Deal making is as integral to the evolution of the financial technology industry as the technologies themselves, and Kenneth Marlin has been in the thick of it since the 1980s. The managing partner of New York–based Marlin & Associates boasts a 90 percent close rate, exhibiting a relentlessness that he says was shaped by a decade in the U.S. Marine Corps. “We just keep going,” says the University of California, Los Angeles, MBA and author ofSeize the High Ground: A Marine Corps Way to Win on Wall Street, due from St. Martin’s Press next year. During ten years at Dun & Bradstreet, when it owned the likes of Interactive Data Corp. and Moody’s Investors Service, Marlin led more than 60 transactions. In the 1990s he was CEO of both Swiss-owned market data company Telekurs (North America) and spin-off Telesphere Corp. He began a stint with private equity firm Veronis Suhler Stevenson in 1999 and three years later formed his own investment banking boutique. Marlin & Associates has advised on more than 200 deals, including the April acquisition of capital markets data company Ipreo Holdings by Blackstone Group and Goldman Sachs Group’s merchant banking division. Ever the fintech optimist, Marlin notes that “a bank might have 200 software vendors. There are opportunities for those who can make these products work together like a more holistic solution.”
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Kenneth Marlin
Managing Partner
Marlin & Associates
(PNR)
The 2014 Tech 50