Virtu Expands Executive Team

Virtu Financial has announced new executive hires and changes to its leadership team. Brett Fairclough has been promoted to chief operating officer and global head of business development; Alex Ioffe will join the company as chief financial officer effective September 30, 2019; and Marc Rosenthal joins the executive team from Morgan Stanley’s equity division as executive vice president of strategy and corporate development.

CLS Names Masami Johnstone as Head of Information Services

CLS, a market infrastructure group delivering settlement, processing and data solutions, has named Masami Johnstone as head of information services. Masami joins CLS from Euronext, where she was head of buy-side sales responsible for advanced data sales and development. Previously she was head of institutional quant research. At CLS, she will be responsible for the ongoing development of CLS’s data business and building out the company’s analytical capability, which is based on a large single source of FX-executed trade data.

CloudMargin Names Karl Wyborn Global Head of Business Development

CloudMargin, creator of a collateral and margin management solution native to the cloud, has named Karl Wyborn to the new role of global head of business development. This is a promotion for Wyborn, who has extensive experience of collateral management and has served as CloudMargin’s global head of sales for nearly four years. He will continue to report to Stuart Connolly, CloudMargin CEO based in the London headquarters, and assumes responsibility for driving the firm’s business development strategies to support revenue growth opportunities, and engaging with partners, regulators, industry participants and other technology vendors.

Scope Markets Hires New Head of Compliance

Eliza Eliadou has joined Scope Markets, an online institutional trading platform, as its Group Head of Compliance. Eliadou joins from London Capital Group, where she worked for two years starting in 2017. She was formerly with global brokerage firm easyMarkets.

Scope Markets is in a period of expansion, in July teaming up with Gold-i, a trading systems integration specialist for the ?financial services ?industry, to offer liquidity to Gold-i’s client base. Earlier this year, the firm also announced a partnership with Hong Kong-based m-FINANCE to expand its Asian footprint.

Templum Appoints Brian Nadzan as Chief Technology Officer

Templum, a FinTech company providing a marketplace for the primary issuance and secondary trading of alternative assets as smart securities, has appointed former AlphaPoint, TradingScreen, Lava Trading, and Bloomberg executive Brian Nadzan as chief technology officer. In this new role, Nadzan will oversee the connectivity of Templum’s technology into financial services firms, as well as integration with a range of partners. He will also manage Templum’s technology team.

ULTUMUS Hires Ex-Legal and General Exec to Head Up Index Operations

ULTUMUS, a provider of data creation, management and distribution services for index and ETF products, has hired Daniel Hodgetts as index operations head. Hodgetts will lead the global index and ETF support team based in London and Singapore, and assist in the support of key clients as ULTUMUS rolls out its managed data service to a growing number of asset managers, investments banks and exchanges. He joins from Legal and General, where he was primary support lead for key index benchmark providers and aggregators. He has previously held positions at FTSE Russell and S&P.

Itiviti Names Head of Customer Success

Itiviti has appointed Gavin Welsh to the new role of executive vice president, head of customer success. Welsh will define and drive Itiviti’s customer strategy, overseeing customer relations and the company’s support offerings, and reporting to Itiviti CEO Rob Mackay. Welsh joins Itiviti with more than 25 years’ experience of fintech customer support, most recently as global head of client coverage at TradingScreen.

First Derivatives Founder Brian Conlon Dies

Brian Conlon, the Northern Irish founder and CEO of the £1 billion+ FinTech firm First Derivatives, lost his battle with cancer on July 28, 2019 at the age of 53. Conlon started at KPMG and worked briefly at Morgan Stanley and software firm Sunguard before starting First Derivatives. He listed the company in 2002 but remained its major shareholder. The firm began its search for a new CEO in May, when Conlon was first diagnosed. The search is ongoing.

Coleman Research Creates New Role for Isaac Karaev

Coleman Research has appointed entrepreneur Isaak Karaev to the newly created role of Executive Chairman. Most recently, Karaev founded and successfully exited InfoNgen, one of the first AI search engines for the financial services community. Karaev was also the founder, Chairman and CEO of Multex, a digital network to aggregate and distribute financial research documents for investment professionals and individual investors. The appointment heralds a new focus on digital strategy following the firm’s launch of a new SaaS platform in 2018.

Rapid Addition Taps Former TR Enterprise Chief Powell as CEO

High-performance trading technology supplier Rapid Addition has named Mike Powell CEO, reporting to Executive Chairman and FIX guru Kevin Houstoun. Powell is former managing director for the enterprise division of Thomson Reuters, now known as Refinitiv, responsible for the company’s core data feed and platform business under the Elektron brand. Powell has been working as a consultant and advisor since leaving TR in 2017. At Rapid Addition, he will spearhead the company’s initiatives in providing high-performance enterprise solutions for electronic trading using FIX/FAST and FPGA technologies. Says Houston: “We see significant opportunity in helping customers evolve their trading infrastructure as regulation continues to push the industry towards an increasingly electronic and transparent world.”