BATS Swoops on Wells to Feed CAT

Market data industry veteran Jeff Wells has left NuPont, the market data and technology product management and marketing consultancy he founded last year (IMD, Dec. 17, 2012), to join BATS Global Markets as technical project manager, where officials say he will be "intimately involved" in major initiatives such as overseeing BATS' proposal to provide the Securities and Exchange Commission-mandated Consolidated Audit Trail (which BATS filed intent to submit last week, along with 30 other potential providers).

Wells, who has moved from his longtime base of St. Louis, Missouri, to BATS' headquarters in Lenaxa, near Kansas City, Kansas, reports to Eric Crampton, global head of software engineering at BATS.

Before founding NuPont last year, Wells spent almost six years as vice president of product marketing at St. Louis-based hardware ticker plant vendor Exegy, after five years as a senior vice president at Reuters America, which he joined in 2001 following its purchase of parts of defunct data vendor Bridge Information Systems, where he spent almost 11 years.

Though no longer affiliated with NuPont, Wells says the team he assembled -- including industry veterans Jerry Brunton, Kerry Hindle, Perry Yee, Tony Moulange, Sebastian Yoon, Renee Jones, Chris Lampropoulos, and Victor Tohux -- will continue to run NuPont without him.

"I was presented with a unique opportunity to join the BATS team and work on some exciting things with great potential, such as the Consolidated Audit Trail project. I have every confidence that the Nupont team will continue to thrive," Wells says.