Metamako Hires FinTech Vet Sweeney to Lead Asia-Pac Business Development

Sweeney has two decades of experience in the financial technology and market data business, in Tokyo and across Asia-Pacific. Most recently, he spent almost five years as vice president and Japan representative director at ICE Data Services, the data arm of Intercontinental Exchange, which he joined following its acquisition of Interactive Data, where he was general manager for Japan, prior to which he served a brief stint as director of sales for Asia-Pacific at tick data management and analysis software vendor OneMarketData, prior to which he spent three years as country manager for Japan and Korea at NYSE Technologies. Before joining NYSE Tech in 2007, he was a senior consultant at MKS Software, and spent six and a half years at foreign exchange trading software vendor Cognotec.

Kevin Covington, who was appointed as chief executive officer at Metamako only a month ago, says Asia currently only accounts for 10 percent of the vendor's business.

"We've been increasingly supplying our existing customers around the region. We believe that as part of our ongoing plans, now is the time to start establishing ourselves in Asia. We see the Japanese market as one in particular that we can focus on, and initially we are going to focus on a number of key centers and then take it from there," Covington says.

These planned market centers include Hong Kong and Singapore, where Metamako is already seeing demand for its products, he adds.

While a majority of its consumers are high-frequency trading (HFT) firms, Covington says the company has also been receiving interest from sell-side firms as well as a couple of exchanges. For example, in July, the Australian Securities Exchange rolled out Metamako's MetaMux switching device to provide real-time monitoring of its new trading platform, timestamping, and time synchronization of internal network traffic. In addition, a few exchanges are currently evaluating Metamako's products, he says.

"Our target in Asia is the wider finance community, including the HFTs," Covington says, adding that his focus is to scale the business and ramp up operations as well as production. "Now that we've got activity in all three regions, we are making sure we anticipate and cope with demand. The company is growing very rapidly, and we are obviously innovating a lot and continuing to develop new products."