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The 2016 Trading Technology 40: Jennifer Nayar
No. 38 Jennifer Nayar, Chief Executive Officer, Vela
A typical teenager might edge her way into the working world by babysitting or waitressing. Jennifer Nayar, to help support her single-parent family, left school at 16 to take a job at the London Stock Exchange. “That was when I first got into things that were electronically confirmed, as opposed to telexes,” Nayar says of her experience working in posttrade services at the LSE. Now 48, she went on to management positions at Thomson Electronic Settlements Group (and its successor company Omgeo), Mercator Software, NYFIX, NYSE Euronext and Goldman Sachs Group trading technology spin-off REDI Holdings, where she was chief of staff for 14 months before being named CEO of SR Labs last June. A developer of high-performance trading and market-data-feed software, New York–based SR Labs was founded in 2007 by former Merrill Lynch & Co. senior consultant Srinivasan Ramiah. It bulked up in 2014 by acquiring Wombat Financial Software from Intercontinental Exchange’s NYSE Technologies unit and before Nayar arrived was helmed by e-trading entrepreneur Richard Korhammer (No. 39 last year). Nayar has added key executives, including BlackRock and NYFIX veteran Christopher Nagy as CFO. In January the company announced new feed handlers for the Australian Securities Exchange, Bombay Stock Exchange and Nasdaq Futures, among other markets, and said growth initiatives this year are focused on the Asia-Pacific region and fixed income, currencies and commodities. “Ten or 15 years ago, we had a year to develop a product rollout; now we’re down to days or weeks to get changes out to a client,” Nayar observes. “Now that I’m in the driver’s seat, and coming from a market-data background, I’m very keen to see used all of the data we have here at our fingertips.”
 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 |