Howard Edelstein

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. His family lived modestly, but in reflecting on his family life, he later remarked that his father taught him the importance of education, persistence, and generosity. He worked after school at a local delicatessen beginning at age 14. He joked that this gave him job skills so that he knew that, when he grew up, he could always find work slicing smoked fish.

As an undergraduate, Edelstein attended the City University of New York, where he earned a bachelor of electrical engineering degree. He went on to earn a master's degree in electrical engineering from Stanford University.

Early career

Edelstein’s first job after graduate school was at the Ford Motor Company in Detroit, where its president, Lee Iacocca, was investigating the integration of new technologies and concepts into Ford automobiles. There, as a young engineer, Edelstein collaborated with a group of Stanford academics, including some who had been his professors in graduate school. Among the futuristic innovations he worked on were heat-resistant semiconductor-based sensor and control systems and speech recognition software for ”talking cars”. After several years at Ford, Edelstein became interested in telecommunications and applications of newly developing information systems technologies to the financial services industry. Around 1980, he joined Telrad, an Israeli telecommunications company, where he worked for five years, initially on data compression algorithms. At Telrad, Edelstein began to apply information technology and telecommunications enhancements 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 in the world, for a commodities brokerage firm. He went on to work on a variety of products in that space, 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 and later in the 1980s became head of international marketing and product development for Dow Jones Telerate. Edelstein then moved west to join C.ATS Software, a provider of risk management technology, extending his role into middle- and back-office products there.

Leadership roles

In 1993, Edelstein was recruited by 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 orchestrated the merger of 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. The company had not yet turned a profit at the time, and Edelstein redefined the Equant's mandate to embrace an early version of cloud computing. After bringing Radianz to profitability, Edelstein facilitated the sale of the company to BT Group, which then named Edelstein CEO of BT Radianz.

Private equity

In 2005, Edelstein joined New York private equity firm Warburg-Pincus, where he was named entrepreneur-in-residence. The following year, when Warburg made an equity investment in NYFIX, a scandal-ridden ridden trading technology company, the private equity firm installed Edelstein as CEO to turn the company around. Edelstein rectified an options-backdating problem that had required the company to restate its 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 an operating partner. He spent the next three years as executive chairman and later CEO of BondDesk Group, one of Advent’s portfolio holdings, where he successfully expanded the firm’s retail bond trading business into the institutional market. In November 2013, BondDesk was sold to Tradeweb.

Venture capital and corporate governance

Edelstein is a venture capital investor in various technology companies and has served on many Boards of Directors. 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. Currently, he is the Lead Independent Director on the board of AcadiaSoft, a secure counterparty collaboration platform. In 2014, Edelstein made an early-stage investment in liquidity-discovery startup Algomi, and he was named to its Board of Directors the following year. Edelstein is also Chairman of the Board of BioCatch. The company delivers online cyber-security solutions based on behavioral and biometric authentication methods that do not compromise user experience. He previously held board positions at Ness Technologies, an IT services provider, PalmSource (the developer of the Palm operating system) and Skillsoft, an online learning platform. Possibly the most notable of Edelstein’s venture capital investments came in 2015, when he was one of the first investors to utilize blockchain technology to participate in a funding round for mobile gaming and polling company Pivit. The funding round was led by Digital Asset Holdings, a venture founded by former J.P Morgan Chase executive Blythe Masters.He is also an advisor to and investor in Street Contxt, an analytic platform that tracks client engagement and customizes user content for investment research web platforms.

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. In 2010, Edelstein received the FINTECH 25-Year 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. Edelstein told the publication, "People come to me for help. If I get excited, I stay, whether as adviser, mentor, director, or investor." At the time of his induction into the Securities Services Hall of Fame in 2009, Edelstein reflected on his career: "I like turning technology into commercial opportunity," says Edelstein. "But my real passion is for taking on challenges others view as too daunting, too complex, or simply too far gone."

• Stanford University, MSEE, Information Sciences/BioMedical Engineering/RealTIme software, 1976–1977
• City College, City University of New York, Bachelor of Electrical Engineering (BEE), Electrical Engineering/Biology/Chemistry/Math, 1971–1976

"Nothing good could happen between trade execution and trade settlement ... Time equals risk, and the amount of time you can take out of the settlement cycle will actually reduce risk to the system.” – On his successful effort to implement T+3 settlement of securities transactions.

"To build a sustainable and enduring business, you need to solve a real problem and create real value with a real business model." – On his role in disrupting the NYSE's monopoly on stock market clearing and creating Omgeo.