< Wall Street's Nerds: The World's Most Powerful Trading Executives

36. Jennifer Nayar
Chief Executive Officer
Vela Trading Technologies
Last year: 38

SR Labs, a Wall Street systems and consulting house founded in 2007, raised its profile with the July 2014 acquisition of Wombat Financial Software from Intercontinental Exchange's NYSE Technologies. Jennifer Nayar, a trading technology veteran who had most recently served as chief of staff at Goldman Sachs Group spin-off (and now Thomson Reuters subsidiary) REDI Holdings, became CEO of SR Labs in June 2015. A year later the high-performance trading and market data systems company was renamed Vela Trading Technologies, symbolic of its mission "to simplify how firms interact with the markets and increase efficiency" and "combining the best of our two historic companies' cultures," Nayar said at the time.

A November announcement of new data feed handlers indicated the geographic and asset class breadth of Vela's activities, ranging from the Australian Securities Exchange (derivatives), to the National Stock Exchange of India and the pan-European Aquis Exchange (equities), to Bats Global Markets' foreign exchange and options platforms. Also in November, Nayar brought on Brian Cassin, formerly of S&P Global and Thomson Financial, and Ollie Cadman from ICE's Interactive Data Corp. as joint heads of product and strategy. They will be "instrumental in helping Vela continue to create, build, and deliver new and innovative trading and market data software products to the global marketplace," Nayar, 49, says. In terms of innovation and experimentation, she says the firm is exploring potential enhancements to its consolidated data feed, along with cloud services and opportunities in "adjacent markets" such as energy.

 
The 2017 Trading Tech 40

1. Richard Prager BlackRock 2. Chris Isaacson Bats Global Markets 3. Bradley Peterson Nasdaq Private Markets Investment Outlook Q2 2025: Opportunities Amid Uncertainty Sponsored by Schroders Capital May 1, 2025 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