New York is one of the world’s financial capitals, and for a long time, FinTech has been regarded as that back office stuff – classic enterprise technologies such as processing, data management, record administration, security and the like.
Well, that has all changed and here are some of the people who are changing it and the way Wall Street itself doing business and finding – and disseminating – information. Word on The Street is that financial technologies are taking over the front office now, too. Read on and be warned: it’s not your father’s FinTech anymore…
Click Here to See The 21 People in the New York FinTech Scene You Need to Know About
Founder’s note: AlleyWatch does not have a financial relationship with any of those included. This list is in no particular order nor is it a ranking. In fact, the =RAND() function on excel was used to determine order.
Matt Harris, Managing Partner, Bain Capital Ventures
Matt Harris is Managing Partner at Bain Capital Ventures. An investor with a strong focus on financial services companies, Harris joined BCV in 2012 to lead the NYC office and focus on business services companies. Harris serves on the board of some notable NYC FinTech startups including Billtrust, Chrome River, Novus Partners, and OpenFin.
And heads up – Harris is actively looking for investment opportunities in payments, specialty lending, fin tech, asset management, trading systems, insurance, etc. So if you are in looking to raise in the space, Harris is a person you need to know.
Harris also blogs about FinTech and Venture Capital at FinSurgency.
Snapshot:
Name: Matt Harris
Title: Managing Director
Company: Bain Capital Ventures
Keep up with Matt:
Twitter
LinkedIn
Image credit: Bain Capital Ventures
Leigh Drogen, Founder and CEO, Estimize
Leigh Drogen is Founder and CEO of Estimize, a platform and community that utilizes the wisdom of the crowds to outdo/outguess Wall Street. Estimize lets anyone – meaning analysts, traders, and portfolio managers from many prominent hedge funds, asset management firms, mutual funds and independent research firms – track their performance and contribute to the broadest and most robust financial data set. Contributing analysts also include many industry experts, corporate finance professionals, independent investors and students who add their unique perspective to the data set. The results: a guesstimate that pretty much does outperforms the street.
Snapshot:
Name: Leigh Drogen
Title: Founder & CEO
Company: Estimize
Keep up with Leigh:
Twitter
LinkedIn
Image credit: LinkedIn
Jay Fraser, Head of Business Development, IEX
Jay Fraser heads up Business Development at IEX, the first equity trading venue owned exclusively by a consortium of buy-side investors, including mutual funds, hedge funds, and family offices, and driven by a team of cross-industry experts with backgrounds spanning market venues, electronic trading, and broker-dealers…like Fraser. He was previously the head of Deutsche Bank’s Autobahn Equity Americas unit, where he built out the firms footprint globally in electronic sales and trading.
Snapshot:
Name: Jay Fraser
Title: Head of Business Development
Company: IEX
Keep up with Jay:
Twitter
LinkedIn
Image credit: WallStWiki
Pete Casella, Executive Director, Strategic Investments, JPMorgan Chase
Here’s someone you definitely want to know. Pete Cassella is focused on sourcing and executing venture and growth stage private investments in businesses that are strategic to the JPMorgan franchise. His coverage sectors include financial technology, market structure, enterprise software and infrastructure technologies, and asset management. FinTech entrepreneurs – this is the person you need to know when you are seeking strategic investment.
Snapshot:
Name: Pete Casella
Title: Executive Director – Strategic Investments
Company: JP Morgan Chase
Keep up with Pete:
LinkedIn
Image credit: LinkedIn
Maria Gotsch, President and CEO, Partnership Fund for New York City
Maria Gotsch is President and CEO of the Partnership Fund for New York City – the investment arm of the Partnership for New York City. The Fund, which has raised over $100 million, has built a network of top experts from the investment and corporate communities who help identify and support New York City’s most promising entrepreneurs in both the for-profit and non-for profit sectors. Gotsch has also spearheaded the creation and operation of a number of the Fund’s strategic initiatives, including: FinTech Innovation Lab; New York Digital Health Accelerator; NYCSeed; BioAccelerate Prize NYC (proof-of-concept funding for university-based biomedical research); Arts Entrepreneurial Loan Fund (low cost loans for mid-size arts groups); and ReStart Central and Financial Recovery Fund (assistance and funding for small businesses impacted by 9-11).
Gotsch is also a member of the boards of Reach Out and Read of Greater New York (children’s literacy non-profit), the New York Venture Capital Association, and the Lang Fund.
Snapshot:
Name: Maria Gotsch
Title: President and CEO
Company: Partnership Fund for New York CIty
Keep up with Maria:
Twitter
LinkedIn
Image credit: CC by Sparklabs Korea
Greg Neufeld, Karl Antle and Josh Elwell, Managing Partners, ValueStream Labs
Greg Neufeld, Karl Antle, and Josh Elwell are the Managing Partners of ValueStream Labs, a venture development firm in New York bridging the gap between emerging Fintech and institutional finance. The mission of ValueStream Labs is to accelerate the adoption of new technologies in the Financial Services industry by fostering a community of customers, professionals, and investors, and partnering with emerging technology-enabled Financial Services startups that target the Professional (B2P), Institutional (B2I), and Enterprise (B2B) spaces.
Before turning their attention to identifying those web platforms with the potential to revolutionize Big Finance, Neufeld, Antle, and Elwell gained extensive experience working across the institutional finance, technology, and consumer startup industries. Greg Neufeld managed a hedge fund before joining his first FinTech startup, which sold to Bloomberg. Karl Antle spent his career advising Private Equity firms on their FinTech investments and working with Financial Institutions to launch new businesses in the Middle East and Asia. Elwell co-founded BuyWithMe, a rapid-growth e-commerce company that raised $37MM in venture capital before being acquired by Gilt Groupe.
Snapshot:
Company: Value Stream Labs
Keep up with Greg:
LinkedIn
Twitter
Keep up with Karl:
LinkedIn
Twitter
Keep up with Josh:
LinkedIn
Twitter
Dane Vrabac, Co-Founder, Investormill
Dane Vrabac is Co-Founder of Investormill, a platform that is quite simply the fastest way to find and chart economic data from trusted sources and go from start to chart in 30 seconds – without needing a degree in economics. Which Vrabac does have, and it shows. Investor Mill solves a number of problems, not the least of which is expense. Bloomberg terminals are $2k a month and Haver, which is not easily searchable, is $1700 a month. The company recently ‘graduated’ from the DreamIt NY Accelerator, and are quickly getting traction in the market.
Snapshot:
Name: Dane Vrabac
Title: Co-Founder
Company: Investormill
Keep up with Dane:
Twitter
LinkedIn
Image credit: LinkedIn
Jesse Podell, Co-Organizer, Fintech Startups Conference
Jesse Podell is theCo-Founder of The Startup Companies, Inc, which owns and operates DevShop, a boutique web development agency, as well as TechDay, the self-proclaimed “world’s largest startup event”.
Podell is also co-organizer of NYFTS, the NYC FinTech meetup group, which has over 2,000 members. Podell has recently been a speaker and organizer for FinTech Startups Conference, Columbia Business School Alumni Club, Columbia School of
Engineering, NextInvest, NextGenVest, Social Media Week. Podell was the first ever winner at FinTech Startup Weekend in NYC. Prior to foraying into technology, Jesse was a trader at distinguished firms like Susquehanna and Jeffries.
Snapshot:
Name: Jesse Podell
Title: COO
Company: DevShop
Keep up with Jesse:
Twitter
LinkedIn
Image credit: LinkedIn
Derek Webster, CEO, CardFlight
Derek Webster thinks of everything. He’s founder and CEO of CardFlight, a POS technology that makes it easy to accept swiped credit card payments on mobile devices, with any merchant account.
The company offers turnkey mobile applications that enable merchant service providers to offer an easy and elegant mobile POS. If you’re building your own point of sale app, they also have robust software development kits (SDKs) for iOS/Android that can be incorporated into your own custom applications. CardFlight’s platform also includes encrypted card readers and a PCI Level 1 certified payment gateway that supports over 20 different processors, to provide clients with complete mobile payments and mobile POS (mPOS) solutions. As we said, Webster thinks of everything.
Snapshot:
Name: Derek Webster
Title: Founder & CEO
Company: CardFlight
Twitter
LinkedIn
Image credit: Twitter
Jon Zanoff, Founder, FinTech Startups
Jon Zanoff is a Director at Blackrock and the Founder of the FinTech Startups Meetup – the largest FinTech Meetup in NYC. A product guru with extensive experience in FinTech product management and development, Zanoff is also founder of Empire Startups, a thriving community bridging the gap between startup entrepreneurs, domain experts, and the investment community. Empire Startups recently produced the highly successful inaugural FinTech Startups Conference.
Snapshot:
Name: Jon Zanoff
Title: Director
Company: Blackrock
Keep up with Jon:
Twitter
LinkedIn
Image credit: LinkedIn
Justin Zhen, Co-Founder, Thinknum
Justin Zhen is the Co-Founder of Thinknum, the web platform that basically indexes the world’s financial information by enabling investors to collaborate on financial analyses, aggregating the abundance of financial data and insights out there and presenting it to users in an intuitive format. The idea for the platform came about when Zhen and co-founder Gregory Ugwi noticed that many analysts still manually update spreadsheets and email them back and forth – an inefficient process, to say the least. In 2012, a JP Morgan trader known as the “London Whale” actually lost over $7 billion, partially due to copying and pasting incorrectly in Excel. Thinknum’s financial models are hosted on the cloud, and they automatically update with new data as the markets move.
Good thinking!
Snapshot:
Name: Justin Zhen
Title: Co-Founder
Company: Thinknum
Keep up with Justin:
Twitter
LinkedIn
Image credit: LinkedIn
Nick Gavronsky, Product Manager, Betterment
Nick Gavronsky has a passion for products at the intersection of finance, technology and design, which is what makes him an outstanding product manager at Betterment, an online portfolio platform designed to achieve optimal returns at every level of risk. Betterment customers can expect 4.30% higher returns than a typical DIY investor.
In addition to his responsibilities at Betterment, Gravonsky is the Co-Founder and the main organizer of the FinTech Hackathon, which brings together FinTech developers and designers to create and promote the development of financial technology for consumers and institutional customers.
Snapshot:
Name: Nick Gavronsky
Title: Product Manager
Company: Betterment
Keep up with Nick:
LinkedIn
Twitter
Image credit: Twitter
John Melloy, CEO, StockTwits
A former executive producer of CNBC’s Fast Money/Halftime Report and stocks team leader at Bloomberg News, John Melloy is the person Howard Lindzon appointed to be the new CEO of StockTwits, the financial communications platform for the financial and investing community. StockTwits created the $TICKER tag to enable and organize “streams” of information around stocks and markets across the web and social media, providing new forms of insight, ideas and information that are used by investors, analysts, media and others as they research stocks and manage their investments.
Today, more than 300,000 investors, market professionals and public companies share information and ideas about the market and individual stocks using StockTwits, producing streams that are viewed by an audience of over 40 million across the financial web and social media platforms.
Snapshot:
Name: John Melloy
Title: CEO
Company: StockTwits
Keep up with John:
LinkedIn
Twitter
Image credit: Google Plus
Igor Gonta, CEO, Market Prophit
Igor Gonta (MIT BS/MS in electrical engineering/computer science) is the CEO of Market Prophit, the first service to ever provide rankings of financial bloggers in social media to generate unique, real-time sentiment signals (bullish/bearish) based on identifying the mavens or “Market Prophits” in the crowd, delivering a top-level view of what’s hot and what’s not. Market Prophit recently entered into their first non-exclusive partnership agreement with Interactive Data to distribute its unique social media sentiment signals through their eSignal trading platform to their active trading customer base.
Social is growing up. And Gonta is the market prophit who saw it coming.
Snapshot:
Name: Igor Gonta
Title: CEO
Company: Market Prophit
Keep up with Igor:
Twitter
LinkedIn
Image credit: Market Prophit
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Mazy Dar, CEO, OpenFin
Mazy Dar is CEO of OpenFin, a company that provides runtime technology for financial desktops. The company’s patent-pending software enables financial desktop applications to be instantly deployable, interoperable and cross-platform while meeting the strict security and compliance requirements of financial institutions.
In other words, they may well be the technology that disrupts the Bloomberg terminal. OpenFin was a graduate of First Growth Venture Network and the FinTech Innovation Lab, a program sponsored by the Partnership Fund for New York City.
Snapshot:
Name: Mazy Dar
Title: CEO
Company: OpenFin
Keep up with Mazy:
Twitter
LinkedIn
Image credit: Twitter
Alexa von Tobel, Founder & CEO, LearnVest
Alexa von Tobel is founder and CEO of LearnVest and the New York Times- Bestselling Author of Financially Fearless. A CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER™. Von Tobel launched LearnVest in 2009 with the goal of making financial planning affordable, accessible and even delightful, and since then she has raised over $75 million in financing from Accel Partners, American Express Ventures, and others.
On why she started her company, with very little money in the bank at the time: “No one ever made (financial planning) accessible to people outside of the 1%,” said von Tobel. “That’s a big product vision. But it’s rewarding, because it’s disruptive – and disruptive is hard work. But I love consumer products and making things accessible.”
Snapshot:
Name: Alexa von Tobel
Title: Founder & CEO
Company: LearnVest
Keep up with Alexa:
Twitter
LinkedIn
Image credit: CC by Fortune Live Media
Julianna Young, Vice President, Operations, Commonbond
Julianna Young is the operations lead at Commonbond, a platform that helps lowers the cost of higher education in the U.S. by connecting student and graduate borrowers with individual and institutional investors to save borrowers money on their student loans, and allow investors to earn a financial return.
As for Young, she is a human behavior expert and has spent her career injecting a customer-centric approach to products and services. Prior to reimagining the student loan experience, Young managed customer insight and growth at Moven, a mobile bank innovator. She has also developed engagement strategies for brands such as IBM and OppenheimerFunds. She’s also a lifelong Cubs fans, but what can you do?
Snapshot:
Name: Julianna Young
Title: VIce President, Operations
Company: Commonbond
Keep up with Julianna:
Twitter
LinkedIn
Image credit: CommonBond
Josh Kuzon, Senior Payments Strategist, Silicon Valley Bank
New York-based Josh Kuzon is Senior Payments Strategist at Silicon Valley Bank , which he joined earlier this year to focus on building a new line of business at the Bank to support emerging payments and FinTech companies. He also heads up the Commerce & Innovating Accelerator program that SVB and Mastercard have partnered on and works closely with post-seed stage FinTech, payments, and commerce startups to help them scale via access to subject matter experts, mentors, and technical resources.
Kuzon is a recognized thought leader in the space, and routinely advises FinTech startups and investors with little expectation of anything in return – ask around the FinTech startup space and you’d be surprised at the number of people who’ve probably had a call with Kuzon for advice.
Snapshot:
Name: Josh Kuzon
Title: Senior Payments Strategists
Company: Silicon Valley Bank
Keep up with Josh:
Twitter
LinkedIn
Image credit: LinkedIn
Gareth Jones, Co-Founder and General Partner, FinTech Collective
Gareth Jones is Co-Founder and General Partner at FinTech Collective, a next-generation Venture Capital platform built to harness the power of curated networks and bring together investors, entrepreneurs, and the industry in a bid to re-imagine Financial Services.
The Collective understands that the VC’s job starts with sourcing great leaders. They aren’t following the pack or jumping on the bandwagon of accelerator-driven investment. They get in the weeds and they’re out there meeting founders.
And what better person at the helm than Gareth Jones.
Snapshot:
Name: Gareth Jones
Title: Co-Founder and General Partner
Company: Fintech Collective
Keep up with Gareth:
Twitter
LinkedIn
Image credit: Finovate
Omar Qari, Co-Founder and CEO, Abacus
Omar Qari is Co-Founder and CEO of Abacus, an app that finally kills, or at least updates, the expense report by allowing employees to submit transactions as soon as they happen by taking a photo of a receipt (via iOS or Android) or adding a credit card transaction. Managers can then immediately approve expenses (or not), which are synced to cloud accounting software. Reimbursements are automatically deposited at the end of each day into employees’ bank accounts, which saves a lot of paperwork and accounting.
Snapshot:
Name: Omar Qari
Title: Co-Founder & CEO
Company: Abacus
Keep up with Omar:
Twitter
LinkedIn
Image credit: LinkedIn
Reggie Middleton, CEO, Veritaseum
Entrepreneurial investor and globally renown analyst Reggie Middleton is CEO of Veritaseum and creator of the UltraCoin wallet, a patent pending technology that allows users to create their own “smart contracts” – unbreachable contracts based upon bitcoin technology that enables money to be programmed and mimic the business functions of nearly any company or employee. UltraCoin currently enables holders of the client/wallet to trade over 75,000 stocks, bonds, commodities and futures from around the world on a peer to peer basis, without a conventional securities exchange or brokerage account. All with a simple 30 second software download. For the curious, here’s a video description of a simple trade. The disintermediation caused by Middleton’s UltraCoin has the potential to disrupt the brokerage industry.
Snapshot:
Name: Reggie Middleton
Title: CEO
Company: Veritaseum
Keep up with Reggie:
Twitter
LinkedIn
Image credit: Wikipedia
