The 2016 Tech 50: Stephane Dubois

The gap between the legacy systems of financial industry incumbents and the sleek apps that appeal to younger, more mobile demographic groups is closing. One reason, saysStephane Dubois, is that older institutions simply can no longer afford to run on their outdated software, so they are now open to alternative fintech solutions like Xignite’s market-data cloud. “The technology that financial companies built in the 1990s and 2000s is getting thrown away,” says the Xignite CEO. “They can build on top of legacy technology, but eventually infrastructure will cost the large banks millions, if not billions, of dollars.” Old and new find common ground — to be more exact, a common cloud — in Xignite. More than 1,000 customers, ranging from Nasdaq and Wells Fargo & Co. to Betterment, Robinhood and Wealthfront, rely on Xignite’s cloud network for data distribution and application programming interfaces (APIs) to push new-product and mobile strategies. Cloud, though maturing, is still a “big thing, and particularly critical to the market data industry,” says Dubois, 52, a native of Rennes, France, who started San Mateo, California–based Xignite in 2000. He says demand for the platform is doubling every six months as it allows users to accelerate innovation and reduce operating costs by freeing them from the need to own and maintain hardware. The company has raised $37 million in venture funding, capped by a $20.5 million Series C round in February led by financial data company QUICK Corp., part of Tokyo-based Nikkei. QUICK will be partnering with Xignite to expand in Asia. Dubois says an alliance with FactSet Research Systems, announced in 2014, has proved “very critical for us,” resulting in rollouts of APIs that are among Xignite’s most successful products to date.

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