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The 2016 Trading Technology 40: Amar Kuchinad

No. 37 Amar Kuchinad, Chief Executive Officer, Electronifie

37
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

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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