(US and Canada) Nasdaq Private Market (NPM) recently announced hiring Jonathan Yam as its Chief Technology Officer. NPM is an industry pioneer and a leading marketplace for the efficient trading of private company stock for employees, institutional investors, and other shareholders. Yam will lead software development and infrastructure globally, effective immediately. He will be based in the company’s New York office and report to NPM President and COO Eric Folkemer. 

NPM has partnered with some of the fastest-growing, venture-backed private companies on more than 600 company-sponsored programs, facilitating $43 billion in secondary liquidity for 160,000 individual stakeholders. Yam will continue the expansion of the technology team by recruiting developers, operations professionals and data scientists who will help the company deploy transformative trading technology that offers global connectivity for financial services providers through a common marketplace.

 “We are thrilled to welcome Jonathan to NPM,” said NPM Chief Executive Officer Tom Callahan. “His extensive engineering experience will accelerate the de CEOvelopment of our world-class platform and help us achieve our mission to bring trust, transparency, and liquidity to the private markets.”

Yam has more than 20 years of financial technology and engineering experience. Before joining NPM, he was Head of Exchange Engineering at Coinbase and spearheaded the architecture of its next-generation platform. Yam managed the day-to-day technical operations of the company’s U.S. spot exchange and scaled its trading systems for cryptocurrency investors’ needs. Previously, he was Head of Technology Development at IEX and was responsible for the exchange trading systems. Yam was also a Director and Global Head of Client Connectivity and Market Data at Citi. Earlier in his career, he spent six years at RBC Capital Markets as a Director and the Head of Development for the company’s THOR smart order router. Yam spent an additional six years at Barclays Capital and Lehman Brothers, where he was a vice president within the algorithmic trading technology unit. Yam earned his undergraduate degree from Yale University.

“We are excited to welcome Jonathan to NPM,” said Folkemer. “He will scale our technology division and systems to serve the needs of private market clients and address the evolving market structure. By leveraging his years of engineering and senior management experience at fintech firms and on Wall Street, Jonathan will help us fast-track our innovation agenda as we push into new products and client segments.”