Currently ranked: 30
Previously ranked: 23
Along with other businesses within what was, before the start of 2017, interdealer brokerage ICAP, Euclid Opportunities has rebranded. The former ICAP is now NEX Group; its post-trade risk and information services division (PTRI) became NEX Optimisation; and reporting to the latter’s CEO, Ken Pigaga, is Steve Gibson, CEO of NEX Opportunities, the firm’s strategic investment arm and nurturer to start-ups.
Corporate venture capital investing was not a new idea when Gibson founded Euclid in 2011, but the initiative was unique in its focus on middle- and back-office functions that paralleled PTRI’s interests and that were beginning to attract entrepreneurial attention. Gibson stresses the importance of Opportunities’ alignment with NEX Group, which defines itself as a financial technology company serving the trading life cycle from beginning to end.
As of mid-October, Opportunities’ active portfolio consisted of Duco (which uses machine learning in the automation of reconciliations and other data control processes), AcadiaSoft (a joint venture collateral management hub), Axoni and Digital Asset Holdings (both of which offer distributed ledger technology), Cloud9 Technologies (a trading communications and collaboration system), OpenFin (which creates desktop technology solutions), OpenGamma (which provides derivatives risk analytics), and RSRCHXchange (a research aggregator and marketplace for meeting MiFID II unbundling requirements).
Says Gibson, who earlier in his career worked for Calypso Technology, Ipreo, and Siebel Systems, “We are focused on the capital markets space, where the problems we are solving, such as collateral processing, are very different from issues such as digital payments.”