< The 2016 Trading Technology 40
21
Eric Noll
President and Chief Executive Officer
Convergex
PNR
Institutional brokerage Convergex needed more than just management tweaking when Eric Noll was named CEO, in November 2013. Within weeks Convergex would agree to pay more than $150 million to put accusations of trading misconduct and overcharges behind it. Noll then went to work on focusing and redefining the privately held, New York–based company as an agency brokerage; it currently has more than 3,000 clients worldwide. “We don’t do anything but execute transactions in the marketplace,” says Noll, 53, who was executive vice president of transaction services at Nasdaq OMX Group from 2009 to 2013 and one of the leaders of quantitative brokerage Susquehanna International Group for 15 years before that. “We don’t do any market making, research, investment banking or lending. We are to a large extent conflict-free in that we don’t accept payment for order flow.” The 520-employee organization’s simply stated objective is to “build out the electronic algo that works best on behalf of institutional investors.” The firm offers algorithms for more than 40 markets and runs one of the only U.S.-registered dark pool for options. Convergex’s Millennium alternative trading system does nothing but capture midpoint, or between-the-match, spreads for equity trading and has, in effect, a built-in speed bump. “It routes to our data center,” Noll explains. “That gap, if you will, prevents latency arbitrage from occurring in equity execution.” Noll, who earned an MBA from Vanderbilt University’s Owen Graduate School of Management, observes that institutional investing’s technological advancements have been mainly “on the front end — around execution, venues, speed, communication. There hasn’t been a lot of attention paid to what I call the plumbing, or what happens after the trade has occurred.” One likely route to making posttrade plumbing safer and more efficient, he says, “is going to be the blockchain and seeing how it works in the back-office space.”
2016 Trading Technology 40
1. Raymond Tierney III 2. Richard Prager 3. Chris Isaacson 4. Jonathan Ross 5. Bradley Peterson |
6. Brad Levy 7. Dan Keegan 8. Ronald DePoalo 9. Raj Mahajan 10. Ari Studnitzer |
11. Mayur Kapani 12. Gerald O’Connell 13. Nicholas Themelis 14. Gil Mandelzis 15. Bill Chow and Richard Leung |
16. Rob Park 17. Philip Weisberg 18. John Mackay (Mack) Gill 19. Robert Cornish 20. Paul Hamill |
21. Eric Noll 22. Tyler Moeller and Joshua Walsky 23. Rishi Nangalia 24. Veronica Augustsson 25. Alasdair Haynes |
26. Manoj Narang 27. Gaurav Suri 28. Robert Sloan 29. Anton Katz and Stephen Mock 30. Stu Taylor |
31. D. Keith Ross Jr. 32. Donal Byrne 33. Alfred Eskandar 34. R. Cromwell Coulson 35. Masayuki Hosaka |
36. Peter Maragos and David Karat 37. Amar Kuchinad 38. Jennifer Nayar 39. Dave Snowdon 40. Dan Raju |
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