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The 2014 Tech 50: Seth Merrin

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Seth Merrin
Chief Executive Officer
Liquidnet Holdings

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.

The 2014 Tech 50
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

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