At first glance, Dexter Senft doesn't look the
adventurous type. He's smartly dressed, as Lehman Brothers
bankers usually are. He has a quiet, patient voice, and
short-cropped silver hair that gives away his maturing
years.
So Euromoney was surprised that he had travelled to the meeting
riding pillion on a motorbike from Heathrow airport. It's the best
way to travel for top-flight executives, as a bike can cut through
London's traffic much faster than a car. But it's not for nervous
types.
It's not the sort of thing to scare Senft, who is a keen pilot
and the owner of a Cessna 210 six-seater aircraft.
His career has taken some twists too. Thirty years in banking
have taken him from the data-processing team (it wasn't called IT
back then) at First Boston to becoming one of the first dot com
entrepreneurs in finance, to being the global head of fixed income
e-commerce at Lehman Brothers.
It doesn't stop there. He is on the TradeWeb board, and is
chairman of the FIX committee - a group backed by the Bond Market
Association that is developing a common language for electronic
bond trading. On the way, he led the team that developed
collateralized mortgage obligations in the US. In short, he's one
of the most respected figures in e-finance - and modest too.
"Various people aggrandize my character by accusing me of
inventing the CMO," he says. "But it was not one person's effort.
There was a team of people, from research, sales, trading, banking,
accounting, and legal. It took a year to happen. But when I look
back on my career, it's on my list of good things I have achieved."
The result of this team effort was the launch of the first Freddie
Mac CMO issue in June 1983.
Technology has always been central to Senft's professional life.
As an analyst, he used it to help him create quant models - no mean
feat in the days before the first PC was marketed in 1981.
Ten years later, in 1991, Senft left his position as head of
research at First Boston and became one of the first e-commerce
entrepreneurs. By that time, he was already considered a tech
veteran. The idea was to set up EJV - a platform that would unite
the pre-payment mortgage analytics of six banks. It was a good idea
but it didn't work out. The platform would have worked at its best
by uniting the banks' analytical capabilities, which sadly also
meant uniting their views. As Senft learnt then, and several other
consortium site entrepreneurs learnt 10 years later, that is a
thankless task. Even now, no similar platform to EJV exists, but
Senft is reluctant to try again. "One of those projects per
lifetime is enough, thanks," he says.
When TradeWeb was created in the late 1990s by two former First
Boston staff, it was natural for Senft to be involved. It is now
the biggest multidealer internet-based trading platform for bonds.
At one point, Senft was the platform's chairman. "One of the
handicaps EJV faced is that it was not in the middle of a dot com
boom," he says. "Whereas with TradeWeb, dealers looked at it as
inevitable. They knew the risk was out there that if they didn't
figure it out, someone else would - someone like Instinet or
Bloomberg could promote the technology. We knew we didn't want
that."
He became involved in the FIX project when the Bond Market
Association set up a protocols and standards committee around three
years ago. The latest protocol is set for release in January 2003,
and if it is adopted successfully by the buy side it will link
together much better the front office and back office for
fixed-income trading. Senft says: "That technology threatens
TradeWeb and other e-trading systems in the same way that they
threatened the voice business." He therefore understands that he
and TradeWeb need to be involved in the process of building the new
protocol - it's the best way of protecting the platform from being
usurped. Senft says: "The boards I sit on are integral to what I do
for a living. I see them as shaping the future of the fixed-income
business. I can sit on the sidelines or be a leader, and I prefer
the latter."
Senft's non-work interests including music, competitive bridge,
word puzzles, and the Marsenne prime project, which is seeking the
largest possible prime numbers. He has two computers at home
working on the quest.