This content is from: Portfolio
The 2015 Trading Technology 40: Brad Katsuyama
#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.”
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 |