Witad Awards 2020: Woman of the year—Ann Neidenbach, LSEG

Since the mid-1980s, Ann Neidenbach has called the capital markets home. There’s the 25 years spent at Nasdaq, where she defined the exchange’s roadmap of products and services—a $250 million business with over 90 global customers. She oversaw the acquisition and implementation of several companies, and was instrumental in the company’s European expansion. And of course there are her years spent at the likes of Citi, Lava Trading, BNY Convergex, and Cowen.

That long road has led her to the London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG), where today she serves as global head of LSEG Technology and chief information officer of the exchange’s capital markets group. This year’s WatersTechnology Woman of the Year has dedicated her life to technology and has seen firsthand the markets evolve from the trading pits to a universe driven by innovation.

“I haven’t worked with a group of business colleagues that doesn’t depend on a technology team delivering,” she says. “So it’s always exciting to be at the table and be part of the solution to grow revenues or to build up new business opportunities.”

When she joined LSEG about a year-and-a-half ago, she was initially focused on kick-starting the company’s ambitious cloud program, which aims to move 60% of service delivery and corporate computing to the public cloud by 2021. As an example of this cloud push, Turquoise, the European multilateral trading facility majority owned by the LSEG, launched Nylon, a cloud-native platform that brings together Turquoise SwapMatch and Turquoise CFD. The exchange is also moving some of its post-trade processes and information services to the cloud.

“There’s a big migration program, but there’s also an acceleration of anything new that we feel comfortable we can put in the cloud, we’ve been building cloud-native,” Neidenbach says. “We’re very excited about what we’re doing.”

LSEG Technology is focused on building clearing and trading systems, both internally and for external customers, which includes more than 40 firms around the globe. Services and solutions include everything from traditional broker and exchange technology, to market data, risk management, surveillance, clearing, and settlement products.

To set up the exchange for the future, Neidenbach has led the enhancement of LSEG Technology’s solutions to support multiple asset classes and different market structures on a single platform. This resulted in the recent go-live at the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, which implemented equity and foreign exchange derivatives.

Clearly, Neidenbach is not done innovating.