Exchange listing is costly and, when reporting and other management burdens are factored in, unattractive for many small public companies. OTC Markets Group offers an alternative path to visibility and liquidity and, for some, a stepping-stone onto an exchange. Some 10,000 securities trade on the New York–based company's three platforms. The top-tier OTCQX, marking its tenth anniversary in 2017, serves 399 domestic and global issuers with an aggregate $1.4 trillion in market capitalization. Its $36.8 billion in annual dollar volume represents 20 percent of the total for all over-the-counter securities.
That market, the middle-tier OTCQB Venture Market, and OTC Pink are more than just trading venues. OTC Markets Group, led by president and CEO R. Cromwell Coulson since 1997, aims to create favorable conditions for trading, transparency, disclosures, and analytics. The strategy is increasingly data-driven; 2016 saw the introduction of an online Research Marketplace to encourage independent analysis of OTCQX and OTCQB companies; a Compliance Analytics offering; and execution-quality and market maker performance metrics on the company's OTC Link alternative trading system. "The fastest execution is not always the best execution," Coulson, 50, notes. Armed with the data, "broker-dealers might tell market makers to slow down to get better execution quality."
 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 |