WFIC 2017: FISD Honors Raskin with Lifetime Achievement Award

Raskin is best known for his time at Telekurs Financial and SIX Financial Information, where he spent more than 25 years, many of those at the helm, steering the company safely through external crises, building trust and long-term relationships, and rebuilding the company again and again after internal change.

After leaving SIX in 2015, Raskin had a short stint at GBST, an Australian provider of technology for brokers, custodians, investment banks, and fund managers. Although GBST had expansion plans for a New York office when Raskin joined, these were scaled down and he left after seven months. Following that setback, Raskin says he went to “data Yoda” and founder of consultancy Jordan & Jordan Tom Jordan, who—when the opportunity arose—appointed Raskin managing director, a role he has held since 2016.

“I’m very proud that my peers sought to nominate and select me, and I’m completely blown away—first because I don’t think I’m ready for retirement, but also, [because] when I look at the past winners, they have done a lot and continue to do a lot for the industry. They made a real impact on the industry: they created jobs, they created products, and they promoted. I’m honored,” Raskin told Inside Market Data on receiving the Lifetime Achievement award.

Raskin says he has worked to be active in FISD since its inception, and hailed the important role he feels the association plays in facilitating dialog across the industry. “I’ve always felt it’s important that you bring people to the table. People in this industry have diverging interests, but at the end of the day their goal is the same. You can’t improve financial markets if people don’t talk to each other,” he says. By bringing together exchanges, banks, vendors and others “all in one place so they can have dialog and talk about the common issues is tremendous.”

He adds that the industry has notably improved due to the work of FISD. “You see more transparency with data vendors and exchanges than you had before, there is more cooperation and more partnerships formed because people understand each other’s issues. FISD lowers the rhetoric and helps make our lives less complicated, as well as enabling the new players to get involved and help us think forward.” Though a Lifetime Achievement award suggests the sun setting on one’s career, Raskin says he has “a couple of good years left” to continue facilitating discussions which will make lives “less complicated.”

Inside Market Data profiled Raskin in 2013 when he was inducted into the Inside Market Data Hall of Fame. Read our profile here.

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