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The 2017 Trading Tech 40: Paul Hamill

18. Paul Hamill
Global Head of Fixed Income, Currencies, and Commodities
Citadel Securities
Last year: 20

Since moving from UBS to Citadel Securities in January 2015, Paul Hamill has been building and developing a fixed-income and foreign exchange trading and execution business, and it is a growth story. The market-making business, which is separate from Citadel's multistrategy hedge fund business, expanded into interest rate swaps in November 2014. "We started with just a handful of clients and are now up to well over 500 institutional counterparties," Hamill, 41, enthuses. This February it launched its off-the-run Treasuries offering — effectively an extension of the firm's business in on-the-run Treasuries. "It's exciting," he says of the new offering. "A huge focus of the last year has been getting ready for that."

Hamill calls technology the "lifeblood" of the business. "What we are about is precision, pricing, and risk," he notes. "That is what we are known for and that is what clients expect from us. We are among the best at thinking the right way about how to process data, how to look across correlations in markets, and how to think about synthesizing that in such an optimal way that you always know where the price is." Citadel is thus able to offer guaranteed market prices, giving it an edge over competitors with only indicative prices. "We make sure the price the client can see all the time is firm, it's live, it's here, we will deal right now," Hamill says.

He cites another Citadel advantage: being able to build a system from scratch, as opposed to dealing with legacy technology. "We have had to think differently about the kinds of tools we put into the hands of our traders and salespeople," he explains. With the flexibility afforded by new technology, "we can say, 'What would you like your day-to-day tool set to look like?' and we can build that, quickly." At a time when banks have to allocate significant budget to comply with Dodd-Frank implementation firms like Citadel Securities have a competitive advantage. "We are well positioned to use technology to innovate," says Hamill, who has an MA in political science from the University of Glasgow and an MSc in finance from the University of London.


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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