Lee Olesky is to step down as chief executive of Tradeweb Markets after more than a decade leading the bond trading venue he co-founded that went from a start-up to a $20bn giant of the fixed income markets.
The US group said on Wednesday that Olesky, who launched Tradeweb in 1996, would move aside as chief executive at the end of the year. He will also replace Martin Brand, a partner at private equity group Blackstone, as chair immediately. Billy Hult, president of Tradeweb and a close associate of Olesky will replace him as chief.
Under his direction Tradeweb has become one of the most influential actors in the fixed-income market as more deals have shifted from being negotiated over the phone to being executed electronically. Tradeweb was one of the first venues to use the internet as the backbone for its operations.
As of January, brokers and fund managers were trading more than $1.1tn a day of bond, mortgage and derivatives deals on its electronic markets as investors position themselves for rising interest rates and inflation. It has also been one of the best-performing listings worth more than $1bn in the past three years, climbing 130 per cent and outperforming the benchmark S&P 500 index, which has risen 55 per cent, according to data from FactSet.
Olesky told the Financial Times it had been “a hard decision” to step down. “It’s been a big part of my life for 25 years,” he said. “I wanted to finish strongly and the company to be in a great position. We’re coming out of the turbulence of the last few years. There is an element of a cycle ending and it is a new time.”
Olesky, a former banker at Credit Suisse, launched Tradeweb as a rival to the investment banks that dominated credit trading on Wall Street. He left in 1999 to start BrokerTec, a rival US Treasuries trading venue, but returned only months before BrokerTec was bought by ICAP, the interdealer broker run by British entrepreneur Michael Spencer, in 2002.
He became chief of Tradeweb in September 2008, a week before Lehman Brothers collapsed, and Hult, who joined Tradeweb in 2000, became president. Hult has been the driving force behind many of Tradeweb’s most successful US businesses, including the mortgage and Treasury franchises.
“I can preserve the very strong culture of this company and add my own stamp on it,” said Hult.
He added that London Stock Exchange Group, which has a 52 per cent economic interest in the platform through its ownership of Refinitiv, had been “very supportive”.
Brand, one of the driving forces behind LSE Group’s $27bn purchase of Refinitiv and an LSE board member, will leave as chair of Tradeweb after three years.
