Happy Independence Day from America! A quick book recommendation: “A Magnificent Catastrophe: The Tumultuous Election of 1800, America’s First Presidential Campaign,” by Edward Larson.

While not really about the Revolutionary War, this is a fascinating story about the turn-of-the-century election after George Washington essentially made it clear that he would not become king, and the (often ugly) battle that unfolded between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams in the campaign to be President No. 2. It also contains some great stories about Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr (since many of y’all are obsessed with That Play), as well as many other stories about the founding fathers.

Read it—you’ll thank me later. Anyway, let’s get to it.

(You can find previous Waters Wraps here.)

Rebirth and reimagining

In late March, it was announced that Michael Chin would assume the role of CEO at Broadway Technology. A couple of weeks later, Symphony named Brad Levy as its new CEO. The reasons for their placements are, of course, different, but Chin and Levy are in similar positions.

Chin finds himself at the helm of a company reborn, even if its skin and skeleton appear largely the same, sans an appendage or two. (Click here to read about what has become of Broadway Technology after it was acquired—and then spun out of—Ion Group.) For our purposes here, what you need to know is that Broadway today is fully independent from Ion, and there isn’t a non-compete; the battle between the fixed-income technology providers is as contentious as ever. And while Chin—who joined the company from Refinitiv—is now running the show, previous CEO and co-founder, Tyler Moeller, is still with the team, serving as Broadway’s chief innovation officer.

Levy, on the other hand, joined Symphony last year, and though some speculated he might one day replace the founding CEO, David Gurle, that day came sooner than some might’ve thought. (You can click here if you want to read about Levy’s plans for the company going forward.) Levy, who spent almost 18 years at Goldman Sachs before serving eight years at Markit (and then IHS Markit), is a storied capital markets professional. He’s now going to be tasked with refocusing Symphony on the specific front-to-back workflow needs of the Wall Street giants that have funded the company.

What Chin and Levy have in common—most recently, at least—is being thrown into companies with experience in navigating turmoil.

When Ion acquired Broadway, it sent shivers down the spines of some fixed-income market participants. After the UK’s Competition & Markets Authority forced Ion to spin out the Broadway fixed-income franchise—while keeping the foreign exchange (FX) piece—Broadway welcomed a fresh start.

When I spoke with Chin and Eitan Reich, Broadway’s chief architect, the impression I got was that the vendor is going to look to further open up its platform so it can connect to other fixed-income platforms and data sources. While the vendor has always had a managed service component and would even white-label some its technology—both of which Chin expects to expand—the execs are tuning into the interoperability push running through the industry.

In the world of fixed income, there’s a lot of talk about fancy new trading platforms that enter the market, promising to bring electronification—and, thus, liquidity—but to me, the greatest challenge facing fixed income isn’t necessarily innovation, but a lack of interoperability between the systems already on the market. Trading platforms have been closed off, or have been gobbled up by Ion, which is a company that hasn’t shown a willingness to play nice with others in the past. Rather than concocting and investing in massive new platforms, such as the infant “Octopus” project headed by Citi and Bank of America, the players in the space can utilize open-source tech, open APIs, and interop containerization tools to build a robust and interconnected ecosystem—no Big Bang changes necessary.

So it would seem to me that’s the direction in which Chin will lead Broadway.

Symphony, conversely, was founded upon interoperability and open source. The vendor is quasi-responsible for the creation of the Fintech Open Source Foundation, or Finos, which grew out of the Symphony Software Foundation.

Over the last few years, I’ve had a fair amount of conversations about Symphony and one common refrain was frustration that the company was losing focus on the capital markets and wasn’t as much of a believer in open source as it once was. As Symphony started flirting with health care and defense workflows, it needed to be more protective of its IP. And while the sell side was buying into Symphony, the buy side really wasn’t having it. So who is the vendor competing against: Bloomberg? Microsoft? Slack? Maybe it’s simply a matter of marketing and communication, but it feels like the vendor can benefit from a branding reset.

And Levy knows all about that type of shift, having overseen IHS Markit’s overhaul of its derivatives nerve center. Levy’s first win at Symphony was the rollout of its know-your-customer (KYC) offering, a topic Levy knows much about also from his time at IHS Markit. And his first big acquisition as CEO of Symphony was the recent addition of Cloud9 Technologies, a savvy trader-voice, communications technology provider that has embraced cloud and natural language processing (NLP), and which has been all about partnering with others in the comms space, most notably IPC.

KYC is an important workflow challenge for capital markets firms. Cloud9 is a capital markets technology company that’s done significant work on interoperability. Going head-to-head with the likes of Bloomberg, Microsoft, and Slack would be tough; there are simply too many different battlefronts. If Symphony can go back to its collaborative roots and be laser-focused on trading workflows, the vendor can maybe keep the promise it laid out in 2014.

Change can be good—even necessary. Yet sometimes, you can disrupt a good thing, or the company culture can change in a drastic (read: bad) way. I, for one, am excited to see what the future holds. It will make for good stories, one way or the other.

Got thoughts on these new versions of Broadway or Symphony? Hit me up: anthony.malakian@infopro-digital.com

And other new CEOs

Before I go, there are a few other changes at the top of influential vendors that I wanted to address, though I have yet to have a chance to talk with these new leaders. Think of this section as more of a simple State of the Union roundup.

First is Trading Technologies. The Chicago-based futures and derivatives trading platform has been led by Rick Lane for the past seven years, having taken on the title of CEO in 2014 after serving two years as TT’s CTO. Lane has since moved over to Citadel, where he’s CTO of core engineering for the investment manager. He is being replaced by Tim Geannopulos.

Geannopulos had worked at TT for 15 years, before leaving as global head of sales in February 2014, which, is when Lane took over as CEO. After that, he went on to co-found AI regtech provider Neurensic, where he served as president. In late 2017, TT acquired “selected assets” from the company. Neurensic was subsequently bought by TT, but after Geannopulos had left to do consulting work. [Editor’s note: This story was updated after learning Geannopulos’s timeline after leaving TT in 2014.]

Anyway, if you’re a regular reader of this column, you know that I find TT to be interesting. First, it’s a company that had a flagship trading platform that was one of those legacy, monolithic behemoths (X_Trader), and thus, it wasn’t cloud-friendly. Under Lane, they decided to rip off the Band-Aid and migrate to a software-as-a-service model via its new TT trading platform. It then built a new infrastructure-as-a-service offering. Even more ambitious, it is trying to build a platform that provides a free view of futures order flow for TT platform users. And even though I don’t care about crypto, the vendor was early in on building institutional grade tools for crypto trading.

Lane is a hardcore technologist; Geannopulos comes from the world of sales. I have to believe that Geannopulos will bring a different mindset to the company—I’m not saying that’s a bad thing; it’s just different. We’ll let the results speak for themselves. Or, as Harris Brumfield, who is the majority shareholder of TT, put it in a press release, “Tim will be instrumental in managing the key partner transactions we anticipate this year and will guide our strong team through the next chapter of growth and expansion.”

We’ll have to see what those “key partnerships” are to fully understand the future direction of the company.

Then there’s Rimes Technologies. At the beginning of June, the managed data services provider named Brad Hunt as its new CEO. He replaces Christian Fauvelais, who helped found the company in 1996. The press release noted that Fauvelais “will retain an active role on the company’s board where he will continue to provide guidance and support over the company’s strategy and focus on retaining Rimes’ uniquely customer-centric culture built over the last 25 years.”

“Culture”—that’s an important word.

People have described Rimes to me as “Fauvelais’ baby.” Unlike Symphony’s Gurle and TT’s Lane, but similar to Broadway’s Moeller, it sounds as if Fauvelais will still be around. If that changes, it will be worth noting. It should also be said that he graduated with his BS in economics in 1982, according to LinkedIn, and earned his Ph.D. in finance from New York University’s Stern School of Business in 1988, after which, he started working at Deutsche Bank. So after a long career in finance, maybe he simply wants some “me time”.

Hunt, meanwhile, joins Rimes after a year of consulting. Prior to that, he served about three years at BNY Mellon as global head of strategy and business development for its Markets unit. He also worked in Singapore as then-Markit’s head of information for Asia-Pacific. And he has under his belt a decade at Goldman, where he was a managing director and global head of algorithmic trading. Before that, he was at Instinet. So it’s fair to say that the man knows the capital markets pretty well, and has been around the world serving those markets.

And he gets to lead a company that also has some interesting projects underway, most notably with the recent launch of its Lean Data Management service, which is a cloud-based data management platform. This comes on the heels of Rimes warding off acquisition rumors after Swedish private equity firm EQT made “a significant growth investment” in the vendor through its Mid Market Europe fund. The amount has not been disclosed, and a spokesperson for Rimes declined at the time to provide a number.

Like TT, we’ll have to watch how Hunt looks to spend that “significant growth investment”.

There are certainly other recent senior moves I could point to—Ray Tierney was poached by Broadridge from Bloomberg to lead its recently-acquired Itiviti division, replacing Rob Mackay, who is staying on as a senior advisor. And David Craig is stepping down as CEO of Refinitiv following the merger with the London Stock Exchange Group. He’s being replaced by Andrea Remyn Stone. And former JP Morgan Chase banker Alejandro Nicolas Aguzin is taking over as the CEO of Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing.

Or, I could gossip about the TradingScreen-Philippe Buhannic drama; or what’s become of Fidessa since Chris Aspinwall—and many, many others—left; or Lex Fenwich’s less-than-two-year-run as CEO of Dow Jones & Company…or, maybe that’s better left for beers at the White Horse on Bridge Street.

Got some thoughts on recent CEO moves? I’d love to read them: anthony.malakian@infopro-digital.com.