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The 2017 Trading Tech 40: Steven Randich

31. Steven Randich
Chief Information Officer
Financial Industry Regulatory Authority
PNR

The corporate sector has no monopoly on cloud computing, machine learning, or any other trend in technology. By the end of 2016, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority had moved 90 percent of its data to the Amazon Web Services cloud, and the rest will be done this year. "We are recognized as one of the leaders in implementing AWS," boasts FINRA chief information officer Steven Randich. A onetime managing principal of IBM Global Services who has been a CIO of the Chicago Stock Exchange, Nasdaq, and Citigroup, the 54-year-old is running a real technology shop: Some firms are paying FINRA for assistance in making similar transitions. Other regulators "want to get on the cloud and partner with us to build shared applications," Randich says, though he is not far enough along to name names.

His Washington-based self-regulatory and market surveillance agency takes in an average of 50 billion market events a day — trades, trade cancellations, and quote changes; it's not unusual for FINRA to deal with rows of data totaling in the trillions. To get better and faster at finding needles in those haystacks, Randich is working on machine learning systems that can identify patterns of market manipulation more effectively than existing automated methods that throw up too many false positives. Algorithms perform the surveillance and kick out the data for humans to act on. "Innovation is key to our business as a regulator," says Randich, a University of Chicago MBA who has been with FINRA since March 2013. "Financial markets have become very electronic. The only way to catch the bad guys is through sophisticated technology."


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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