Kx Systems
Wall Street has been ahead of much of the corporate world in seeing the enormity of big data and finding technology to analyze it. Major capital markets players like Goldman Sachs Group and Morgan Stanley have for years been users of First Derivatives' Kx Systems — high-performance databases for crunching huge sets of historical and streaming market data. First Derivatives was a longtime strategic partner of Kx before picking up a controlling interest in the Palo Alto, California-based business in 2014. Now the Newry, Northern Ireland-based company, founded in 1996 by chief executive officer Brian Conlon, is taking the technology beyond finance. Recent sales announcements cite analytical applications of Kx in satellite imagery with a unit of Airbus, and in health care with startup RxDataScience. "We have the engine to power people's ideas," says Conlon. The CEO has his sights on an "addressable target market" exceeding $60 billion in such data-rich and analytics-hungry areas as cybersecurity, the Internet of Things, robotics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. In May, First Derivatives reported preliminary earnings that Conlon, 51, calls "another monumental year," with revenue in the 12 months through February rising 30 percent to £152 million ($197.5 million). Of that, £117 million was in fintech.
 1. Adena Friedman NASDAQ  2. Catherine Bessant Bank of America Corp.  3. Robert Goldstein BlackRock  4. Jeffrey Sprecher Intercontinental Exchange  5. Lance Uggla IHS Markit |
 6. Shawn Edwards & Vlad Kliatchko Bloomberg  7. David Craig Thomson Reuters  8. Michael Spencer NEX Group  9. Don Callahan Citigroup  10. Elisha Wiesel Goldman Sachs Group |
 11. Michael Bodson Depository Trust & Clearing Corp.  12. Terrence Duffy CME Group  13. Charles Li Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing  14. Sean Belka Fidelity Investments  15. Chris Concannon CBOE Holdings |
 16. Guy Chiarello First Data Corp.  17. Steven Lieblich Citadel  18. David Rutter R3CEV  19. Blythe Masters Digital Asset Holdings  20. Alfred Spector Two Sigma Investments |
 21. Neil Katz D.E. Shaw Group  22. Lee Olesky Tradeweb Markets  23. Richard McVey MarketAxess Holdings  24. David Gledhill DBS Bank  25. Seth Merrin Liquidnet Holdings |
 26. Antoine Shagoury State Street Corp.  27. Peter Brown & Robert Mercer Renaissance Technologies  28. Lou Eccleston TMX Group  29. Peter Cherecwich Northern Trust Corp.  30. Mike Chinn S&P Global Market Intelligence |
 31. Chris Corrado London Stock Exchange Group  32. Neal Pawar AQR Capital Management  33. Gary Norcross Fidelity National Information Services  34. Steven O'Hanlon Numerix  35. Sebastián Ceria Axioma |
 36. Brian Conlon First Derivatives and Kx Systems  37. Tyler Kim MaplesFS  38. Michael Cooper BT Radianz  39. Robert Schifellite Broadridge Financial Solutions  40. Jim Minnick eVestment |