Howard Edelstein

Howard Edelstein
Born	1954 New York, NY
🎓 Alma mater	City University of New York Stanford University
💼 Occupation	Technology entrepreneur

Howard Edelstein (born 1954) is an American corporate executive and serial entrepreneur, in the financial technology industry, where he applied information technology methods to previously paper-based transactions processing and settlement systems. Edelstein was founder, president and CEO of Thomson Electronic Settlements Group (now Omgeo), CEO of BT Radianz, NYFIX and BondDesk Group. He is currently the CEO of BioCatch, a behavioral biomentrics start-up company.

Biography

Edelstein was born in New York City, the son of a Polish Holocaust survivor family. He was raised in the Bronx, where his father was in the wholesale grocery business. Edelstein attended the City University of New York, where he earned a bachelor of electrical engineering degree. He received a master's degree in electrical engineering from Stanford University.

Career

Early career

Edelstein’s first job after graduate school was at the Ford Motor Company in Detroit, which was investigating the integration of new technologies and concepts into Ford automobiles. Among the projects he worked on were heat-resistant semiconductor-based sensor and control systems and speech recognition software for ”talking cars”. Around 1980, he joined Telrad, an Israeli telecommunications company, where he worked on data compression algorithms. At Telrad, Edelstein began to apply information technology and telecommunications techniques to the financial markets, where communications were still predominantly voice- and paper-based. He helped to develop a proprietary hardware and software platform to implement a touchscreen-based order-entry system, one of the first such systems, for a commodities brokerage firm. He later worked on a variety of related products, including proprietary trading systems, digital data distribution platforms, and mortgage backed securities and derivatives. He was one of the founders of Knight-Ridder's Financial Information business. He later became head of international marketing and product development for Dow Jones Telerate and then joined C.ATS Software, a provider of risk management technology.

Later roles

In 1993, Edelstein joined Thomson Financial, which was in the early stages of developing straight-through processing systems for equity market investors. He was named president and CEO of its newly established post-trade processing business, Thomson Financial Electronic Settlements Group. In that role, Edelstein eventually succeeded in securing an SEC ruling to overturn a longstanding New York Stock Exchange rule that had given the Depository Trust & Clearing Company (“DTCC”) a monopoly on equity trade confirmation services. Thomson’s electronic network replaced the industry’s paper-based processes to enable speedy, efficient, straight-through transaction processing. In 2000, the Boston Globe estimated that Edelstein's Thomson Financial Electronic Settlements Group was responsible for processing one third of the world's daily stock transactions. A year later, Edelstein merged Thomson's trade confirmation business with a subsidiary of the DTCC to create the new company, Omgeo, which was the first commercial provider of such services.

In 2003, Edelstein became president and CEO of Radianz, a joint venture of Reuters and Equant that operated a financial industry telecommunications platform. Edelstein redefined the Equant's mandate to embrace an early version of cloud computing and then facilitated the sale of the company to BT Group, which named Edelstein CEO of BT Radianz.

In early 2018, Edelstein was appointed CEO of BioCatch, an Israeli/American startup company, after it closed a $30 million growth financing round. The company uses cybersecurity metrics to monitor behavioral variables that verify user access to critical systems. The company's technology significantly exceeds the security achieved by conventional user-id and password systems. Edelstein had joined BioCatch as Chairman of the board in 2016.

Private equity

In 2005, Edelstein joined Warburg Pincus as an entrepreneur-in-residence. In 2006, Warburg made an equity investment in NYFIX, a scandal-ridden trading technology company, and named Edelstein as CEO. The company rectified an options-backdating problem that had required it to restate earnings and lose its stock market listing for two years. Edelstein restored the company’s NASDAQ listing and boosted the company’s profits from its order aggregation and execution system products. In 2009, NYSE Euronext acquired NYFIX in an all-cash transaction at a substantial premium to the market price of its shares. Edelstein then joined another private equity firm, Advent International. As CEO of BondDesk Group, one of Advent’s portfolio holdings, he expanded the firm’s retail bond trading business into the institutional market. In November 2013, BondDesk was sold to Tradeweb.

In February 2014, Edelstein was named chairman of REDI Global Technologies, a New York-based trading platform that was spun off from Goldman Sachs in 2013. Edelstein negotiated the sale of REDI to Thomson Financial in January 2017.

Recognition

In 2008, Edelstein was named one of the “15 Who Made a Difference” in the 15th Anniversary issue of Waters Magazine. The next year, Edelstein received Global Custodian’s Legends Award for industry contributions and innovations. Institutional Investor Magazine named him to its 2013 "Trading Tech 40" list and to its Fintech Finance 35 ranking of industry financiers in 2015.]

External links

• BioCatch
• Bloomberg profile

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