Nasdaq Inc, a global tech firm that serves capital markets and other industries worldwide, announced on Monday the retirement of Lars Ottersgård, the Executive Vice President for Market Technology, after 16 years of serving leadership roles at the company. The firm said that Ottersgård will perform an advisory role from April 30, 2022 until his formal retirement on August 31. Thus, Nasdaq has appointed two senior leaders, Jamie King and Roland Chai, to continue driving its Anti-Financial Crime and Market Infrastructure Technology businesses, respectively.
Over a 16-year career at Nasdaq, Ottersgård led the company to triple its market technology franchise and was instrumental in growing the business into one of the world’s largest solutions providers to exchanges, brokers, banks, clearing organizations, central securities depositories and regulators.
Ottersgård worked at IBM for over 20 years before joining OMX AB in 2006 to lead global sales for the Nordic-based exchange firm’s commercial technology business. Following Nasdaq’s landmark acquisition of OMX in 2008, Ottersgård was appointed to lead the combined market technology businesses.
As a result of leadership changes at Nasdaq, effective from April 4, 2022, Jamie King has been promoted to serve as Executive Vice President of the company and will lead Nasdaq’s Anti-Financial Crime (AFC) business. Meanwhile, Roland Chai, who is currently Nasdaq’s Global Chief Risk Officer, has been promoted to serve as Executive Vice President and will assume leadership of Nasdaq’s Market Infrastructure Technology business.
Following such changes, John Zecca, Nasdaq’s Chief Legal & Regulatory Officer, succeeds Chai’s role and will be the head of Nasdaq’s Group Risk Management team and become the Chief Legal, Risk & Regulatory Officer.
Democratizing Global Capital Markets
In September last year, the firm joined DeFiChain, a Blockchain-based tokenized stock-trading venture, to enable tokenization of stocks to the underlying price of US-listed major firms such as Apple, Tesla, Amazon and GameStop. In November, Nasdaq launched a Retail Trading Activity Tracker, a new dataset, which provides information into the trading activity of self-directed retail investors in the US equity market.
Began its business back in 1971, Nasdaq has been a disrupter of its time. About 15 years ago, Nasdaq started advancing itself beyond the equities markets, and now it is among the largest options markets in the US. The company has scaled its data and analytics business for the investment community. The firm uses modern technology to democratize the capital markets and makes network exchange available to anyone anywhere in the world. Millions of investors are now able to access the markets directly. Today, tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions, of retail investors come in and trade every day.
