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CEO CHAT: AIR's Stephenson Discusses Initiatives, Buy Side Tech and Market Structure

Traders Magazine Online News, August 16, 2018

John D'Antona Jr.

Bill Stephenson spent 20 years at Franklin Templeton Investments, ultimately becoming Global Head of Trading and one of the most recognizable figures in the buy side trading community. After leaving the firm in 2017, he’s now leading the AIR Summit, a buy-side only event focused on showcasing the companies with the most innovative new solutions to help drive alpha.

Traders Magazine editor John D’Antona recently caught up with Stephenson to talk about his new initiative, buy side technology trends, recent market structure developments, and more.

Traders Magazine: You left Franklin Templeton last fall after a two-decade career there. What are you up to now?

Bill Stephenson: It has been a year since I left Franklin Templeton as the Global Head of Trading. While I spent my entire career on a trading desk, the last thing I wanted to do was lead another trading team. Not because I don’t love the trading desk culture, camaraderie and the opportunity to directly add alpha to client portfolios, but because I really wanted to find new opportunities and challenges in our industry. I initially consulted for a few different fintech companies, one of which, RobustWealth, was acquired by Principal Financial in July and another was FundSeeder, which previously presented at the AIR Summit.

The AIR Summit -- short for Alpha Innovation Required -- is an event I started in 2013 while at Franklin Templeton, which turned into a very valuable forum for buy-side related innovation. While I didn’t initially plan on continuing the event outside of Franklin Templeton, the growing list of requests from past attendees and presenters pushed me to reconsider. So, I teamed up with Morgan Dunbar earlier this year and we started planning the launch of AIR 4.0, which will be my fourth year hosting the event.

Aside from AIR, I was also thinking about some of my most pressing challenges as the head of a global trading team and how I might be able to help automate, streamline or improve upon those in a more scalable or user-friendly way. One such area was around order routing, performance analytics and best execution processes that impact both the buy-side and sell-side.  As part of that thinking, I teamed up with Dave Lauer to work with the buy-side to create some new standards that can be leveraged across the industry. This would include a deep-dive exercise with some broker dealers who are looking to differentiate and provide new levels of transparency into their business. We are calling this “NextEx” – short for “next execution” – because it will help both sides of the Street anticipate potential challenges to our industry and to consider adopting future best practices now. I expect to have information on this in the near future.

TM: Sounds interesting on both fronts. Can you share more about the AIR Summit?

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