Rick McVey serves as CEO and chairman of the board of directors for MarketAxess Holdings Inc., a company he founded in 2000. His leadership has developed MarketAxess into the leading electronic platform for corporate bonds for global institutional investors and broker-dealer firms to trade a broad range of credit products. MarketAxess has been one of the fastest growing financial service companies in the U.S. public markets and in 2019 was added to the S&P 500 stock index.
MarketAxess has developed a wide range of trading tools to connect bond buyers and sellers and has been awarded 11 patents for its trading technology. McVey is known for transforming Wall Street’s lucrative but outdated approach to trading bonds. These innovations have earned McVey many awards including Ernst & Young’s “National Entrepreneur of the Year for Financial Services” in 2012. He is also the recipient of numerous awards from Institutional Investor and has landed on their Tech 40 list fifteen times, most recently in 2017 as number 23. This list honors the visionaries, innovators, and leaders in financial technology.
In 2019, McVey made a commitment to Colby to support the creation of a multidisciplinary data science initiative that will integrate data science into the curriculum from social and natural sciences to the humanities. This initiative makes Colby one of the first liberal arts colleges to offer interdisciplinary coursework and research opportunities in data science.
McVey received a BA in finance from Miami (Ohio) University and an MBA from Indiana University Bloomington. After earning his MBA, McVey worked his way up from trading futures for a Cleveland-based regional bank to serving as an institutional futures broker on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. Ultimately, one of his clients, JP Morgan hired him to run their company’s Chicago futures business and later promoted him to lead North America Fixed Income sales in New York. He originally proposed the business model for MarketAxess in 1999 as part of JP Morgan’s Lab Morgan program, which was designed to back executives’ ideas for using web-based technology. He launched the company as an independent venture after leading an initial funding round which raised $24 million in capital from JP Morgan and other market participants.
McVey is a trustee at Colby where he chairs the Investment Committee for the Colby endowment. He is a member of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) Fixed Income Market Structure Advisory Committee, as well as a member of the board of directors of the Miami (Ohio) University Foundation. He previously served on the board of directors of Blue Mountain Credit Alternatives L.P., an asset management fund focused on the credit markets and equity derivatives markets. McVey has three daughters and two of them, Lane ’12 and Grace ’16, are Colby alum.