[Contributing
Editor Ben Mattlin wrote the following profiles.]
Thomas Peterffy
CHAIRMAN, Interactive Brokers
No. 23. Last year's rank: 30
"We can prevail in a continuing price war in our industry."
Thomas Peterffy is an efficiency junkie. The 61-year-old founder and chairman of Interactive Brokers, a Greenwich, Connecticut-based
online brokerage that serves institutions and wealthy individuals, insists that markets, though they may be more efficient
than ever, fall short of their potential. "There's still more need for liquidity,
sophisticated dynamic-order routing, long and short position financing and direct access to some foreign markets," he says. That view might surprise the firm's clients, who can open an account in any of eight
major currencies and trade international and domestic equities, options, futures and currencies. Peterffy, who emigrated to the U.S. from Hungary in 1965, founded Interactive's predecessor, electronic
trading firm Timber Hill Group, in 1982. Today, Interactive handles 500,000 transactions
daily, on average, a 25 percent increase from the 2004 level. The firm has an
especially high volume of options and futures trades. With its 500-strong workforce
concentrated in Greenwich but also spread among offices in Chicago; Hong Kong; London; Montreal; Sydney, Australia; and Zug,
Switzerland, the firm generated revenue of more than $2 million per employee last year--more than $1 billion in all--half
of which represented pretax profits. Productivity, says Peterffy, who owns 84
percent of Interactive, is the reason it will continue to win the brokerage price war.
Jane Wheeler
SENIOR MANAGING DIRECTOR, Evercore Partners
No. 27. Last year's rank: 24
"I try to position a company and articulate the story
it wants to tell potential investors."
In July, just
a few weeks after joining Evercore Partners, a New York-based boutique advisory and private equity firm, from Morgan Stanley,
Jane Wheeler counseled E*Trade Financial Corp. (see Mitchell Caplan, No. 9) on both its $700 million purchase of rival HarrisDirect
and its $1.6 billion acquisition of BrownCo, J.P. Morgan Chase & Co.'s online brokerage service. A few months later she advised Hotspot FX, a Watchung, New Jersey-based firm that operates an electronic
foreign-exchange trade execution platform, on its $77.5 million acquisition by Jersey City, New Jersey-based Knight Capital
Group. At Morgan Stanley, where she pioneered a financial
technology investment banking effort, Wheeler, 37, advised the International Securities Exchange (see David Krell, No. 12)
and the IntercontinentalExchange (see Jeffrey Sprecher, No. 29) on their IPOs, valued at $542 million and $416 million, respectively;
SunGard Data Systems on its $11.4 billion LBO, then the second-largest in history; and Reuters on its $1.9 billion sale of
Instinet Group to the Nasdaq Stock Market (see Robert Greifeld, No. 11). Wheeler
says she feels a special connection to the financial technology sector--where she seems to know everyone--but defines her
niche as nothing than global financial services. "Technology will continue to
reshape financial services," she contends.
Randolph Altschuler and Joseph Sigelman
CO-CEOS, OfficeTiger
No. 32. Last year's rank: 35
Altschuler:
"We want people to come to us because we're better."
Since former
investment bankers Randolph Altschuler and Joseph Sigelman, both 35, launched OfficeTiger in 1999, the company has doubled
revenue every year--reaching $100 million in 2005. It sells "judgment-driven
professional services," in the words of Madras, India-based Sigelman, a Harvard MBA like his co-CEO, Altschuler. For its investment banking clients, OfficeTiger performs financial analytics, creates pitch books and performs
other desktop publishing jobs. Last year, fueled by a $52 million investment
from venture capital fund Francisco Partners, OfficeTiger expanded its workforce by more than 50 percent, to 3,800--550 of
whom are in the U.S. (most in New York, where Altschuler is based, and a growing number in Salt Lake City), 300 in Europe
and the remainder in India, Sri Lanka and the Philippines. Over time Sigelman
wants OfficeTiger to be known not only as an inexpensive, efficient alternative to in-house work but also as a provider of
expert knowledge and superior processes. Late last year OfficeTiger purchased
MortgageRamp from General Motors Acceptance Corp., giving it entrée into the real estate securities market, a base near Atlanta
and an anticipated 35 percent sales boost. In March, Chicago-based printer RR
Donnelly and Sons Co. said it would acquire OfficeTiger for $250 million.
Susan Peters
CEO,
ESecLending
No.
33. Last year's rank: 38
"We'll continue to lead the way in providing the most
electronically enhanced features possible."
When institutional investors want to lend
securities, more and more are turning to ESecLending for an online auction rather than automatically turning to their customary
custodians. Founded in 2000 and majority-owned by U.K. insurer Old Mutual, the
company auctioned $240 billion in assets last year, a 47 percent jump from 2004's total. More
than 15 institutions use the firm, including multinational portfolio manager Russell Investment Group, with $2.3 trilion in
assets; mutual fund manager Janus Capital Group, with
$148.5 billion in assets; and the $194 billion
California Public Employees’ Retirement System, ESecLending's founding client. "We bring investment
management discipline and technique, including risk modeling and benchmarking, to securities lending," explains CEO Susan
Peters, 54, who joined the Boston-based enterprise in 2001 from Credit Suisse First Boston.
Her goal is to combine the advantages of traditional custodial arrangements, such as comprehensive program administration,
independent oversight of borrowers and indemnification insurance, with the premium returns and guaranteed revenues typical
of principal-borrower structures. International expansion is on the way: "We're
looking at new markets all the time," she says. In March, Boston-based private
equity firm TA Associates said it would buy ESecLending and expand growth by "facilitating commercial introductions."
Robert Slaymaker
CEO, BondDesk Group
No. 30. Last year's rank: 32
"Customers are asking for new compliance tools."
When Robert
Slaymaker, 54, became CEO of BondDesk Group in December 2004, his goal was to make the nation's largest retail fixed-income
online trading platform "more client-focused." The 30-year bond veteran quickly
reorganized management and added several positions he calls "client-facing," increasing staff by 30 percent, to 130 professionals. The result: Revenue at the Mill Valley, California-based firm, owned by a consortium
of 14 brokerages, catapulted 50 percent last year, and operating income more than doubled.
Nearly 20,000 transactions now take place through BondDesk every day, 43 percent more than did a year ago. Brokers and advisers at more than 90 retail brokerage firms access the service on a typical day, viewing
about 26,000 bids and offers. Committed to giving retail advisors easy online
access to institutional markets and information, Slaymaker hopes to make retail fixed-income trading so manageable that clients
will actually trade more often. To that end, BondDesk last year launched MarketView
& Trade Monitor System, an electronic tool kit created to promote best execution by automatically alerting a firm if its
customers’ trades are out of line with prevailing market prices. Slaymaker
says his firm developed the product "by listening to our clients' most pressing regulatory concerns."
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