Ex-AWS and Liquidnet Steve Cooper joins Pragma as Chief Technology Officer
Based in New York, Stephen Cooper will be responsible for ensuring Pragma’s technology stack, market infrastructure and connectivity evolves ahead of client demands and the wider marketplace.
Algo trading technology provider Pragma has appointed Steve Cooper as its new Chief Technology Officer.
The AI-powered algo service for equities and foreign exchange trading will now count with Mr. Cooper, who joins the company from Amazon Web Services (AWS), where he was Principal Solutions Architect.
Based in New York, he will be responsible for ensuring Pragma’s technology stack, market infrastructure and connectivity evolves ahead of client demands and the wider marketplace.
The 20-year industry veteran also led Global Front Office Technology for Liquidnet, where he drove several important initiatives including the creation of a low-latency, algorithmic trading platform that is currently in use around the world.
Pragma provides algo FX and equities trading tools for banks, brokers, and quantitative hedge funds and is now incorporating artificial intelligence to its products.
David Mechner, Co-Founder and CEO at Pragma, said: “Steve brings a powerful combination of capital markets knowledge and leadership in building and scaling global algorithmic trading platforms, making him a tremendous asset to our senior management team as the company continues to grow. We have charted an aggressive roadmap of expansion, and Steve’s talent and deep experience will be instrumental in achieving those goals.”
Steve Cooper, Chief Technology Officer at Pragma, added: “I’m thrilled to be joining a company at the cutting edge of algorithmic trading, and I look forward to helping Pragma stay ahead of the market. Pragma’s unique business model, coupled with its focus on industry-leading research makes it ideally placed to develop services that our clients can customize and develop into their own proprietary solutions.”
Throughout 11 years at Liquidnet, Mr. Cooper player a number of roles, including Director of Global Front Officer, which included leading eight teams (100 engineers and analysts globally) responsible for all revenue-generating platforms, applications, data, and associated budget.
His teams created leading source of revenue and growth by implementing trade execution systems, developed a sophisticated, ultra-low latency trading platform exceeding performance targets and increasing profitability, created machine learning solutions that ingest hundreds of millions of records in real-time and recommend trading strategies, and eliminated severe production outages through process improvements.
For six years, he was Director of Global Trading Technology at Liquidnet, where he led four teams of 30 engineers and analysts responsible for trade execution systems operating in 50 global securities markets.
Throughout that period, his teams launched new global equity trading platforms: algorithms, smart order routers, execution desks, data feeds, network connectivity, and quantitative analytics; integrated corporate bond trading platform becoming the leading source of revenue diversification, and architected a centralized trade capture stream, reducing cost, complexity and time to market.
For three years, he was Director of Product/Technology, Trading and Capital Markets at Liquidnet, where he led software engineers and product managers responsible for trading and analytics systems for investors and corporate issuers.
His teams expanded algorithmic trading platforms establishing new quantitative services business unit, and designed and built innovative equity capital markets business solutions enabling penetration into new customer segments.
