When Euromoney visited Nasdaq in New York in early November, Eric Noll did not sound like a man with his eyes on pastures new.
Noll was expounding eloquently about a range of opportunities for the exchange in fixed income, following the $750 million acquisition of bond trading platform eSpeed that he had engineered in April from BGC Partners.
"We’d been looking at eSpeed for a while, including whether we could build something similar, as it hits our sweet spot in terms of central clearing, providing data feeds and a central limited order book – like our other transaction platforms," Nasdaq OMX Group’s then executive vice-president of transaction services said. "We think we can improve the technology performance of the platform and introduce new products to meet the demand of the dealer community."
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Noll was seen as the key architect, alongside CEO Bob Greifeld, of Nasdaq’s expansion away from its core equities trading platform – a business that had stalled with the equity markets. As well as buying eSpeed, he had also been behind the launch of Nasdaq NLX, a platform for trading interest rate derivatives, in May.
