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The 2015 Trading Technology 40: Bina Kalola
#16 Bina Kalola, Head of Global Equities Strategic Direct Investments, Bank of America Merrill Lynch
For as long as she can remember, Bina Kalola has had an entrepreneurial streak. As head of global equities strategic direct investments for Bank of America Merrill Lynch since 2006, Kalola is a corporate venture capitalist, overseeing strategic financial technology investments. “The number of innovative platforms and new technology focused on fintech is at a peak,” says Kalola, 45, who wears a second hat as head of global e-trading market structure strategy for fixed income, currencies and commodities. As part of her mission of identifying opportunities for augmenting BAML’s technology, Kalola sits on the boards of BATS Global Markets, Chi-X Global Holdings and REDI Holdings and is a board observer of data analytics company Context Relevant and messaging platform developer Symphony Communication Services. She extols the advantages of “partnering up through collective mind share, both external — on the Street — and internal.” Working collaboratively and with a portfolio of investments can contribute to the success of strategic holdings: “Sometimes clients want aggregation — to use one or two multibroker-dealer portals, not ten individual portals,” Kalola notes. The tech bug bit the 1991 Barnard College graduate (BA in global economics) when, as a junior analyst at Salomon Brothers, she wrote her first macro in Excel to automate work flow. With a JD from Georgetown University, Kalola did a stint in corporate law, then co-founded a dot-com start-up before landing at Merrill Lynch & Co. in 2001 as an assistant general counsel responsible for M&A and structuring joint ventures.
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 |