< The 2016 Trading Technology 40

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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

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1. Raymond Tierney III
Bloomberg

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2. Richard Prager
BlackRock

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3. Chris Isaacson
BATS Global Markets

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4. Jonathan Ross
KCG Holdings

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5. Bradley Peterson
Nasdaq

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6. Brad Levy
Markit

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7. Dan Keegan
Citi

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8. Ronald DePoalo
Fidelity Institutional

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9. Raj Mahajan
Goldman Sachs Group

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10. Ari Studnitzer
CME Group

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11. Mayur Kapani
Intercontinental Exchange

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12. Gerald O’Connell
CBOE Holdings

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13. Nicholas Themelis
MarketAxess Holdings

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14. Gil Mandelzis
EBS BrokerTec (ICAP)

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15. Bill Chow and Richard Leung
Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing

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16. Rob Park
IEX Group

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17. Philip Weisberg
Thomson Reuters

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18. John Mackay (Mack) Gill
MillenniumIT

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19. Robert Cornish
International Securities Exchange

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20. Paul Hamill
Citadel Securities

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21. Eric Noll
Convergex

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22. Tyler Moeller and Joshua Walsky
Broadway Technology

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23. Rishi Nangalia
REDI Holdings

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24. Veronica Augustsson
Cinnober Financial Technology

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25. Alasdair Haynes
Aquis Exchange

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26. Manoj Narang
Mana Partners

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27. Gaurav Suri
Arcesium

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28. Robert Sloan
S3 Partners

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29. Anton Katz and Stephen Mock
AQR Capital Mgmt

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30. Stu Taylor
Algomi

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31. D. Keith Ross Jr.
PDQ Enterprises

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32. Donal Byrne
Corvil

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33. Alfred Eskandar
Portware

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34. R. Cromwell Coulson
OTC Markets Group

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35. Masayuki Hosaka
Rakuten

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36. Peter Maragos and David Karat
Dash Financial

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37. Amar Kuchinad
Electronifie

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38. Jennifer Nayar
SR Labs

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39. Dave Snowdon
Metamako

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40. Dan Raju
Tradier