Honoring Overachievers

With the new century less than a month and a half away, it seemed time to get nostalgic and look back across the decade at what's been achieved in financial technology.

In this issue, the editors of Wall Street & Technology, picked 10 innovators who have made an impact on the capital markets because they invented some concept, protocol, software or financial information system See, "The Top 10 Financial Technology Innovators of the Decade." In some cases, they made trading happen faster, they drove down costs, they automated the investment management process, they organized trades, they simplified risk management, they removed the intermediary, and at one point, they were all underdogs.

In many cases, they had to tear down obstacles to get past the powers-that-be or the mindset that prevented people from seeing the benefits of a new technology. It was not enough to be visionary. They had to be relentless in their pursuit of a goal. "She took a concept, followed it through to its execution and developed a business plan that's been very successful," says Buddy Adler, president of Asset Management Inc., commenting on the track record of Advent Software's Chairman and CEO Stephanie DiMarco.

Of course not every IT project was successful. In fact, the statistic that 50% of all IT projects fail, is frequently used on the financial IT conference circuit by moderators to instill fear in attendees.

The 90s is littered with many technology lemons-IT projects abandoned, buried or ambushed. Among the lemons were Seer Technologies, a joint venture spun off by IBM and First Boston using Computer Aided System Engineering-based tools to develop applications. Though the product was sold to Kidder Peabody to develop a back office, and the company went public in the 90s, it no longer operates. There are a few other gems worth mentioning. There was Dow Jones Markets' $670 million Rolling Thunder project to revive the company formerly known as Telerate. And there was Reuters' attempt to build a Bloomberg killer which led to a data downloading scandal and an FBI investigation.

Clearly there are risks in every IT venture, and the industry has learned from them. But in the next decade, the stakes will be higher for financial houses and vendors alike. "What the Internet does is create an environment for different business models that never existed before and many of which can be construed to be threatening to financial institutions," says Advent's DiMarco. Financial institutions are going to have to adapt and evolve to take advantage of those models and build new models using...empowering technology," she says.

Wall Street is actively doing that-reinventing itself on the Internet-even calling for the abolition of Rule 390, See, "The Quest to Kill 390." Who will the most innovative figures in financial technology be in the next decade? Stay tuned.

Ivy is Editor-at-Large for Advanced Trading and Wall Street & Technology. Ivy is responsible for writing in-depth feature articles, daily blogs and news articles with a focus on automated trading in the capital markets. As an industry expert, Ivy has reported on a myriad ... View Full Bio