David Nicol, co-founder of LedgerEdge, a distributed ledger-based fixed income trading venue, has left his position as CEO. Ian Chicken, chief operating officer at the firm, is staying in his role.
The departure has been triggered by the need for a management team with deeper industry relationships on both the buy- and sell-side as LedgerEdge seeks to accelerate the pace of client onboarding, according to chairman David Rutter.
“David Nicol is an incredible guy, very talented and a complete rockstar. He helped build the company, he is a real startup guy,” said Rutter speaking exclusively to the DESK. “But we’re entering a phase now where we’ve designed, built and delivered on the technology of the operation, we’ve gotten our multilateral trading facility (MTF) licence and really now we’re entering a phase where [the business] is all about relationships and experience in order to drive greater sell-side/buy-side participation.”
While no candidate has been chosen as a replacement, Rutter will take on executive responsibilities for an interim period and continue as chairman and founder. The expectation is that a new CEO will be appointed in early 2023.
Joining the firm are Kate Karimson, formerly head of repo at BrokerTec products & BrokerTec Quote at CME Group, who will become the firm’s chief commercial officer leading product and sales, commercial strategy and growth priorities, and Mark Leahy who has joined as chief business officer, overseeing client facing operations and partnerships. Leahy recently worked on Trumid XT, a joint venture between bond trading venue Trumid and Singapore Exchange, his previous employer.
“The big news is I’m bringing two additional, very senior, veterans into what was otherwise a very senior management team, with David Nicol having been the young star of the group. Kate Karimson joins from CME with credit and rates experience and some very solid relationships on the street. She’s joining us in the second week of January. We’ve also already had Mark Leahy join us who was running the SGX/Trumid joint venture out of Singapore. That gave us a great opportunity to bring in a guy that not only has incredible operational experience, but has been engaged in [onboarding clients] in association with Trumid.”
Rutter says that clients will not see any big changes in the firm’s proposition, but that the new appointees will have the ability to make their mark.
“You won’t see a pivot yet,” he says. “The way I’ve been successful in the past is to come up with a well-articulated value proposition which is developed by iteration not pivot. This is another area where experience from Kate and Mark will help, which is specifically listening to feedback from clients, third party integrators, and folks like Charles River. Being an ex trader I know everybody reverts to what they know. I’ve been asking the team to be very careful to ensure we are seen as a different proposition to a dark pool or an RFQ platform. So, we will stay the course. But when you bring on the level of senior people that we’ve brought on, you listen to their feedback and importantly their interpretation of customer and partner feedback.”
©Markets Media Europe, 2022
