< The 2016 Trading Technology 40

38
Jennifer Nayar
Chief Executive Officer
Vela
PNR

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.”

 
2016 Trading Technology 40

1. Raymond Tierney III Bloomberg 2. Richard Prager BlackRock Advisors and Their Clients Call for New Asset Classes in Model Portfolios Sponsored by BlackRock May 6, 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