The 2014 Tech 50: David Gershon

July 08, 2014

< The 2014 Tech 50: Moving Out of the Lab and Into the Cloud

David Gershon

Chairman and Chief Executive Officer

SuperDerivatives

Last year: 32

SuperDerivatives has come a long way in the 14 years since David Gershon, a physicist and an expert in exotic foreign exchange options, left Barclays Capital to develop a web-based valuation service. It may seem modest in retrospect, but price transparency in forex options, the first asset class he tackled, was a disruptive innovation that London-based SuperDerivatives would subsequently replicate in interest rate and commodity products on its journey to becoming a derivatives-oriented data, technology and trading platform positioned as a rival to none other than Bloomberg. Certainly not alone among sellers of technology and services to financial firms, Gershon, 49, is keenly aware of the industry’s “continuous path to cost-cutting” since the crisis of 2008. “Bloomberg terminals for everybody is really a luxury they can’t afford,” Gershon reasons. He predicts that with his and others’ cloud-based technology providing a lower-cost, efficient data-delivery alternative, “five years from now, the landscape of market data terminals will be dramatically different.” SuperDerivatives’ DGX market data platform has surpassed 100,000 users, and an extension announced last October, DGX Direct, streams real-time information on cash and derivatives instruments straight into users’ systems. In May the company’s multibank, multiasset trade execution platform, SDeX, went live, with at least 30 banks committed to providing prices.

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