Speakers
Stuart Adams
EMEA Regional Director
FIX Protocol Organization
Stuart Adams has been the FIX Protocol EMEA Regional Director since March 2009. Working closely with members, exchanges, ECNs and regulators across the region, Mr. Adams is responsible for building stronger relationships with this market sector and generating a greater understanding of how the FIX Protocol may be used to increase market efficiency. Mr. Adams has worked in the financial technology sector for more than 20 years, most recently as Head of European Operations at Portware, where he was responsible for setting up the firm’s London office and developing senior industry relationships to establish the business in Europe. Prior to this, Mr. Adams undertook a number of different assignments including the position of Managing Director of AKJ, a technology solutions provider for the hedge fund and asset management community, SEO of Brut ECN Europe and Institutional Sales Director for Instinet Global Services. In addition to his current position at FPL, Mr. Adams continues to work as an independent consultant within the financial services industry.
Valerie Bannert-Thurner, PhD
Executive Director
FTEN Europe
Valerie is Executive Director of FTEN’s European operations. Valerie is responsible for adapting FTEN’s business model to the European trading community, establishing strategic business and technology partnering arrangements, identifying and championing new requirements into product development, and increasing FTEN’s leadership and quality of service across Europe.
Prior to joining FTEN, Valerie served as European Managing Director for Skyler Inc. While at Skyler, she was in charge of developing the business model, strategic partnerships, technology licensing, product positioning, and marketing, including public relations, where she established Skyler as an industry thought leader. Prior to Skyler, Valerie authored articles on finance and technology, published a book on strategic acquisition management, lectured at Cambridge University and the University of California, and spoke at several Industry conferences worldwide.
Valerie brings entrepreneurial and leadership skills along with vast experience in strategic alliances to deliver innovative, jointly developed, solutions to market. She has worked across many continents and cultures.
She has a B.S.M.E., M.S. and Ph.D. in Strategic Management from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, ETH Zurich.
Xavier Bellouard
Managing Director
QuartetFS
Xavier Bellouard has two decades of experience in building, marketing and distributing Capital Market trading systems. A co-founder of Quotient SA in 1989, Xavier was also a key player in the development of Summit Systems in Europe. Xavier then started and managed Summit Systems in London from 1997 to 2005. Xavier has an MSc from Ecole Centrale Lille.
John Best
Principal Consultant
Kendale Systems and Services
John is a well known Market Data industry expert with over 20 years experience. He is
renowned for insightful commentary and a deep understanding of Market Data systems
and vendors. After graduating John took a post as Junior Lecturer and Research Assistant
in the Computing Dept of Kings College London. John subsequently moved into the
Financial Markets arena, his experience includes a 6 year stint at Salomon Brothers,
gaining responsibility for networks and dealing rooms across Europe and 6 years with
Dow Jones Telerate where he undertook presales support and product management for
the Trading Room Systems division. He then moved back to the client environment
with West LB, developing a range of systems utilizing market data including Real Time
Market Risk Management and a Virtual Dealing Room Systems linking multiple offices
and functions.
John has been working as an independent consultant for the last 8 years
working primarily with banks and brokers getting the best from their investment in
market data systems and technology. He also counts many vendors as clients who use
his consulting expertise and resources to assist with their system testing and support.
Darshan Chandarana
Director, Financial Services Middleware, EMEA
Oracle
Darshan Chandarana is a director in Oracle’s Middleware Solutions Specialists Group in EMEA, focusing on product strategy, development & solutions specifically for Financial Services. He joined Oracle June 2008, having previously worked at BEA, where he headed up the financial services product strategy team in London. He has also worked at Sybase, with a focus on Capital Markets. Darshan has also worked at Bank of America and Merrill Lynch.
Dave Clare
Regional Vice President, EMEA
Solace Systems
David has worked in middleware companies for over 15 years from Reuters, to Progress Software/Sonic, then the IBM WebSphere business unit and latterly Solace Systems where he now runs the EMEA operation. Through this time he has worked in many different market sectors, however, the last 5 years have been focussed almost entirely in the financial services sector.
John Collins
Member
Kinetic Partners LLP
John is a Member of Kinetic-Partners, a global boutique financial services advisory firm. He leads the risk consulting practice, covering traded risk, risk management, and risk technology. John has 20 years capital markets experience and has worked at Swiss Re, Citi and Morgan Stanley in front office, risk and technology. He holds the TRIUM Global Executive MBA.
Combie Cryan
Head of Business Development – Global Data Products
NYSE Technologies
As head of business development, as well as improving existing offerings and client relationships, Combie is responsible for growing new products, services and customers for NYSE Euronext’s expanding range of data and data technology solutions. His key focus is on core Euronext cash equities, indices and LIFFE derivatives data franchises and includes relationship building with sell side, buy side, data vendors, other venues and regulators.
Prior to this, Combie created and ran the New Zealand Exchange’s ‘high growth’ business units, which including cash equities market data and information, indices, investor relations services, fund and agri-commodities analytics and Australasia’s largest ETF fund management business.
Combie has spent his career in the global capital markets - as a fixed income funding analyst at Goldman Sachs International in London plus a variety of positions at Cantor Fitzgerald in London , ABN Amro Futures in Sydney and for many years at the London Stock Exchange. This background, including the invaluable experience of running his own fledgling businesses, has enabled Combie to develop a strong appreciation of the needs of growth focused organisations and especially of their clients.
Andrew Delaney
President, Editor-in-Chief
A-Team Group
Andrew Delaney is A-Team’s president & editor-in-chief, based in London and New York. He has been involved in information gathering and dissemination around financial markets IT since 1987. He joined A-Team in 2002 to spearhead the company’s publishing activities and is responsible for A-Team’s offerings in the pre-trade information and electronic transactions areas.
Before joining A-Team, Andrew spent three years launching a financial information distribution platform aimed at the off-trading-floor marketplace. Prior to that he spent 11 years at Waters Information Services in a variety of senior roles including editor-in-chief, senior vice president of global sales, and general manager of North American operations. He also spent time with Banking Technology magazine in London and The Wall Street Journal in Brussels.
Bradley Duke
Managing Director
Knight Direct Europe
Bradley Duke is a Managing Director at Knight Capital Europe Ltd. and Head of Knight Direct in Europe. Knight Direct is Knight’s agency direct market access (DMA), smart order execution and algorithmic trading business. Mr. Duke joined Knight in July 2008 from Jefferies where he was Senior Vice President and Head of Electronic Trading Services at Jefferies International Limited based in London.
Mr. Duke joined Helfant Group, Inc. based in New York City in 2000, prior to the firm’s acquisition by Jefferies in 2001. He was Vice President, Business Development for Jefferies Execution Services in New York before taking on the electronic trading services role in Paris and then London. Mr. Duke also has held various sales, marketing and business analysis positions at technology firms in the U.S. and Europe.
Mr. Duke has a certificate in Business-to-Business Marketing Strategy from Harvard Business School, an MBA from Vrije Universiteit Brussels and a BA in Economics from the University of Cape Town.
Peter Duffy
CTO
Sumerian
Peter, who joined Sumerian in 2002, is responsible for managing the technical aspects of Sumerian’s analytical solutions, identifying innovations and new analysis techniques which may evolve into future Sumerian service offerings. He is also responsible for developing our collaborative links with academic institutions.
Prior to joining Sumerian, Peter was a Technical Leader with Cisco Systems in California, where he worked with large service provider clients and Cisco partners to define network and service management solutions. Peter has over 20 years’ experience in the industry, spanning research, product development, service management and business analysis.
Bill Fenick
European Business Manager for Real Time Information
Thomson Reuters
Bill Fenick is the European Business Manager for Real Time Information at Thomson Reuters.
Bill joined Thomson Reuters in May 2000 as Global Technology Manager and has over fifteen years’ experience within Financial Services. Bill currently holds responsibility for real-time solutions including low-latency, consolidated and hosted.
Previously, Bill worked at Tibco Inc as a technical consultant.
Bill holds a PhD from the University of Vienna, BA from University of California, Los Angeles and a MA from Webster University.
Charles Ferland
Vice President and General Manager, Europe, Middle East & Africa
BLADE Network Technologies
Charles Ferland is responsible for BLADE’s Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) sales and support operations, including BLADE’s OEM relationships with partners such as HP, IBM and NEC, as well as direct sales through value added resellers and distributors. Under Charles’ management, the EMEA region accounts for 40% of the company’s business. Charles has over a decade of experience in IT, networking, data center, network architecture and service provider product management and international sales.
Prior to joining BLADE, Charles led Nortel’s Embedded Switching Business Unit in the EMEA region and had sales, marketing, pre and post sales responsibility for the business in the region. He began his career as a senior network solutions specialist for TELUS, Canada’s second largest telecommunications service provider. Charles holds a B.S. in Mathematics and Computer Sciences from the University of Quebec and an MBA from the University of Wales.
Stephen Ferrando
Partner, Bendigo Partners
CEO, dbConcert
Steve Ferrando has nearly thirty years of experience in Financial Services Information Technology. For the past eight years, Steve has run the software solutions firm that he founded, dbConcert, Inc. In his capacity as CEO of dbConcert, Steve has worked with a wide variety of financial services institutions, from the smallest hedge fund to the largest investment banks. He has been instrumental in helping the firm’s clients improve operational efficiencies, streamline workflows and minimize the possibility of errors while at the same time reducing overall technology expense. Specific projects include the development and deployment of multiple front office trading systems, middle and back office integration, the creation of a fully automated reconciliation platform and data warehouse/business intelligence implementations.
Steve has detailed knowledge of all aspects of the international brokerage, hedge fund, and asset management businesses. Prior to dbConcert, Steve was in charge of international and institutional technology at E*TRADE. In this role he not only had full technology responsibilities for launching and operating E*TRADE Global, he also had business responsibilities for this full electronic, retail cross-border trading platform. Before joining E*TRADE, Stephen was CIO of TIR Securities for seven years.
Markus Fischer
HPC Consultant
Stordis
Markus is an HPC Consultant bringing in twenty years of experience on parallel computers and distributed systems. His current focus is on high speed networks and protocols including traditional network stacks. He has been involved in implementing portable message passing systems on a variety of networks. Markus holds a PhD in Computer Science.
Steve Grob
Director of Group Strategy
Fidessa
Steve is responsible for Fidessa’s strategic development. This includes the development of new geographic markets and strategic partnerships and driving new industry initiatives.
As part of this Steve heads up the firm’s strategy in response to the fragmentation of the equities trading landscape, managing the firm’s initiatives in conjunction with both the established exchanges and the new and emerging alternative liquidity venues and dark pools. Steve has also played a significant part in bringing the Fidessa Fragmentation Index (FFI) and the Fragulator® to the wider trading community. He provides a regular commentary on the issues surrounding fragmentation of the markets on the community forum that was launched at the end of 2008.
On joining Fidessa in 2004 Steve led the development of the company’s multi-asset trading capabilities. For four years, he worked to extend the core strengths of the Fidessa platform and ensure that all enhancements support an asset agnostic architecture to deliver multi- and cross-asset trading across its product lines globally.
Prior to joining Fidessa Steve was the founder and CEO of specialist derivatives software house Future Dynamics which was one of the companies at the vanguard of the shift from open outcry to screen based trading in world derivatives markets. This business grew to be one of the major facilitators of workflow based derivatives trading and was eventually sold in 2004.
Amir Halfon
Senior Director, Technology
Oracle Financial Services
Amir Halfon is Senior Director of Technology at Oracle’s Financial Services Global Business Unit. In this role he represents Oracle to the industry and advises customers and ISVs on harnessing technology to target top-of-mind concerns such as low latency trading, high performance analytics and hybrid cloud computing.
Amir came to Oracle via the Sun acquisition, where he was CTO for Global Financial Services. At Sun Amir held several other field and engineering positions, including Senior Architect with Sun’s Cloud Computing division, Senior Java Architect with the Sun Java Center, and Solutions Architect with Sun’s Enterprise Web Services group.
David Hann
Managing Director, EMEA
ACTIV Financial Systems
David Hann joined ACTIV Financial as managing director, Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA), in 2009 to support the company’s global expansion and meet ongoing customer and market requirements. Prior to his role at ACTIV, he served as general manager, EMEA, at Interactive Data. Earlier in his career he held sales director positions at Interactive Data and Moneyline Telerate.
Alex Heneveld
Co-Founder & Chief Technology Officer
Cloudsoft
Alex brings twenty years experience designing software solutions in the enterprise, start-up, and academic sectors. Most recently Alex was with Enigmatec Corporation where he led the development of what is now the Monterey® Middleware Platform™. Previous to that, he founded PocketWatch Systems, commercialising results from his doctoral research.
Alex holds a PhD (Informatics) and an MSc (Cognitive Science) from the University of Edinburgh and an AB (Mathematics) from Princeton University. Alex was both a USA Today Academic All-Star and a Marshall Scholar.
Steve Hughes
Cloud Services Specialist
Colt
Steve Hughes joined Colt in 2008 as part of the launch team for their cloud service platform. Responsible for defining the new services portfolio and requirements, he has worked closely with customers throughout Europe in bringing the service to market.
During his career, Steve has been involved in the launch of over 15 new products in the managed services, enterprise integration and business software development areas. He has set up his own on-line business which he successfully sold to BT; was Head of Messaging and Transaction Services at BT; and grew several business software start-ups in the fields of payments, supply chain and situation management.
Steve has a BSc. in Electronics from the University of Salford, and an Open Business School MBA.
Rustam Lam
Director, Global Head of Marketing
RealTick
Rustam Lam joined Townsend Analytics RealTick® in 2003 and is currently Global Head of Marketing for RealTick®, the electronic trading industry’s premier global, broker neutral, multi-asset Execution Management System. Rustam has over 20 years of experience spanning trading, vendor businesses and electronic brokerage. Prior to joining RealTick® Rustam held a number of senior positions at Thomson Reuters and Instinet, where his responsibilities included the development, sales and marketing of a range of financial information products and brokerage business for the sell side, institutional and corporate market.
Todd Montgomery
VP of Architecture, Messaging Business Unit
29West-Infomatica
Todd L. Montgomery is Vice President of Architecture for the Messaging Business Unit of 29West, now part of Informatica. As the chief architect of Informatica’s Messaging Business Unit, Todd is responsible for the design and implementation of the Ultra Messaging product family which has over 150 production deployments within the financial services sector. In the past, Todd has held architecture positions at TIBCO and Talarian as well as lecture positions at West Virginia University, contributed to the IETF, and performed research for NASA in various software fields. With a deep background in messaging systems, reliable multicast, network security, congestion control, and software assurance, Todd brings a unique perspective tempered by 20 years of practical development experience.
Tony Moulange
Senior Business Development Manager
Colt Technology Services
Tony joined Colt as Senior Business Development Manager in July 2009 with responsibility for the financial services vertical. He is working with global clients and liquidity pools on their low latency and algorithmic trading infrastructure.
He has extensive experience of IT, trading systems and real time market data within the finance sector, having worked with the investment banking and brokerage arms of Merrill Lynch, Smith New Court, Citi and HSBC. Tony is a former Chair of both the UK and European Information Provider User Groups (IPUG).
Ben Newton
Associate Partner
Citihub
With over 10 years of Investment Banking experience Ben has been driving technology hard. Starting out deep in the software labs of IBM, Ben gradually stepped into the light of client facing work, firstly as a consultant then in pre-sales. Having reached the heights of global leadership in low latency and front office tech, Ben is well placed to drive quality up and latency down.
Mark Palmer
CEO
StreamBase Systems
Mark Palmer is the Chief Executive Officer at StreamBase Systems, Inc.
He is a long time advocate of the growing role of CEP and has published over 30 articles on the application of CEP to real world problems and spoken at numerous industry events. In 2005 he won an InfoWorld Innovator award and was named to the InfoWorld Media Group’s Innovators Hall of Fame for his work in event processing.
Prior to joining StreamBase, Mark worked for Progress Software where he led that company’s acquisition of Apama (another CEP Market leader) and then led the Apama business unit as general manager. Previous roles include Director of Product Management at IONA Technologies, where he led the development of the Artix enterprise service bus (ESB). In 1998, he co-founded YouthStream Media Networks and served as its CTO and CIO, overseeing the growth of the company from 0 to 400 people. YouthStream was acquired by Alloy, Inc. (NASDAQ: ALLY) in 2002. Before then, as a principal consultant with Object Design, Inc., Mark was involved in the architecture, development and design of some of the world’s largest distributed systems from 1992 to 1998, including GE, Cabletron, Fidelity Investments and Lucent Technologies. Mark holds a Bachelor of Science in Engineering degree in computer science from the University of Connecticut.
Mark Powers
Global Head of Sales and Marketing
Lime Brokerage
Mark joined Lime Brokerage from Citigroup where he was a managing member of Citigroup’s Global Electronic Execution team. During his tenure at Citi, Mark was Head of the Relationship Management Group, and held a variety of sales management and senior production roles focusing on the sale of their trading platform to the institutional hedge fund and investment management community.
Prior to joining Citi, Mark worked at Instinet as a senior member of the institutional electronic execution team, co-managing the electronic trading desk after joining from the sales team at Lynch, Jones, and Ryan. Mark began his career in sales at Deutsche Bank Securities in New York.
Mark holds both a JD and an MBA from Villanova University, and a BA from the University of Delaware.
Peter Randall
CEO
Equiduct
Peter Randall is the Chief Executive of Equiduct Systems Ltd. Peter started his career in investment research and was named a leading analyst by Euromoney when he was at James Capel. He spent an extended time in Asia with the joint venture between Sanford Bernstein and James Capel where he was responsible for quantitative sales, after this he became the MD of Thamesway and then CEO of Instinet in Asia. Peter relocated to Instinet Europe in 2005 and was responsible for delivering the MiFID compliant Chi-X platform. He latterly served as CEO of Chi-X Europe Limited. Peter has been on a number of regulatory committees and was educated at the London School of Economics and the University of Oxford.
Alexis Richardson
Senior Director
VMware SpringSource
Alexis is a Senior Director at VMware SpringSource. Previously he was the CEO of Rabbit Technologies Ltd, and a founder of RabbitMQ. The company was acquired by VMware in April 2010.
Overall, his commercial experience is very broad covering all areas of business and operations for the past ten years leading software companies following a career on Wall St.
Previously he was the founder and MD for Bus.Dev. of CohesiveFT, the cloud computing company. Alexis was also CEO and co-founder of MetaLogic, a middleware company specializing in high throughput caching and transaction management products for Fortune 1000 corporations. Alexis has also consulted to software companies in an acting CTO or CEO capacity, towards sales and exit.
Alexis currently plays a leading role in both the cloud and messaging communities. He is co-founder of the successful CloudCamp conferences; and co-chair of the OGF Open Cloud Computing Interface - a community alternative to DMTF. Through RabbitMQ he contributes leadership to AMQP, and other open messaging standards such as Google’s PSHB, and XMPP.
Raymond Russell
CTO and Co-Founder
Corvil
Raymond is one of Corvil’s founders and co-inventor of its core technology. Since joining Corvil in 2000 as Chief Technology Officer, Raymond has played an instrumental role in building a strong product suite around the core Corvil technology. As CTO, Raymond is focused on driving continued advancement and fulfillment of Corvil’s innovations with a focus on applications and infrastructure in capital markets.
Steve Shine
Executive Vice President, Worldwide Operations
Ingres
Steve Shine serves as executive vice president of worldwide operations. In this role he is responsible for our global sales force and for the sale and delivery of our consulting services.
Steve comes to Ingres from Sybase where he was senior vice president and general manager for EMEA, overseeing all operational, sales, financial and human resources in the region for the past three years. While at Sybase, he achieved more than 200 million in revenue and managed 500 employees, charting over 50 percent growth in the Business Intelligence market for Sybase.
Prior to Sybase, Steve was at Canadian-based Geac Computer Corporation for ten successful years, helping to successfully turn around two major global divisions for the ERP firm.
Steve holds a degree in physics from Manchester University.
Peter Simpson
SVP, Research and Development
Panopticon
Peter Simpson is Panopticon’s SVP Research & Development. He is responsible for all development, pre-sales, support and consulting activities. Peter held Content, Product Management and Implementation roles at Instant Information before joining Panopticon in 2007.
Before that, he held several senior positions with HSBC Global Banking and Markets, including Global Distribution Manager for Global Research and E-commerce Strategist.
Peter holds a Master of Science degree in Information Systems Engineering and a Bachelor of Science degree in Physics with Space Science & Technology.
Asaf Somekh
Vice President of Marketing
Voltaire
Asaf Somekh has served as Vice President of Marketing since January 2009. Previously, from 2006 to 2008, Mr. Somekh served as Vice President of Strategic Alliances and from 2001 to 2005 as Director of Marketing. Prior to joining Voltaire, from 1997 to 2000, Mr. Somekh was Director of Software Development at Nexus Telocation Ltd. a provider of location based services. From 1994 to 1997, Mr. Somekh served as Software Manager at Aptel Ltd. a provider of wireless messaging solutions. From 1989 to 1993, Mr. Somekh served as IT Manager at Ernst & Young Israel.
Mr. Somekh holds a B.Sc. in Computer Engineering from The Technion, Israel Institute of Technology and an M.B.A. from IMD in Lausanne, Switzerland.
Simon Tweddle
Risk Management COO
Mizuho International
Simon is currently the Risk Management COO at Mizuho International plc, previously he was the Debt Markets COO. Before joining Mizuho in 2006 he was Global Head of Market Risk Engineering at Barclays Capital. He joined Barclays in 2001 from Citigroup where he was Head of Market Risk Control for Europe. Simon spent the early part of his career at Svenska Handelsbanken as a Trader, then moved to become Head of Treasury Operations.
Adrian Williams
Business Development Director
Sybase UK
Adrian manages the EMEA Business Development team at Sybase. Adrian works with key customers and partners to identify, validate and develop industry solutions based on Sybase technology, combining world class technology with domain experts to solve business and technology challenges.
Henry Young
Founder and Director
TS-Associates
Henry Young is a founding director of Trading Systems Associates plc (TS-Associates), a firm that specialises in monitoring and analysis of networks and real time financial middleware products. TS-Associates’ “TipOff” middleware analysis appliance leverages both FPGA and ASIC based hardware acceleration techniques in order to achieve real time capture, decode and analysis of 1GE and 10GE data flows. With a built in high resolution hardware based time stamping capability, TipOff is leading the charge into high resolution passive latency monitoring of direct exchange feed and transaction infrastructures.
Prior to founding TS-Associates in 1999, Henry was a roving industry consultant splitting his time between London and New York with engagements for a variety of banks and exchanges. Henry led the team at MSB Consultants that, in the mid 90s, developed the RT Emulator – a product that delivered Reuters Terminal functionality integrated with six of the then available market data platforms.
Henry holds an MSc in Computing from Imperial College and a BSc in Physics & Electronics from Edinburgh University.
