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The 2016 Trading Technology 40: Amar Kuchinad

No. 37 Amar Kuchinad, Chief Executive Officer, Electronifie

March 07, 2016

< The 2016 Trading Technology 40

Amar Kuchinad

Chief Executive Officer

Electronifie

PNR

Like the founders of other trading platforms, Amar Kuchinad based his ideas for automation and efficiency on institutional trading experience — in his case with Credit Suisse and Goldman Sachs Group from 1996 to 2011. But before forming Electronifie in New York in 2014, Kuchinad spent more than a year as a senior policy adviser in the Securities and Exchange Commission’s Division of Trading and Markets. The experience sated “a desire to do public service,” he says, and fortified his faith in “private market solutions.” He saw what it was like to be on the receiving end of complaints that regulation is to blame for tight liquidity and other woes, particularly in fixed income, where e-trading start-ups have proliferated in recent years. Fully aware that many such ventures failed, Kuchinad and a team that included former Credit Suisse colleague and Electronifie CFO and CTO Ian McAllister spent a year in development and launched their platform into the corporate-bond marketplace in May 2015. By December traders at 75 asset managers and broker-dealers had been set up on Electronifie and had routed more than $36 billion in executable orders, making the firm one of a handful of viable options in an asset class long dominated by MarketAxess Holdings (see Nicholas Themelis, No. 13). “We don’t look at the corporate space as just what is traded electronically,” says Kuchinad, 41, noting that traditional voice brokerage has been far from fully displaced. As capital-constrained dealers retreat or consolidate, he sees room for “three, five, even ten electronic platforms” to win significant pieces of business. Electronifie’s differentiators, Kuchinad adds, are “cutting-edge programming” and a simple user interface that allow for seamless integration with client work flows: “The market structure needed to be disrupted, but this is still a business of people needing to transact. Our technology automates the low-value-add, high-touch work of intermediaries.”

2016 Trading Technology 40