< The 2016 Trading Technology 40

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 Model Portfolios to Deliver Alternative Asset Exposure Sponsored by BlackRock April 29, 2025 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