This content is from: Portfolio

The 2015 Trading Technology 40: Brad Katsuyama

#23 Brad Katsuyama, President and Chief Executive Officer, IEX Group

23
Brad Katsuyama
President and Chief Executive Officer
IEX Group

Two years ago IEX Group was just another upstart dark pool operator. Yes, it was controlled by buy-side owners, setting it apart from its rivals. It had a management team out of RBC Capital Markets determined to disrupt the status quo by favoring the interests of stock issuers and investors over those of high frequency traders. Those characteristics may have attracted plenty of notice on Wall Street, but IEX’s notoriety spread far beyond that with the March 2014 release of Michael Lewis’s anti-HFT bestseller, Flash Boys, which portrayed IEX president and CEO Brad Katsuyama as a heroic underdog. Since handling 568,000 shares on its first trading day, in October 2013, IEX is currently in the range of 130 million to 140 million a day, further stoking the 36-year-old’s star power on the business-talk-show circuit. “We’ve grown substantially,” asserts Katsuyama, formerly global head of electronic sales and trading at RBC, a unit of Royal Bank of Canada. “Why? Because we’re trying to create the fairest possible trading environment.” In September, IEX raised $75 million from Bain Capital Ventures, MassMutual Ventures and Spark Capital, among others, and began the process of filing to become a full-fledged exchange. “We don’t just want to complain about exchanges,” Katsuyama says. “We want to do something about it” by simplifying order types and avoiding practices like paying for order flow. He vows not to go into the technology sales business: “We use technology for one thing — to create a better experience.”

The 2015 Trading Technology 40

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


Related Content