The 2014 Tech 50: Lee Olesky

July 08, 2014

< The 2014 Tech 50: Moving Out of the Lab and Into the Cloud

Lee Olesky

Chief Executive Officer

Tradeweb Markets

Last year: 24

Tradeweb Markets can claim one of the true firsts of e-finance: Its original business plan was in the works in 1995, when “no one was trading fixed income electronically,” recalls Lee Olesky, who at the time was part of a Credit Suisse First Boston team that went on to launch Tradeweb as a multibank joint venture. Its multidealer online marketplace for U.S. Treasuries was the first of its kind in 1998. From there the New York–based company built an extensive fixed-income and derivatives product menu, eventually expanding internationally and into interdealer and retail trading. It is currently part of the growing marketplaces segment of majority owner Thomson Reuters’ Financial & Risk group (see David Craig, No. 7). “When we first pitched this, I didn’t envision that the Internet would become such a thing that we would eventually be building websites for individuals to come in and trade fixed income electronically,” says Olesky, 52, who became Tradeweb’s president in 2002 and CEO in 2008. “Our focus is on designing new products and protocols that meet the evolving needs of our customers,” he says, noting that revenue has grown in ten years from less than $100 million to more than $500 million. Capitalizing on new derivatives rules, Tradeweb’s swaps execution facility is second only to Bloomberg’s in dealer-to-customer volume.

The 2014 Tech 50