In the late nineties, a young John Shay was cutting his teeth as a US Treasuries broker when he spotted a harbinger of change for fixed-income markets.

“When I worked at Icap, I used to see two brokers shouting across the room that they had banks wanting to buy and sell 10-year US dollar interest rate swaps. Those two dealers were a match but they never actually traded, simply because they couldn’t hear each other over the noise on the floor,” says Shay, who now manages the fixed-income and