Pioneer Of Fixed Income Electronic Trading: MarketAxess Founder Richard McVey Named Ernst & Young National Entrepreneur Of The Year® 2012 Financial Services Award Winner

NEW YORK, Nov. 18, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Richard McVey, Founder of MarketAxess, has been named the Ernst & Young National Entrepreneur Of The Year ^® 2012 Financial Services Award winner. The Ernst & Young Entrepreneur Of The Year Award is the country's most prestigious business award for entrepreneurs. The award encourages entrepreneurial activity and recognizes leaders and visionaries who demonstrate innovation, financial success and personal commitment as they create and build world-class businesses.

McVey was recognized for transforming the way trading is conducted in the corporate bond market by leveraging his experience and knowledge of the fixed income markets to create an electronic trading model that increases liquidity and ease of execution. Over the past 12 years, McVey has been faced with several challenges, including slowed trading activity as a result of Sept. 11, 2001, decreased funding, and the credit crisis of 2008, which led to an evaporation of liquidity and widening of credit spreads. Despite all, McVey weathered the storm and MarketAxess has grown from two employees to over 200 in 2011.

"We are delighted to honor Richard McVey with this prestigious award and commend him for his accomplishment of not only changing the way people conduct fixed income, but for seizing opportunities in the most troubling of economic times," said Bryan Pearce, Americas Director, Entrepreneur Of The Year, Ernst & Young LLP. "Entrepreneurs like Richard are not only committed to transforming industries but remain steadfast with their convictions in the wake of unprecedented challenges."

Challenges from the beginning

McVey began his career in the futures industry in Cleveland, priming him to run the JP Morgan futures brokerage operations in North America during the 1990s. It was there that McVey realized the potential that electronic trading held for the fixed income markets. In 2000, MarketAxess – a client-to-multi-dealer trading platform that allows institutional investors to request bids and offers on corporate bonds from broker-dealers and choose whom to trade with, was born.

Since then, McVey and MarketAxess have endured several threatening challenges. The first hit in 2008, when the credit crisis took hold. The company's stock price plummeted, and the market consensus pointed toward large dealers not being able to survive. With JP Morgan, Chase and Bear Stearns as the company's founding investors, these large firms were driving MarketAxess's growth and liquidity at the time.

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