BMLL named Brad Hunt chairman of its board today (Wednesday), nine months after Nordic Capital bought the London-based market data company. Hunt ran Rimes Technologies until its sale to Rothschild & Co’s Five Arrows in 2024.

He takes the chair from Lee Hodgkinson, who stays on as an independent non-executive director. Hodgkinson is Group Chief Strategy Officer at Saudi Tadawul Group and previously led Euronext London, according to BMLL.

Hunt joins a board that has also picked up Spiros Giannaros as a US-based independent director since the buyout closed. BMLL did not disclose effective dates for either appointment.

Nordic Capital and Optiver Both Hold Board Seats

Nordic Capital has two seats, filled by principal David Samuelsen and managing director Dan Rosenberg. Optiver, the Amsterdam market maker, is represented by Hilde Kaemingk, a director at Rambutan Capital.

Optiver is not a passive name on the register. It led a $21 million investment in BMLL in October 2024 and took part in the Nordic Capital purchase a year later.

The market maker also holds a place on BMLL’s client product advisory board, the panel the company uses to shape its roadmap and which added proprietary trading firm Five Rings in May. One firm is therefore shareholder, board member and customer at the same time.

Chief Executive Paul Humphrey and Nigel Medhurst, the chief financial and operating officer, hold the two executive seats.

Chairman Comes From a Data Firm That Changed Hands

Hunt became chief executive of Rimes in June 2021. He stayed through the sale of the business by EQT to Five Arrows, the alternative assets arm of Rothschild & Co, announced in April 2024 and completed that June.

Before Rimes he ran strategy and business development for Global Markets at Bank of New York Mellon, and held senior roles at IHS Markit and Goldman Sachs International, the company said. BMLL’s announcement credits him with widening Rimes from benchmark data into enterprise data management, and with the sale itself.

BMLL raised about $83 million across seed, Series A and Series B rounds before the buyout, backed at various points by Optiver, Nasdaq Ventures and FactSet. Nordic Capital has not disclosed what it paid.

Data Vendors Reshuffle Boards Under New Owners

Giannaros, the new US independent director, became chief executive of Gresham on June 30, four weeks before this appointment. Gresham is owned by private equity firm STG and bought S&P Global’s enterprise data management business in January.

Ownership has been moving elsewhere in the sector too. LSEG pushed into low-latency data with its 2022 purchase of MayStreet, Databento sells nanosecond-precision records through cloud APIs, and Kaiko runs similar distribution for digital-asset order book data. BMLL sells T+1 Level 3, 2 and 1 history across equities, ETFs, futures, options and prediction markets, and does not compete in real-time feeds.

Senior seats have turned over as quickly as ownership. TP ICAP’s data arm TraditionData hired Shynna Lee from the London Stock Exchange Group in April to widen its sales reach.

Pricing vendor DIGITEC moved into data distribution this month with D3 DataHub, after a minority investment from EMH Partners late last year. Both firms sell into the same institutional desks BMLL is chasing.

Announcements Repeat the Same Lines

BMLL’s commercial bench has been rebuilt since October. The company hired Karen King for Asia Pacific sales in January, a US derivatives lead in March, nine more staff in April, and Michael Chiappinelli as chief revenue officer in June.

The announcements have leaned on identical language. “When Nordic Capital came on board, we made our intentions very clear,” Humphrey said of Hunt’s arrival.

Rob Laible, BMLL’s head of Americas, used that sentence word for word in March, when the company announced its US derivatives hire.

Hunt’s quote follows the same template. “There is a clear, growing appetite among market participants for this depth of insight,” he said. Chiappinelli said the same thing in June, with “institutional” where Hunt has “market.”

Hodgkinson’s outside job keeps him close to a paying client. Saudi Tadawul Group’s technology arm, Wamid, signed a multi-year deal with BMLL to build a white-labeled cloud analytics platform for the Saudi market.

This article was written by Damian Chmiel at www.financemagnates.com.Executive MovesRead More

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