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The 2015 Tech 50: Seth Merrin
The Liquidnet Holdings CEO jumps to No. 23 on this year’s Tech 50 ranking.
Fourteen years ago Seth Merrin, a serial entrepreneur who had gained renown for inventing trade order management systems in the 1980s, introduced Liquidnet, an even farther-reaching, technology-based breakthrough for the buy side. A peer-to-peer network for institutional equity trades, built to handle large blocks that were difficult to execute on exchanges, the trailblazing dark venue now spans 43 markets on five continents, and Merrin, 55, has set out to conquer another world: fixed income. “The corporate bond market is broken,” says the founder and CEO of New York–based Liquidnet Holdings. He believes that tight liquidity, bank capital constraints and inevitably rising interest rates will create “perfect storm” conditions that are ideal for Liquidnet’s brand of “electronification.” In March 2014 the company acquired Vega-Chi, a successful European bond-trading platform, as the foundation of Liquidnet Fixed Income, which is expected to launch this quarter, promising simple, anonymous and fast order matching — and potentially the kind of centralized, deep liquidity pool that the bond market lacks. Merrin looks to Liquidnet’s membership of 800 asset managers with a combined $14 trillion under management as the key to assembling the critical mass that will do for bonds what the institutional platform did for equities. Merrin envisions Liquidnet as a full-service broker-dealer, offering access to liquidity in any way a customer may want and, like a Global Positioning System, “not just telling them where to go but how best to get there.”
See the full story, “The 2015 Tech 50: Racers to the Edge.”
 1. Jeffrey Sprecher Intercontinental Exchange  2. Catherine Bessant Bank of America Corp.  3. Phupinder Gill CME Group  4. Lance Uggla Markit  5. Robert Goldstein BlackRock |
 6. Shawn Edwards & Vlad Kliatchko Bloomberg  7. R. Martin Chavez Goldman Sachs Group  8. Deborah Hopkins Citi Ventures  9. Stephen Neff Fidelity Investments  10. Adena Friedman Nasdaq OMX Group |
 11. David Craig Thomson Reuters  12. Daniel Coleman KCG Holdings  13. Michael Spencer ICAP  14. Michael Bodson Depository Trust & Clearing Corp.  15. Charles Li Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing |
 16. Chris Concannon BATS Global Markets  17. Christopher Perretta State Street Corp.  18. Antoine Shagoury London Stock Exchange Group  19. Kevin Rhein Wells Fargo & Co.  20. Neil Katz D.E. Shaw & Co. |
 21. Lee Olesky Tradeweb Markets  22. Richard McVey MarketAxess Holdings  23. Seth Merrin Liquidnet Holdings  24. Robert Alexander Capital One Financial Corp.  25. Frank Bisignano First Data Corp. |
 26. John Marcante Vanguard Group  27. Joseph Squeri Citadel  28. Lou Eccleston TMX Group  29. Claude Honegger Credit Suisse  30. Chris Corrado MSCI |
 31. David Gledhill DBS Bank  32. John Bates Software AG  33. Michael Cooper BT Radianz  34. Gary Scholten Principal Financial Group  35. Sunil Hirani trueEX Group |
 36. Hauke Stars Deutsche BÖrse  37. Brian Conlon First Derivatives  38. Jim Minnick eVestment  39. Lars Seier Christensen & Kim Fournais  40. Tyler Kim MaplesFS |
 41. Jim McGuire Charles Schwab Corp.  42. Steven O'Hanlon Numerix  43. Sebastián Ceria Axioma  44. Yasuki Okai NRI Holdings America  45. Stephane Dubois Xignite |
 46. Mazy Dar OpenFin  47. Brian Sentance Xenomorph Software  48. Mas Nakachi OpenGamma  49. John Lehner BNY Mellon Technology Solutions Group  50. Jock Percy Perseus |