Industry Trailblazer Award
Bea Ordonez
Firm: CONVERGEX
The secret to Bea Ordonez’s success is simple – stay relevant. Do whatever needs to be done, adapt to whatever change occurs around you or get left behind. It’s as simple as that.
And when it comes to adaptation, Ordonez has moved throughout her career to new places and challenges. Literally. She grew up in London, England and wanted to be a lawyer – a far cry from algorithms, accounting and Wall Street. Her journey would take her across the Atlantic with several stops before ending in Manhattan.
“Working on Wall Street was never part of my plan,” she told Traders. “I didn’t think when I was growing up that I would someday be in New York in the financial services industry.”
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Upon graduating from the University of Nottingham, Ordonez became a tax accountant at Arthur Andersen and spent almost two years at the prestigious firm. Intrigued by the mergers-and-acquisitions craze that enveloped the financial word during the mid- to late ’90s, she moved to rival PricewaterhouseCoopers, where she also spent nearly two years before the road came calling.
“It was here that my career made a hard right turn,” Ordonez recalled. “I had had enough of London and wanted to go work overseas, spend time there, do something and then return to London.”
She wound up in Bermuda. It was 1998.
Her search ended when she was hired as CFO of G-Trade, then a unit of Credit Lyonnais. The days were long, and learning the business was tough.
“It was extremely hard work building a business,” she said. “But I was part of something completely different and new, and that was what made it exciting.”
G-Trade was sold to The Bank of New York in 2002. Later, she relocated to Orlando, Fla., where she oversaw the firm’s move to consolidate operations globally. With a small group of people, she built an entire global operations headquarters from the ground up – hiring talent, overseeing technology build-outs and training staff. The firm would eventually become ConvergEx in 2006, and later she would be appointed COO based out of the global brokerage’s New York corporate headquarters.
“This was challenging, but a lot of fun,” she reminisced.
Then in 2011, she moved yet again, but back to her big-city roots – New York. As her leadership role expanded from tactical to strategic, Ordonez had to be closer to senior management. Her love of Wall Street and business grew, only to be rivaled by her love of the Big Apple.
So where does she see herself in the next three to five years? Ordonez is uncertain as she told Traders she doesn’t have a master plan, but she is certain she’s moving in the right direction.
“If you’re not growing or driving in new directions, you get left behind,” she said. “Each day presents new challenges, and I try to learn something new every day ? only then will you remain relevant.”
