The 2014 Tech 50: Richard McVey

July 08, 2014

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

Richard McVey

Chairman and Chief Executive Officer

MarketAxess Holdings

Last year: 26

Bond markets have been through cyclical ups and downs since MarketAxess Holdings’ e-trading platform, led by former J.P. Morgan & Co. head of North American fixed-income sales Richard McVey, emerged from that bank’s LabMorgan incubator in 2000. McVey has maintained a steady hand throughout, as chairman and CEO from the beginning and over MarketAxess’ ten years as a publicly traded company, and his vision and patience are being vindicated: MarketAxess is posting record profits ($107 million pretax in 2013, up 20 percent, on $239 million in revenue) and volumes in its high-grade, high-yield and emerging-markets asset classes. “Our credibility reflects ongoing demand for electronic trading in credit,” says the 54-year-old, at a time of “reduced market-making capacity and liquidity in the secondary markets.” MarketAxess, which in the first quarter of 2014 claimed a 13.4 percent share of the U.S. high-grade market, is applying technology and creativity in what McVey terms “a strategy to embrace new ways of trading credit.” It includes an alliance with BlackRock and a set of “all to all” protocols, called Open Trading, that contrasts with the traditional dealer-to-client model. Last year MarketAxess bolstered its European and posttrade services presence with the £25.3 million ($38.5 million) acquisition of Xtrakter from Brussels-based Euroclear.

The 2014 Tech 50