Institutions like BlackRock and Goldman Sachs Group have come up short in their attempts to run electronic platforms for corporate-bond trading. MarketAxess Holdings earns increasing profits at it, but the vast majority of the potential liquidity is still up for grabs, and Seth Merrin, founder and CEO of 13-year-old, buy side–centric equities pool Liquidnet, is setting his sights on it. In March, New York–based Liquidnet Holdings announced its acquisition of Vega-Chi, which launched Europe’s first multilateral trading facility for convertible bonds in 2010, adding European and U.S. high yields in 2012. With that technology, Merrin envisions “building out the largest institutional-sized liquidity pool dedicated to corporate bonds.” Liquidnet’s 740 member firms, he notes, “own 85 percent of the corporate bonds in the U.S. and Europe. They will come together to create a marketplace for bonds.” A serial entrepreneur, Merrin, 54, founded Merrin Financial, which introduced buy-side order management systems in the 1980s, and co-founded application-integration-software company VIE Systems in the 1990s. He is enhancing Liquidnet in other ways, notably with liquidity and transparency controls that have “systematized our clients’ access and [data] preferences.” In June, however, the Securities and Exchange Commission cited Liquidnet for shoddy information practices and penalized the firm $2 million. In April, Bob Garrett, formerly head of equity trading and prime services technology at Wells Fargo Securities, assumed the newly created position of head of technology.
1  | 1  | 3  | 4  | 5  |
| Thomas Secunda Bloomberg | Jeffrey Sprecher Intercontinental Exchange | Catherine Bessant Bank of America Corp. | Stephen Neff Fidelity Investments | Lance Uggla Markit |
6  | 7  | 8  | 9  | 10  |
| Robert Goldstein BlackRock | David Craig Thomson Reuters | Phupinder Gill CME Group | Anna Ewing NASDAQ OMX Group | R. Martin Chavez Goldman Sachs Group |
11  | 12  | 13  | 14  | 15  |
| Deborah Hopkins Citi Ventures | Dan Mathisson Credit Suisse | Daniel Coleman KCG Holdings | Michael Spencer ICAP | Michael Bodson Depository Trust & Clearing Corp. |
16  | 17  | 18  | 19  | 20  |
| Joe Ratterman BATS Global Markets | Dominique Cerutti Euronext | Ron Levi GFI Group | Gaurav Suri D.E. Shaw Group | Charles Li Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing |
21  | 22  | 23  | 24  | 25  |
| Lou Eccleston S&P Capital IQ | Lee Olesky Tradeweb Markets | Richard McVey MarketAxess Holdings | Seth Merrin Liquidnet Holdings | Antoine Shagoury London Stock Exchange Group |
26  | 27  | 28  | 29  | 30  |
| Christopher Perretta State Street Corp. | Kevin Rhein Wells Fargo & Co. | Peter Carr Morgan Stanley | Hauke Stars Deutsche Börse | Robert Alexander Capital One Financial Corp. |
31  | 32  | 33  | 34  | 35  |
| David Gershon SuperDerivatives | Chris Corrado MSCI | Joseph Squeri Citadel | Tanuja Randery BT Global Services | John Bates Software AG |
36  | 37  | 38  | 39  | 40  |
| Gary Scholten Principal Financial Group | David Gledhill DBS Bank | Simon Garland Kx Systems | Cristóbal Conde FinTech Innovation Lab | Jeff Parker EidoSearch |
41  | 42  | 43  | 44  | 45  |
| Kim Fournais & Lars Seier Christensen Saxo Bank | Kenneth Marlin Marlin & Associates | Tyler Kim MaplesFS | Jim McGuire Charles Schwab Corp. | Jim Minnick eVestment |
46  | 47  | 48  | 49  | 50  |
| Steven O’Hanlon Numerix | Sebastián Ceria Axioma | Yasuki Okai Nomura Research Institute | Niki Beattie Market Structure Partners | Mas Nakachi OpenGamma |