Fresh from a stint in private equity, he’s clearly delighted to be taking over this month as CEO of Radianz, a provider of secure networking services to financial institutions, exchanges and market data companies. Edelstein has now seen the securities processing business from just about every perspective.
Back in the 1990s, as CEO of Thomson Financial Electronic Settlements Group, he sold the securities industry on electronic trade confirmation, a precursor to automated clearing and straight-through processing. Then he merged Thomson ESG with Depository Trust & Clearing Corp.'s TradeSuite business to form Omgeo, a global posttrade, presettlement processing facility.
But soon after Omgeo’s March 2001 launch, Edelstein left securities processing to satisfy his entrepreneurial itch, first as an independent consultant and then as an adviser to private equity firm Warburg Pincus.
Now he has come full circle: Three-year-old Radianz is a utilitylike enterprise of the sort he knows from his Thomson days. He’s trading up in organizational heft and client base from his Omgeo era: Co-owned by Reuters Group and French telecommunications company Equant, the New Yorkbased company has twice as many employees (900) as Omgeo and 50 percent more users (9,000). “I wish we’d had something like Radianz six or seven years ago,” muses Edelstein. “Back then we had to run our own networks, and we couldn’t do it nearly as well or as cost-effectively.”
