The 2015 Tech 50: Stephane Dubois

Where the Silicon Valley start-up mentality clashes with the traditions and inertia of financial industry incumbents, “we have been the arms dealer in the process,” saysStephane Dubois. The 51-year-old straddles those worlds as CEO of Xignite, a company he founded in 2000 with headquarters in San Mateo, California; an active branch on Wall Street; and a simply worded mission statement: “To power and inspire the future of finance.” A global customer base of 1,000 that includes new-wavers like Betterment,Robinhood和Wealthfront,加拿大蒙特利尔银行金融集团dNasdaq OMX Group, suggests that Xignite occupies a rare, cross-generational sweet spot. Originally a software start-up — Dubois was previously vice president of product management at investment-systems leader Advent Software — Xignite pivoted several years later into cloud computing, with application programming interfaces for integrating market data into websites and mobile apps. Xignite targets companies that are designing systems from scratch and want to pipe in financial data and get products to market quickly. The utility nature of the cloud spreads costs and relieves users from having to own and maintain hardware. “Market data is perfect for the cloud. It’s a lot of data, it’s not confidential, and you can store the data once and let everybody just pick at it,” says Dubois. “It’s a lot more efficient and has the ability to save the industry billions of dollars in the long term.” Later this year Xignite plans to make large data sets easier to handle with a streaming service that will deliver quotes directly from exchanges in real time. “Those feeds are very hard to consume, ” Dubois explains. “It’s like drinking from a fire hydrant.”

See the full story, “The 2015 Tech 50: Racers to the Edge.”