< The 2015 Trading Technology 40: Going with the Flow

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 Zef Nikolla	8	9	10
Chris Isaacson BATS Global Markets	Bradley Peterson Nasdaq OMX Group	Brad Levy MarkitSERV	Dan Keegan Citi	Ronald DePoalo Fidelity Institutional
11 Mark McQueen	12	13	14	15 Margaret Fox
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 Martin H. Simon	19 Todd Plitt	20 A.E. Fletcher Photography
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 Photographer:http://www.digitalh	23	24 Dennis Degnan	25 Paul Elledge
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 Picasa	29 Andrew Harrer	30 Takashi KATO
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 unknown	33 Douglas Kurn	34 Luludi/LUZ	35 William Neumann Photography
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