< Wall Street's Nerds: The World's Most Powerful Trading Executives
13. Jenny Knott
Chief Executive Officer
NEX Optimisation
PNR
At the close of 2016, ICAP completed the transfer of its voice brokering business to rival Tullett Prebon, now doing business as TP ICAP. The old ICAP, which was the world's biggest interdealer brokerage, was reborn as NEX Group, fulfilling a long-held, technology-centric vision of CEO Michael Spencer. NEX says it "empowers markets" with products and services that "underpin the entire trade life cycle pre-, during, and post-execution." NEX Optimisation, the division formerly known as posttrade risk and information (PTRI) and headed by Jenny Knott, is a £245 million ($305 million)-in-revenue business — smaller than that of NEX's EBS BrokerTec trading platforms but growing faster, by 7 percent year-over-year versus 1 percent on a reported basis.
Roughly half of the £145 million in annual technology spending across NEX Group, which employs about 1,800 worldwide, goes toward new developments, as opposed to "business as usual" core functions and maintenance. Knott says that "Optimisation" speaks to NEX's goals of helping clients to simplify processes and workflows and maximize resources as they navigate the complexities of market structure, regulation, and risk management; and to making it easy to access NEX's offerings through a single point of connection, master services agreement, user interface, and marketplace of services. "We combine a talented group of technologists — engineers, data scientists, computer scientists — with business skills and expertise, and that makes us uniquely positioned," says Knott, who joined ICAP as PTRI chief executive in the summer of 2015. Euclid Opportunities, which reports to the 48-year-old CEO, has made several strategic financial technology investments. Two of them in 2016 became wholly owned NEX Optimisation businesses: ENSO Financial Analytics, a data platform for hedge funds and prime brokers; and regulatory reporting hub Abide Financial. Current portfolio company Axoni is collaborating with NEX in developing blockchain, or distributed ledger, technology; Euclid also has in that field an investment in Digital Asset Holdings.
A former CEO of Standard Bank in London, part of South Africa's Standard Bank Group, and with UBS and Nomura International among her previous affiliations, Knott says she is not wedded to any single blockchain standard or approach, focusing instead on arriving at solutions that benefit clients and improve business processes. "Distributed ledger really goes together with cloud technology," she says. "Looking at distributed ledger, artificial intelligence, cloud, big data — it's the convergence of these technologies that is exciting."
The 2017 Trading Tech 40
1.Richard Prager BlackRock 2. Chris Isaacson Bats Global Markets 3. Bradley Peterson Nasdaq 4. Brad Levy MarkitSERV 5. Dan Keegan Citi |
6. Glenn Lesko Bloomberg Tradebook 7. Bryan Durkin CME Group 8. Mayur Kapani Intercontinental Exchange 9. Mike Blum KCG Holdings 10. Raj Mahajan Goldman Sachs Group |
11. Ronald DePoalo Fidelity Institutional 12. Nick Themelis MarketAxess Holdings 13. Jenny Knott NEX Optimisation 14. Billy Hult Tradeweb Markets 15. Rob Park IEX Group |
16. Bill Chow & Richard Leung Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing 17. John Mackay (Mack) Gill MillenniumIT 18. Paul Hamill Citadel Securities 19. Eric Noll Convergex 20. Veronica Augustsson Cinnober Financial Technology |
21. Tyler Moeller & Joshua Walsky Broadway Technology 22. Alasdair Haynes Aquis Exchange 23. Gaurav Suri Arcesium 24. Manoj Narang Mana Partners 25. Michael Chin & Neill Penney Thomson Reuters |
26. Robert Sloan S3 Partners 27. Anton Katz & Stephen Mock AQR Capital Management 28. Donal Byrne Corvil 29. Stu Taylor Algomi 30. Alfred Eskandar Portware |
31. Steven Randich Financial Industry Regulatory Authority 32. R. Cromwell Coulson OTC Markets Group 33. Peter Maragos Dash Financial 34. John Fawcett Quantopian 35. Donald Ross III PDQ Enterprises |
36. Jennifer Nayar Vela Trading Technologies 37. Dan Raju Tradier 38. Susan Estes OpenDoor Trading 39. David Mercer LMAX Exchange 40. Oki Matsumoto Monex Group |
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