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The 2016 Trading Technology 40: Dave Snowdon
No. 39 Dave Snowdon, Metamako


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.”
![]() 2. Richard Prager BlackRock ![]() 3. Chris Isaacson BATS Global Markets ![]() 4. Jonathan Ross KCG Holdings ![]() 5. Bradley Peterson Nasdaq |
![]() 6. Brad Levy Markit ![]() 7. Dan Keegan Citi ![]() 8. Ronald DePoalo Fidelity Institutional ![]() 9. Raj Mahajan Goldman Sachs Group ![]() 10. Ari Studnitzer CME Group |
![]() 11. Mayur Kapani Intercontinental Exchange ![]() 12. Gerald O’Connell CBOE Holdings ![]() 13. Nicholas Themelis MarketAxess Holdings ![]() 14. Gil Mandelzis EBS BrokerTec (ICAP) ![]() 15. Bill Chow and Richard Leung Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing |
![]() 16. Rob Park IEX Group ![]() 17. Philip Weisberg Thomson Reuters ![]() 18. John Mackay (Mack) Gill MillenniumIT ![]() 19. Robert Cornish International Securities Exchange ![]() 20. Paul Hamill Citadel Securities |
![]() 21. Eric Noll Convergex ![]() 22. Tyler Moeller and Joshua Walsky Broadway Technology ![]() 23. Rishi Nangalia REDI Holdings ![]() 24. Veronica Augustsson Cinnober Financial Technology ![]() 25. Alasdair Haynes Aquis Exchange |
![]() 26. Manoj Narang Mana Partners ![]() 27. Gaurav Suri Arcesium ![]() 28. Robert Sloan S3 Partners ![]() 29. Anton Katz and Stephen Mock AQR Capital Mgmt ![]() 30. Stu Taylor Algomi |
![]() 31. D. Keith Ross Jr. PDQ Enterprises ![]() 32. Donal Byrne Corvil ![]() 33. Alfred Eskandar Portware ![]() 34. R. Cromwell Coulson OTC Markets Group ![]() 35. Masayuki Hosaka Rakuten |
![]() 36. Peter Maragos and David Karat Dash Financial ![]() 37. Amar Kuchinad Electronifie ![]() 38. Jennifer Nayar SR Labs ![]() 39. Dave Snowdon Metamako ![]() 40. Dan Raju Tradier |