Four-star admiral William Flanagan spent the mid-1990s commanding the U.S. Atlantic fleet and NATO’s Western Atlantic forces: a combined 200,000 people, 200 ships, 1,350 aircraft and $11 billion budget. He chose Wall Street as his “retirement home” in 1997, after he was introduced to Cantor Fitzgerald CEO Howard Lutnick by William Simon, the late former Treasury secretary. A senior executive at the brokerage firm, Flanagan last month sailed into new waters as president of Independent Market Services, a new Cantor subsidiary charged with developing electronic marketplaces for nonfinancial industries, particularly energy. The admiral , whose friends call him Bud , expects to have no trouble getting his bearings. “Complexity is complexity,” he says. “It’s just different subject matter.” Last year Flanagan helped launch TradeSpark, an online energy marketplace run through e-Speed, a Cantor subsidiary that was spun off as a public company in December 1999. IMS’s skipper notes that regulatory compliance and trading rules can be as important as hard wiring to the success of online markets. Flanagan says Cantor formed the new unit because “it takes a broader view than just technology.”
