< The 2016 Tech 50

22
Seth Merrin
Chief Executive Officer
Liquidnet Holdings
Last year: 23

“Our goal is to make markets more efficient,” Seth Merrin says. “The only way we know how to do this is with technology.” Merrin is proving the point with 15-year-old trading platform operator Liquidnet Holdings, and not for the first time. Three decades ago he left a risk arbitrage trading job at CIBC Oppenheimer to start Merrin Financial, which transformed buy-side trading with its invention of the order management system. After co-founding another start-up, application-integration software company VIE Systems, in the 1990s, Merrin launched Liquidnet, a pioneering dark pool handling large block orders — currently averaging more than 42,000 shares ($1.8 million principal) — that are difficult for investment managers to execute on open exchanges. More than 800 member firms with $14 trillion in combined assets under management are currently trading in 44 markets around the world. New York–based Liquidnet’s first-quarter U.S. average daily volume of 46 million shares was up 21 percent year-over-year, and the firm also set records in other regions. Last September, with Liquidnet Fixed Income, the firm brought its ethos of reinvention into the corporate bond market, setting a minimum order size of $500,000. “It’s pretty absurd if in this day and age you can only trade a bond through a human being,” Merrin says. The platform now has 135 member firms trading $2 billion in corporate names, and the 56-year-old CEO anticipates steady growth because “people in this industry need to see you’re the winner” before later adopters will sign on. Merrin expects further opportunity in equity execution and quantitative services, filling gaps left by the retreat of big, capital-constrained banks. Liquidnet has developed an electronic “high-touch trader” to provide copilotlike order advice and monitoring. Targeted Invitations, launched in Europe late last year and available globally as of April, extends the block-trading model by “taking on one of the last bastions of inefficiency for the buy side: the sales trading process,” according to Merrin. These targeted block trades have been averaging 98,000 shares.

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The 2016 Tech 50

1. Catherine Bessant Bank of America Corp. 2. Jeffrey Sprecher Intercontinental Exchange Model Portfolios to Deliver Alternative Asset Exposure Sponsored by BlackRock April 29, 2025 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