< The 2015 Tech 50: Racers to the Edge

When mandatory electronic swaps trading began in earnest early last year, there were more than 20 swap execution facilities, venues that emerged to meet postcrisis transparency and clearing requirements. Today there are fewer than ten; most are run by brokerages like ICAP that historically dominated swaps trading or by electronic execution titans like Bloomberg and Tradeweb Markets. An exception is trueEX Group, which billed itself as “the first Dodd-Frank-compliant swaps exchange” in September 2012, when it obtained Designated Contract Market status for interest rate swaps from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. SEF approval came a year later, and today the 45-employee New York firm, founded by Sunil Hirani, captures 5.7 percent of overall SEF volume and as much as 15 percent of the Bloomberg- and Tradeweb-dominated half of the market that deals directly with the buy side. “We’re providing choice to consumers in a market that’s dominated by incumbents,” says CEO Hirani, a onetime Lockheed software engineer who came out of Deutsche Bank’s derivatives group in the late 1990s to co-found the pioneering credit default swaps platform Creditex Group, which Intercontinental Exchange bought in 2008 for $513 million. The 48-year-old attributes trueEX’s success to its focus on nondollar, nonstandard swaps. “The world is episodic; the world is custom — you need to give people flexibility,” he says. Last year Hirani and Donald Wilson, CEO of Chicago-based DRW Trading Group, co-founded Digital Asset Holdings, which in March named former JPMorgan Chase & Co. executive Blythe Masters as CEO to lead its development of blockchain technology for transaction settlements. The two ventures “complement each other,” Hirani says, and can do much to “enhance the security, speed and efficiency” of derivatives trading.

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The 2015 Tech 50

1. Jeffrey Sprecher Intercontinental Exchange 2. Catherine Bessant Bank of America Corp. Finding, Applying for, and Winning Grant Funding: Tips for Nonprofits Sponsored by Fidelity Investments April 29, 2025 3. Phupinder Gill CME Group 4. Lance Uggla Markit 5. Robert Goldstein BlackRock

6. Shawn Edwards & Vlad Kliatchko Bloomberg 7. R. Martin Chavez Goldman Sachs Group 8. Deborah Hopkins Citi Ventures 9. Stephen Neff Fidelity Investments 10. Adena Friedman Nasdaq OMX Group

11. David Craig Thomson Reuters 12. Daniel Coleman KCG Holdings 13. Michael Spencer ICAP 14. Michael Bodson Depository Trust & Clearing Corp. 15. Charles Li Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing

16. Chris Concannon BATS Global Markets 17. Christopher Perretta State Street Corp. 18. Antoine Shagoury London Stock Exchange Group 19. Kevin Rhein Wells Fargo & Co. 20. Neil Katz D.E. Shaw & Co.

21. Lee Olesky Tradeweb Markets 22. Richard McVey MarketAxess Holdings 23. Seth Merrin Liquidnet Holdings 24. Robert Alexander Capital One Financial Corp. 25. Frank Bisignano First Data Corp.

26. John Marcante Vanguard Group 27. Joseph Squeri Citadel 28. Lou Eccleston TMX Group 29. Claude Honegger Credit Suisse 30. Chris Corrado MSCI

31. David Gledhill DBS Bank 32. John Bates Software AG 33. Michael Cooper BT Radianz 34. Gary Scholten Principal Financial Group 35. Sunil Hirani trueEX Group

36. Hauke Stars Deutsche BÖrse 37. Brian Conlon First Derivatives 38. Jim Minnick eVestment 39. Lars Seier Christensen & Kim Fournais 40. Tyler Kim MaplesFS

41. Jim McGuire Charles Schwab Corp. 42. Steven O'Hanlon Numerix 43. Sebastián Ceria Axioma 44. Yasuki Okai NRI Holdings America 45. Stephane Dubois Xignite

46. Mazy Dar OpenFin 47. Brian Sentance Xenomorph Software 48. Mas Nakachi OpenGamma 49. John Lehner BNY Mellon Technology Solutions Group 50. Jock Percy Perseus