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As Morgan Stanley's global head of electronic trading services, Eli Lederman could reasonably take the credit for pre-eminent equities trading technology that has won the Euromoney technology awards every year since they began. But he would never do that. He is refreshingly modest and genuine for someone who works at an investment bank, the sort of person who asks his right-hand woman, Nell Axelrod, to join him in every meeting - not because he needs her help or because she insists, but because he thinks she should be included.
When told that he is modest, Lederman jokes that he just hopes that no-one says of him what Winston Churchill said of Clement Attlee, that "he's a modest man with much to be modest about".
Lederman started working at Morgan Stanley 10 years ago, developing risk management software and working on derivatives and portfolio analytics and trading. "I was lucky to be working with a visionary man, Vikram Pandit, who was head of equity derivatives back then [now head of institutional securities]," says Lederman. "He decided that client technology was going to be a very important part of the institutional business and asked me to look into it.