. Critical to all that SuperDerivatives has accomplished, he adds, is the cost-­effectiveness of web-based technology that enables “high-end functionality without the price tag” associated with installed software. “The bottom line for us, the common denominator of what we are trying to do,” he explains, “is to bring things that will change the world.”