The 2015 Tech 50: Lee Olesky

< The 2015 Tech 50: Racers to the Edge

21
Lee Olesky
Chief Executive Officer
Tradeweb Markets
Last year: 22

In 1998, Tradeweb Markets was operating a first-of-its-kind multidealer electronic marketplace for U.S. Treasury securities. The upstart then is an established, multiproduct heavyweight now, with “800 employees focused entirely on fixed-income and derivatives trading — no one else has that,” boasts Lee Olesky. A member of the Credit Suisse First Boston team that developed Tradeweb in the 1990s, the 53-year-old has been CEO since 2008, and it is, as ever, a growth company. Diversifying its original client-to-dealer business, now spanning more than 50 countries, New York–based Tradeweb, majority-owned by Thomson Reuters, has expanded into interdealer and municipal bond brokerage and is serving the financial advisory marketplace through Tradeweb Direct. It has also parlayed its over-the-counter expertise to become a leader in swap execution facilities, operating the DW SEF anonymous trading platform and TW SEF for disclosed transactions. The latter’s notional volume of $5 trillion since March 2014 is significant compared with Tradeweb’s $16 trillion total since launching derivatives trading in 2005. “We have a 50 percent market share,” notes Olesky, who was CEO of BrokerTec Europe, now part of ICAP (see Michael Spencer, No. 13), before moving to Tradeweb as its London-based president in 2002. Tradeweb draws on “years of experience to design what our customers want to use, and our extended network of relationships gives us a huge advantage.” His latest target is corporate bonds, the stronghold of MarketAxess Holdings (see Richard McVey, No. 22). “We’re not new to the credit space as a global company, but we are new in the U.S.,” Olesky says. “We have very high aspirations but recognize fully that this is a multiyear process to build out our franchise.”

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The 2015 Tech 50