Tony Weeresinghe
No. 22
Head of Global Development
London Stock Exchange
In February 2011, London Stock Exchange Group switched off its aging trading system, TradElect, and replaced it with a sleek new platform from MillenniumIT, the Colombo, Sri Lanka, technology company founded by Tony Weeresinghe in 1996 and acquired by LSE Group in 2009. The upgrade came none too soon. The LSE had struggled to keep pace with rising volumes and demands for submillisecond transaction speeds, and TradElect had broken down more than once under the pressure. The transition had some glitches too, but “I think we achieved what we wanted to achieve,” says Weeresinghe, 49, now the exchange group’s head of global development as well as the Sri Lankan enterprise’s CEO. MillenniumIT lowered London’s average trading latency from 1.4 milliseconds to 125 microseconds, and there will be no end to the effort to improve on all aspects of market operations. A key benefit of in-house control has been that “we are enjoying our ability to maintain our agility with the market,” says Antoine Shagoury, LSE Group’s chief information officer and MillenniumIT’s chairman. (Shagoury was a customer of MillenniumIT’s while serving as the American Stock Exchange’s CIO from 2004 to 2008.) In MillenniumIT, LSE Group gained a technology vendor that competes with counterparts at NYSE Euronext and other top exchange operators. In the six months through September, MillenniumIT’s revenue increased 10 percent year-over-year, to £9.6 million ($14.7 million).
