Industry ‘Advocate' Tom Jordan Wins FISD Lifetime Achievement Award

The Advocate: Tom Jordan, president and chief executive, Jordan & Jordan

Tom Jordan loves a challenge. While managing director for the Americas at Knight-Ridder Financial, he took on the task of transforming a commodities news business in a Telerate-dominated fixed income world. As if that wasn't enough, at the same time he formed industry association FISD to take on the giants of the exchange business.

Jordan started down the market data path at IBM, where he was involved in a joint venture between IBM and consulting firm Monchik-Weber that produced one of the earliest PC-based market data workstations, IMnet, and was joined by Merrill Lynch, which became the main user of the workstation.

When IMnet folded (the technology was partially absorbed by ADP), Jordan moved on to become the MD of Knight-Ridder Financial Americas. This would be one of his biggest challenges. "We were building a financial information business from a commodities business base. Our objective was to expand into fixed income and go up against Telerate,"─all funded by the revenues from its commodities business, says Jordan, adding that the effort "always needed more money."

Meanwhile, Telerate founder Neil Hirsch attended a Futures Industry Association meeting in Florida, where he saw exchanges throwing extravagant parties, funded by fees that the exchanges collected from market data distributors, and complained about it to one of his executives, Dick Cowles, who got together with Jordan. The two─along with Carl Valenti from Dow Jones─went on to found and co-chair what is now the Software and Information Industry Association's FISD. "Dow Jones had the IIA membership, so we tied in with them. We put pressure on the exchanges," Jordan says.

This worked to a point, but they decided that instead of railing against exchanges, they should start a meaningful dialogue. The FISD today remains an active group that provides an open forum for its members-exchanges, data vendors and end-users to discuss the distribution, management and use of market data.

For good measure, Jordan co-founded another organization─the Financial Information Forum─in 1991 with Leo McBlain to help deal with the increasingly technical issues around market data. "The biggest changes in the business are the volumes of data and the speed at which they are coming," he says.

Jordan's eponymous consulting business, Jordan & Jordan, not only administers the FIF and FIX Protocol, but also provides management consulting and solutions for all of the market data and technology challenges he has grappled with himself, and more.