Home > About Fortex > Management Team

The roots of Fortex, Inc. pre-date the U.S. bull market of the late 1990s, when the company’s founders launched one of the industry’s first products to enable direct-access, electronic equities trading on the world’s major exchanges. Today Fortex remains committed to keeping its customers in front of technology advances to help them achieve a competitive trading advantage.

Daniel Z. Chen, CEO and Co-founder
With expertise in a broad range of financial markets and technologies, Daniel is responsible for strategy execution, operations, and business development. As co-founder of Courant Technologies, he led the company’s successful launch of the OpenEx trading platform and its subsequent evolution into Fortex. Prior to Fortex, Daniel co-founded and bootstrapped the highly successful Millennium Exchange, which was subsequently sold to an investment syndicate. Daniel’s background at Goldman Sachs’ New York headquarters paved the way to entrepreneurial success with innovative financial technologies. At Goldman Sachs, he specialized in the areas of structuring, modeling, and trading complex fixed-income derivative securities, routinely working on deals that ranged to $2 billion in size. He also participated in the development of large-scale trading and analytics systems that contributed to the firm’s competitive trading advantage. Daniel earned a bachelor’s degree from New York University with distinguished honors in Computer Science and Economics.

Jay Zhan, CTO and Co-founder
Jay brings years of experience and expertise in developing industry-leading financial trading systems to Fortex. A widely recognized industry expert, he is responsible for Fortex’s engineering and product deployment. As co-founder of Courant Technologies and Millennium Exchange, Jay is the chief architect of the highly successful OpenEx and MX trading platforms. Previously, he worked as a management consultant with First Manhattan Consulting Group, a New York management consulting firm that serves the world’s top 50 banks. At First Manhattan, Jay was instrumental in designing large-scale banking systems for major U.S. money center banks. His prior experience also includes positions with the Deloitte & Touche Consulting Group’s IT practice and Bankers Trust. Jay earned a bachelor’s degree from New York University in Computer Science summa cum laude, with Phi Beta Kappa and the department’s highest honors.