Nick Solinger

Running the plumbing behind every listed derivatives trade.

Nick Solinger is the president and chief executive of FIA Tech, the derivatives market infrastructure company that lives one flight of stairs and a lot of fiber underneath the exchange-traded futures business. FIA Tech is not a household name because FIA Tech does not want to be a household name. It exists to make the movement of a listed derivatives trade from the executing broker to the clearing broker to the end client feel like a settled matter. It is owned by a consortium of twelve of the largest clearing firms and the Futures Industry Association, which means the customers own the utility, which is a rare enough arrangement in fintech that it is worth pausing to notice.

Solinger joined in January 2016. He succeeded Mary Ann Burns, who moved up to executive chair. He came from Traiana, the post-trade network for FX and equities and listed derivatives, where he had spent much of his career, first as VP of marketing and business development starting in 2002 when Traiana was still a startup, then as head of product strategy and CMO after a three-year detour running marketing at XOJET, the private jet charter company. Before Traiana he was at Ariba during its climb from small startup to enterprise software incumbent, and before that at Oracle, where he managed the Americas Application Technology team.

You can read the resume two ways. As a straight line through enterprise software and then post-trade financial technology, which is accurate. Or as a pattern of small early bets - Ariba in 1997, Traiana in 2002 - that turned into big infrastructure companies, which is also accurate and probably more interesting.

You can only use AI where you can afford to be wrong every now and then. - Nick Solinger, IDX London, June 2026

Solinger holds a bachelor's in computer science from MIT. He is also a CFA charterholder. This is not a common credential stack. Financial infrastructure has historically been built by people who understand one of those two things well. Solinger, by training, gets both, which helps when the technology and the market microstructure keep colliding, which they have been for about a decade now and show no signs of stopping.

The gap between 97.5% and 83%.

During the June 2026 market disruption tied to the Iran conflict, Solinger's team measured the share of derivatives trades that flowed cleanly through the Trade Data Network against what the wider industry recorded. The delta was significant enough that Solinger mentioned it, unprompted, on stage at FIA IDX in London.

This is the actual product being sold: fewer angry phone calls on the worst possible day.

What the Trade Data Network actually does.

A listed derivatives trade has a lot of counterparties for a piece of paper that used to be one line in a floor broker's book. The client trades through a broker. The broker gives up the trade to a clearing firm. The clearing firm registers it at a clearinghouse. Every one of those hops involves a message, and every message has to reconcile against every other message, or someone gets a call at seven in the morning. The Trade Data Network is a central hub that lets a Futures Commission Merchant hit that hub once and have every venue and every counterparty pick up the message on the other side.

Solinger described the mechanic in 2014, before he ran the network: "The typical FCM has been able to clear three, four, five, six different venues with that one connection to our hub." Twelve years later he is still describing the same thesis, only now the hub sits inside the walls of his own company. The Trade Data Network was, in his framing at IDX London, built for the operational crises of early 2020 and has since become the substrate for something more ambitious.

Which does not mean it is slow. FIA Tech has expanded into execution and clearing cost analytics, reference data, and legal agreement management. In May 2024 it announced a partnership with Nasdaq to integrate Nasdaq Real-Time Clearing into the TDN, which is a sentence that sounds routine and is not. And in January 2024 it launched a global client operations team with eClerx to monitor trades and allocations flowing through the network on a follow-the-sun basis.

Small details that tell you more than the resume.

He keeps returning to companies. He left Traiana for XOJET, came back three years later, briefly left again in 2015, came back two weeks later. Some people quit and stay quit. Solinger seems to be the other kind, the kind that loops back into the same operating problem until it is solved.

He worked at a private jet charter for three years. Sandwiched between two runs at a derivatives post-trade network. That gap in the resume is where the CMO discipline came from. He walked into Traiana's second act better at product marketing than he had walked out of the first.

The address matters. 142 West 57th Street sits half a block off Sixth Avenue in Midtown Manhattan, a couple of blocks from Carnegie Hall and inside walking distance of most of FIA Tech's twelve owners. If you had to design a Manhattan office for a customer-owned utility, you would design this one.

The credential pairing is uncommon. An MIT computer science degree signals one professional peer group. The CFA charter signals another. The overlap is small. When Solinger talks about tokenization, he is drawing on both.