The 2016 Tech 50: Steven O’Hanlon

34

Steven O'Hanlon

President and Chief Executive Officer

Numerix

Last year: 42

From its founding in 1996, Numerix has gained renown for its quantitative models and analytics — so much so that it was chosen in 2009 to provide derivatives valuations for postbankruptcy Lehman Brothers Holdings. As the vast and complex Lehman portfolio continues to be unwound, what Numerix president and CEO Steven O’Hanlon termed “the largest valuation deal in history” still produces revenue for the New York–based software company. Meanwhile, with 270 employees and more than 700 customers worldwide, Numerix has transcended its heritage as a derivatives-pricing shop, though it still thrives in that capacity. Under O’Hanlon — an enterprise software industry veteran who took a senior sales role at Numerix in 2002, became president and COO in 2004, and CEO in 2013 — the company completed a top-to-bottom information technology overhaul in time to meet both pre- and postcrisis spikes in demand for derivatives data and related services. That positioned Numerix for a “pivot to risk” in 2009, O’Hanlon said at the time, delivering enterprisewide, cross-asset risk analytics faster and more comprehensively than legacy technologies could. Today the 58-year-old talks about transformation not as something vaguely aspirational but rather as a set of harsh realities facing the financial industry, as well as a new phase of reinvention for Numerix. “Every major firm has a transformation process,” O’Hanlon explains, with “groups and teams looking at the impact of regulations like the fundamental review of the trading book [market risk management framework], how they might scale up in some areas and reduce costs in others and leverage technology more effectively. Numerix is at the table in those discussions.” The selection of Numerix Oneview by a central bank, the Reserve Bank of New Zealand, for trade valuation and risk analytics in treasury systems, announced in April, is a case in point. “It is a scary path,” O’Hanlon says of banks’ strategic and IT reassessments. “But they have to take it, and it has to be truly transformational.”

Visit The 2016 Tech 50: Making Financial Services Faster, Cheaper, Bigger for more.

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