The 2013 Tech 50: Marianne Brown

Front-office revenue producers’ eyes used to glaze over at the mention of middle- and back-office concerns like trade matching and settlement. Some postcrisis attitude adjustments have resulted in more firmwide appreciation of the bottom-line and risk-reducing benefits of posttrade processing efficiencies. “The planets are aligning,” says Marianne Brown, who has spent 35 years in behind-the-scenes operations — 26 at ADP Brokerage Services Group and since 2006 as CEO of the Depository Trust & Clearing Corp.–Thomson Reuters joint venture, Omgeo. “This is showtime for us.” She is taking advantage of the spotlight to get vocal about the still-untapped potential of shared-cost infrastructure, or “utilitization.” Under Brown, Omgeo, which has 6,500 clients and offices in Boston, New York and 14 other locations worldwide, has extended its core Central Trade Manager into exchange-traded derivatives and in 2012 saw a 35 percent increase in CTM users. It has enhanced its ProtoColl collateral management solution at a time when regulations and capital requirements have brought new prominence to that function. Thinking systemically, Brown, 54, is urging shorter settlement cycles. In the U.S., even as trades are matched quickly, settlement takes three days, or T+3, and much can go wrong in the interim. Europe is on the way to T+2. Brown asks, “Why not go to T+1 if we can do that in a transformational way?”