This content is from: Portfolio
The 2015 Tech 50: Sunil Hirani
The trueEX Group CEO debuts at No. 35 on this year’s Tech 50 ranking.
When mandatory electronic swaps trading began in earnest early last year, there were more than 20 swap execution facilities, venues that emerged to meet postcrisis transparency and clearing requirements. Today there are fewer than ten; most are run by brokerages like ICAP that historically dominated swaps trading or by electronic execution titans like Bloomberg and Tradeweb Markets. An exception is trueEX Group, which billed itself as “the first Dodd-Frank-compliant swaps exchange” in September 2012, when it obtained Designated Contract Market status for interest rate swaps from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. SEF approval came a year later, and today the 45-employee New York firm, founded by Sunil Hirani, captures 5.7 percent of overall SEF volume and as much as 15 percent of the Bloomberg- and Tradeweb-dominated half of the market that deals directly with the buy side. “We’re providing choice to consumers in a market that’s dominated by incumbents,” says CEO Hirani, a onetime Lockheed software engineer who came out of Deutsche Bank’s derivatives group in the late 1990s to co-found the pioneering credit default swaps platform Creditex Group, which Intercontinental Exchange bought in 2008 for $513 million. The 48-year-old attributes trueEX’s success to its focus on nondollar, nonstandard swaps. “The world is episodic; the world is custom — you need to give people flexibility,” he says. Last year Hirani and Donald Wilson, CEO of Chicago-based DRW Trading Group, co-founded Digital Asset Holdings, which in March named former JPMorgan Chase & Co. executive Blythe Masters as CEO to lead its development of blockchain technology for transaction settlements. The two ventures “complement each other,” Hirani says, and can do much to “enhance the security, speed and efficiency” of derivatives trading.
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 |