Howard Edelstein

Howard Edelstein
Born	1954 New York, NY
Alma mater	City University of New York Stanford University
Occupation	Technology entrepreneur

Howard Edelstein (born 1954) is an American corporate executive, serial entrepreneur, and investor in the financial technology industry. He was founder, president and CEO of Thomson Electronic Settlements Group (now Omgeo), CEO of BT Radianz, NYFIX and BondDesk Group. In the private equity space, he was entrepreneur-in-residence for Warburg Pincus and was later an operating partner of Advent International. Edelstein was named to Global Custodian Magazine's Securities Services Hall of Fame in 2009.

Edelstein was born in New York City, the son of a Polish Holocaust survivor family. He was raised in the Bronx, where his father was in the wholesale grocery business. His family lived modestly, but in reflecting on his family life, he later remarked that his father taught him the importance of education, persistence, and generosity. He worked after school at a local delicatessen beginning at age 14. He joked that this gave him job skills so that he knew that, when he grew up, he could always find work slicing smoked fish. As an undergraduate, Edelstein attended the City University of New York, where he earned a bachelor of electrical engineering degree. He went on to earn a master's degree in electrical engineering from Stanford University.

Edelstein’s first job after graduate school was at the Ford Motor Company in Detroit, where its president, Lee Iacocca, was investigating the integration of new technologies and concepts into Ford automobiles. There, as a young engineer, Edelstein collaborated with a group of Stanford academics, including some who had been his professors in graduate school. Among the futuristic innovations he worked on were heat-resistant semiconductor-based sensor and control systems and speech recognition software for ”talking cars”. After several years at Ford, Edelstein became interested in telecommunications and applications of newly developing information systems technologies to the financial services industry. Around 1980, he joined Telrad, an Israeli telecommunications company, where he worked for five years, initially on data compression algorithms. At Telrad, Edelstein began to apply information technology and telecommunications enhancements to the financial markets, where communications were still predominantly voice- and paper-based. He helped to develop a proprietary hardware and software platform to implement a touchscreen-based order-entry system, one of the first in the world, for a commodities brokerage firm. He went on to work on a variety of products in that space, including proprietary trading systems, digital data distribution platforms, and mortgage backed securities and derivatives. He was one of the founders of Knight-Ridder's Financial Information business and later in the 1980s became head of international marketing and product development for Dow Jones Telerate. Edelstein then moved west to join C.ATS Software, a provider of risk management technology, extending his role into middle- and back-office products there.

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