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The 2015 Trading Technology 40: Ronald DePoalo
#10 Ronald DePoalo, Chief Information Officer, Fidelity Institutional
Ronald DePoalo has financial technology in his blood. His father, Phillip, was head of technology at Salomon Brothers. “I spent a good amount of time learning about the business from him,” says the younger DePoalo, now chief information officer of the Fidelity Institutional unit of Boston-based Fidelity Investments. He went on to “put technology at the heart of my degree,” a BS in management information systems from Ramapo College in New Jersey (later supplemented by an MBA from Saint Peter’s University). His “baptism by fire” came shortly after entering a Merrill Lynch & Co. training program in 1986, as a developer in mortgage-backed securities. Back then technology was “the necessary evil of financial services, with lots of batch processing,” the 50-year-old recalls. “I was there at the beginning, witnessing how technology became more and more central.” At Merrill he rose to chief technology officer for global wealth management, leaving in 2008 to oversee Fidelity’s $3.5 trillion-in-assets brokerage platform, which serves the retail and workplace businesses s well as the technology for the institutional business. It includes National Financial, Institutional Wealth Services, Financial Advisor Solutions, Capital Markets Services and Family Office Services. “We are building out trading tools and systems to bring institutional-type quality for all different clients,” DePoalo says. Last year saw enhancements to the PB Optimize price transparency tool for securities lending and the launch of a crossing system for block trades. This year’s priorities: fixed-income trading and transaction cost analysis for equities and options.
1  | 2  | 3  | 4  | 5  |
| Kevin Kometer CME Group | Richard Prager BlackRock | Raymond Tierney III Bloomberg Tradebook | Jonathan Ross KCG Holdings | Charles Vice Intercontinental Exchange |
6  | 7  | 8  | 9  | 10  |
| Chris Isaacson BATS Global Markets | Bradley Peterson Nasdaq OMX Group | Brad Levy MarkitSERV | Dan Keegan Citi | Ronald DePoalo Fidelity Institutional |
11  | 12  | 13  | 14  | 15  |
| Gerard Beatty Goldman Sachs Group | Gerald O'Connell CBOE Holdings | Brenda Hoffman TMX Group | Billy Hult Tradeweb Markets | Nicholas Themelis MarketAxess Holdings |
16  | 17  | 18  | 19  | 20  |
| Bina Kalola Bank of America Merrill Lynch | Gil Mandelzis EBS-BrokerTec (ICAP) | Steven Randich Financial Industry Regulatory Authority | Jerry Dobner GFI Group | Michael Liberman BlueMountain Capital Management |
21  | 22  | 23  | 24  | 25  |
| Bill Chow and Richard Leung Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing | Jamie Selway Investment Technology Group | Brad Katsuyama IEX Group | John Mackay (Mack) Gill MillenniumIT | Jamil Nazarali Citadel Execution Services |
26  | 27  | 28  | 29  | 30  |
| Robert Cornish International Securities Exchange | Tyler Moeller andJoshua Walksy Broadway Technology | Rishi Nangalia REDI Holdings | Manoj Narang Tradeworx, Thesys Technologies | Oki Matsumoto Monex Group |
31  | 32  | 33  | 34  | 35  |
| Alasdair Haynes Aquis Exchange | Veronica Augustsson Cinnober Financial Technology | Stu Taylor Algomi | Luís Otávio Saliba Furtado BM&FBovespa | Tal Cohen Chi-X Global Holdings |
36  | 37  | 38  | 39  | 40  |
| Donal Byrne Corvil | R. Cromwell Coulson OTC Markets Group | Alfred Eskandar Portware | Richard Korhammer SR Labs | Hazem Dawani OptionsCity Software |