Scott Ignall
No. 28
Chief Technology Officer
Lightspeed Financial
Drawing a contrast with his experience at larger enterprises, Scott Ignall says, “I have seen the bounty that being extremely agile and small can produce.” At low-latency trading systems and brokerage services company Lightspeed Financial in New York, with a staff of 100, “breaking down the walls between business units allows us to outpace the competition,” CTO Ignall contends. Revenue has quintupled in five years, to $50 million, spurred by seven acquisitions, including Lime Brokerage International (Ireland), Lightspeed’s first overseas foray, in June; and Chicago-based Greenmoor Financial Group and its Green Trader equity options suite in July. Lightspeed was formed in 2006 after CEO Stephen Ehrlich led a management buyout of E*Trade Financial’s professional trading business. Ignall, who headed direct market access product strategy at E*Trade Capital Markets and was a member of Ehrlich’s founding team, played a key role in developing the Lightspeed Trader client software and the Lightspeed Gateway algorithmic system. He began his career in the 1990s at high-tech trading pioneer Datek, which spawned the Island ECN electronic communications network, sold to Nasdaq Stock Market. “I got the tech product bug at that time,” says Ignall. He joined E*Trade in 2002 upon its acquisition of technology start-up Tradescape, where he was vice president of technology affairs.
