50 Charles Marston

Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
Calypso Technology
[PNR]

Not much more than a decade ago, few people in the highly fragmented, or “siloed,” securities industry contemplated multi-asset-class trading systems integrated from front to back office. Charles Marston had that vision when he and Kishore Bopardikar founded San Francisco–based Calypso Technology in 1997. CEO Marston, 61, describes “adaptable” software — “generic to any asset class” and with straight-through-processing efficiencies — as a significant advance in trading and risk controls. Rather than building a trading system for one product and adapting it for others, Calypso took a comprehensive approach from the start, Marston says, seeking to be “robust enough to respond to changes in the market.” With that built-in agility, Calypso was ready when demand for fast, sophisticated over-the-counter derivatives platforms picked up in the early 2000s. Today, Calypso is the leading vendor of central clearing solutions, claiming such clients as CME Group. All this has its roots in Infinity Financial Technology — acquired by SunGard Data Systems in 1997 — where Marston was president and Bopardikar, 45, now Calypso’s president, was CTO.

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