Dar Nazem is COO of GTS.
What surprised you in 2024?
I joined GTS in the second half of 2024, so going in, I was aware that GTS made markets in over 10,000 global names and was powered by incredible technology. What surprised me was how the IP and technology stack could be leveraged for other businesses across our organization, enabling us to provide deeper liquidity and tighter spreads in the market. We are seeing significant synergies across the entire franchise.
What are your expectations for 2025?
We expect to continue growing our multi-asset client franchise businesses across Equities and FX. This spans everything from our ETF to Wholesale Market Making to FX businesses, as well as our NYSE Designated Market Making and Floor Broker activities. From the COO seat, we are focusing a lot of our efforts on operational excellence and simplifying workflows across the stack to facilitate faster decision-making—not just on the trading side but across the entire franchise, including front, middle, and back-office.
What are you most excited for in 2025?
There are two major themes we’re excited about and focused on: First, with the impending change of guard at the SEC, we look forward to seeing how market structure regulation will evolve under the new administration. Our Co-Founder and CEO, Ari Rubenstein, testified before the House Committee on Financial Services Subcommittee on Capital Markets last year, clearly outlining GTS’s stance, and you’ll undoubtedly hear more thought leadership from GTS in 2025 regarding our market structure viewpoints and affect the impact to markets and specifically our trading partners and clients. We’re eager to continue to expand upon our expertise and data-driven approach to help clients tackle trading challenges while remaining a highly trusted counterparty.
Second, we have ambitious plans in place across all of our business units and our technology and operations organizations. We are particularly excited about growing our business units while continually calibrating the organization to ensure GTS is well-positioned to consistently deliver superior liquidity solutions while providing concierge-level client service.
