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The 2016 Trading Technology 40: Gaurav Suri

No. 27 Gaurav Suri, Arcesium

27
Gaurav Suri
Chief Executive Officer
Arcesium
PNR

In March 2015, aiming to capitalize on requirements in the alternative-investment marketplace for greater operational efficiency and transparency, D.E. Shaw Group announced the launch of Arcesium, an independent spin-off to sell posttrade technology that the hedge fund firm had developed. Gaurav Suri, who had been New York–based D.E. Shaw’s head of information technology and software development and is now Arcesium’s CEO, says the strategy began to take shape around 2008. Christopher Zaback, formerly of Sandelman Partners and Moore Capital Management, had joined D.E. Shaw as CFO, and the firm took a fresh look at how to innovate in its middle and back offices. The answer was to build an entirely new platform to deliver what Suri calls one version of the truth, thereby avoiding time-consuming reconfigurations of data between back and front offices. “We’ve built a comprehensive and robust exception-driven platform, so computers do most of the heavy-lifting, leaving humans free for higher-order analysis,” says Suri, 45, who joined D.E. Shaw in 1996 from Bell Laboratories. The platform launched in 2012, and D.E. Shaw reportedly cut both its operating costs and the time it took to close its books by more than 50 percent. Commercialization was a logical next step. Suri says the intention “both physically and technologically” was “to ensure that our business operates independently.” Arcesium runs on Amazon Web Services rather than hosting in-house and dealing with maintenance, upgrades and other hassles that can be outsourced. Having D.E. Shaw as majority owner and biggest customer — Blackstone Alternative Asset Management was the other initial client and took an ownership stake — provides a solid foundation. Suri says Arcesium also benefited from good timing, as growing acceptance of cloud-based services coincided with regulation-driven needs for transparency and disclosure. “We are exactly at the intersection of these two trends,” he says.

2016 Trading Technology 40

1. Raymond Tierney III
Bloomberg
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

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