Bio

Brennan Carley is an experienced leader with a strong record of delivering results managing fast-growth, global technology companies. He has held CEO, CSO, CTO and board level positions in VC and private equity backed companies, publicly traded companies, joint ventures, and subsidiaries.

Brennan’s primary areas of expertise include:
•    Financial markets, with a focus on trading and financial technology and financial data businesses in particular
•    Network/telecommunications/messaging businesses
•    International business management (lived and worked in both US and Europe)
•    Commercial and technology strategy, and the execution of strategies for business results
•    Managing businesses from start up through midsize ($500m)
•    Strategic M&A transactions (including acquisitions, divestitures, and joint ventures)

In addition to his consulting engagements, Brennan is a professor of Management Strategy in Technology Sectors at New York University, and mentors students who are starting up companies at the Cornell Tech Runway Program.

From 2011-2021 Brennan was a member of the Senior Leadership team at Refinitiv (formerly the financial information business of Thomson Reuters, spun out as a Blackstone company in 2018, and acquired by the London Stock Exchange Group in 2021.) From 2011-2019 Brennan ran the Enterprise Data Solutions business, a $1.8B business that includes all Refinitiv’s business in real-time, reference, and historical data feeds, data and text analytics, data management platforms, hosting and managed services), and from 2019-2021 he created and lead the Refinitiv Access Consulting & Implementation team, responsible for consultative engagement with Refinitiv’s most strategic customers.

Through Proton Advisors, Brennan advised Spread Networks on all aspects of the launch and commercialization of the network, including product marketing, product management, and sales, and served as acting SVP of Product Marketing from spring of 2009 through summer of 2011.

From 2009-2010 Brennan served as independent director on the board of Marketcetera, a venture backed (Shasta Ventures) business that provides open source software for automated trading systems.

Brennan was CEO of Monitor110, an early stage financial intelligence and real-time Internet monitoring firm, backed by venture capital firms Draper Fisher Jurvetson and DFJ Gotham. Previously he served as Chief Strategy Officer and Head of Business/Product Operations for NYFIX, following a period as Entrepreneur in Residence at Warburg Pincus, a leading private equity firm. At Warburg Pincus, Brennan analyzed the global financial technology market, focused on trading technology, information, analytics, alternate execution, and reference data, which led to an investment by Warburg Pincus into NYFIX.

Brennan served from 2006 through 2007 as an independent Member of the Board of Directors for YIPES, a fast-growth, venture backed (Crosslink Capital, Norwest Venture Partners, JP Morgan Partners, Sprout/CSFB) leading global provider of managed, end-to-end Ethernet solutions for enterprise customers. Yipes completed a successful sale to Reliance Telecommunications of India in December of 2007, at which time Brennan stepped down from the board.

In 2000, Brennan founded Radianz (now BT Radianz after a successful sale in 2005 to British Telecom), where he was responsible for strategy, products, technology, and operations. Prior to founding Radianz, he was Senior Vice President of strategic planning at Reuters, where he led the initiative to develop Radianz (including negotiating the joint venture agreement to create Radianz.) While at Reuters, he also was active in a number of securities industry initiatives, established and chaired the Industry Capacity Planning Committee of the Financial Information Forum, and participated in SEC Roundtable on Technology and Markets.

Before joining Reuters, Brennan served as Senior Vice President at Instinet, responsible for Information Technology. At Instinet, he led major initiatives such as the migration from legacy to an internet based network and development of Instinet’s trading floor. He joined Instinet in 1992 as director of Quality Assurance.

Prior to working for Instinet, Brennan was employed by IBM for 10 years. While there, he held a series of positions in marketing, consulting, and systems engineering, primarily focused on systems and networks in the financial services industries. He began his career with IBM as a programmer responsible for operating system and communications software development, and developed the first fully preemptive, multi-tasking, DOS compatible operating system for the IBM personal computer.

Brennan has been widely quoted in industry publications such as Dealing With Technology, Securities Industry News, Waters, Trading & Technology, Inside Market Data, Financial-I, STP Magazine, Wall Street & Technology, Traders Magazine, Banking Technology, the Hong Kong Economic Times, FX & Money Markets, Computerworld, Information Week, etc. He is a regular speaker at conferences on the role of the technology in Securities Industry (e.g. Futures & Options Expo, Risk Waters annual conference, Securities Industry Association Conference, Securities Operations Conference, Global Investment Technology Forum on Technology and Markets, Tradetech, World Federation of Exchanges, etc.), and chaired a panel on RegNMS during 2005 Securities Industry Association conference. He served as a member of Cisco Systems advisory board for 2003-2004, authored an article for the 2002 Handbook of World Stock, Derivative & Commodity Exchanges, and is the Founder and former Chairman of the Capacity Planning Committee of the Financial Information Forum.

While he doesn’t agree with much of what was in the book, Brennan was quoted in Michael Lewis’s best selling Flash Boys and was featured in Architects of Electronic Trading: Technology Leaders Who Are Shaping Today’s Financial Markets.

Brennan was born in Palo Alto, California, and is a Magna Cum Laude graduate of New York University, with a degree in Economics. He has taken graduate courses in business at the Harvard Business School, MIT Sloan School of Management, and Columbia Business School.

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