Cormac Kinney is a serial

fintech Fintech, a portmanteau of "financial technology", refers to firms using new technology to compete with traditional financial methods in the delivery of financial services. Artificial intelligence, blockchain, cloud computing, and big data are r ...

entrepreneur, known for Diamond Standard, a regulator-approved fungible diamond commodity, Heatmaps, cited in 5,800 US Patents, and a publisher social network acquired by News Corp.

Early life

Kinney grew up in

University City, Missouri University City (colloquially, U. City) is an inner-ring suburb of the city of St. Louis in St. Louis County, in the U.S. state of Missouri. The population was measured at 35,065 by the 2020 census. The city is one of the older suburbs in the ...

, a suburb of

St. Louis St. Louis () is the second-largest city in Missouri, United States. It sits near the confluence of the Mississippi and the Missouri Rivers. In 2020, the city proper had a population of 301,578, while the bi-state metropolitan area, which e ...

, the oldest of six children. He graduated from

Carnegie Mellon University Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. One of its predecessors was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools; it became the Carnegie Institute of Technology ...

's College of Engineering, earning a

Bachelor of Science A Bachelor of Science (BS, BSc, SB, or ScB; from the Latin ') is a bachelor's degree awarded for programs that generally last three to five years. The first university to admit a student to the degree of Bachelor of Science was the University o ...

degree, and a

Master of Science A Master of Science ( la, Magisterii Scientiae; abbreviated MS, M.S., MSc, M.Sc., SM, S.M., ScM or Sc.M.) is a master's degree in the field of science awarded by universities in many countries or a person holding such a degree. In contrast t ...

in 5 years, skipping one year of college, but leaving a

Software Engineering Software engineering is a systematic engineering approach to software development. A software engineer is a person who applies the principles of software engineering to design, develop, maintain, test, and evaluate computer software. The term '' ...

degree uncompleted. He has lived in

Manhattan Manhattan (), known regionally as the City, is the most densely populated and geographically smallest of the five boroughs of New York City. The borough is also coextensive with New York County, one of the original counties of the U.S. state ...

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...

since 1994, and is married to Mimi So, an influential jewelry designer.

Career

As a student at Carnegie Mellon, Kinney founded two small software companies in succession, acquired by

Northwestern Mutual Northwestern Mutual is an American financial services mutual organization based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The financial security company provides consultation on wealth and asset income protection, education planning, retirement planning, investm ...

Life Insurance Co., and

JD Edwards J.D. Edwards World Solution Company or JD Edwards, abbreviated JDE, was an enterprise resource planning (ERP) software company, whose namesake ERP system is still sold under ownership by Oracle Corporation. JDE's products included World for IB ...

. Both were related to optimization.

Heatmaps, NeoVision

In 1993, with Carnegie Mellon Senior Research Scientist, Marc Graham, Kinney founded NeoVision Hypersystems, Inc. to develop and market the

Heat maps A heat map (or heatmap) is a data visualization technique that shows magnitude of a phenomenon as color in two dimensions. The variation in color may be by hue or intensity, giving obvious visual cues to the reader about how the phenomenon is c ...

technology. The term "heat map" was coined by Kinney and trademarked in 1993, but the trademark was unintentionally abandoned by its acquirer. As of January 2020, since 1993, Heat maps have been cited in over 5,550 patents granted by the US PTO, and in 200,000 peer reviewed research papers. As developed by Neovision, Heat maps were a real time

middleware Middleware is a type of computer software that provides services to software applications beyond those available from the operating system. It can be described as "software glue". Middleware makes it easier for software developers to implement co ...

and computation platform used to rapidly develop trading and risk management systems, featuring the first commercial application of heat maps.

Citibank Citibank, N. A. (N. A. stands for " National Association") is the primary U.S. banking subsidiary of financial services multinational Citigroup. Citibank was founded in 1812 as the City Bank of New York, and later became First National City ...

was a key initial client, for which Kinney designed a risk management application for the global capital markets division in 1999. Ultimately the Neovision technology was installed on over 100 institutional trading desks, and at Nasdaq and the DTC for monitoring $1.7 trillion in daily transactions. Distribution licenses were signed with

Bloomberg L.P. Bloomberg L.P. is a privately held financial, software, data, and media company headquartered in Midtown Manhattan, New York City. It was co-founded by Michael Bloomberg in 1981, with Thomas Secunda, Duncan MacMillan (Bloomberg), Duncan MacMi ...

, Dow Jones Telerate,

Thomson Thomson may refer to: Names * Thomson (surname), a list of people with this name and a description of its origin * Thomson baronets, four baronetcies created for persons with the surname Thomson Businesses and organizations * SGS-Thomson Mic ...

, and

Reuters Reuters ( ) is a news agency owned by Thomson Reuters Corporation. It employs around 2,500 journalists and 600 photojournalists in about 200 locations worldwide. Reuters is one of the largest news agencies in the world. The agency was estab ...

to install Heatmaps to over 300,000 desktops. The

Nasdaq The Nasdaq Stock Market () (National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations Stock Market) is an American stock exchange based in New York City. It is the most active stock trading venue in the US by volume, and ranked second ...

incorporated Heatmaps into the front page of www.nasdaq.com from 2001 through 2013. In 2002, Kinney designed a trade cost analysis system for

Fidelity Investments Fidelity Investments, commonly referred to as Fidelity, earlier as Fidelity Management & Research or FMR, is an American multinational financial services corporation based in Boston, Massachusetts. The company was established in 1946 and is on ...

which was cited by

The Wall Street Journal ''The Wall Street Journal'' is an American business-focused, international daily newspaper based in New York City, with international editions also available in Chinese and Japanese. The ''Journal'', along with its Asian editions, is published ...

as "a sophisticated tracking system to see which brokers can execute trades most efficiently," and was credited with reducing the mutual-fund firm's trading costs by hundreds of millions of dollars per year, to half the industry average. This system was installed at Bank of America Investment Management, Invesco, Janus, Merrill Lynch Investment Management and Putnam Investments. Brian Barefoot, President of PaineWebber International, and former global head of sales and trading at Merrill Lynch joined NeoVision as CEO, and Deutsche Bank's COO joined the board of directors. Subsequent to NeoVision, Barefoot became President of

Babson College Babson College is a private business school in Wellesley, Massachusetts. Established in 1919, its central focus is on entrepreneurship education. It was founded by Roger W. Babson as an all-male business institute, but became coeducational i ...

for seven years. Neovision raised $8 million from

Deutsche Bank Deutsche Bank AG (), sometimes referred to simply as Deutsche, is a German multinational investment bank and financial services company headquartered in Frankfurt, Germany, and dual-listed on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange and the New York Sto ...

Bear Stearns The Bear Stearns Companies, Inc. was a New York-based global investment bank, securities trading and brokerage firm that failed in 2008 as part of the global financial crisis and recession, and was subsequently sold to JPMorgan Chase. The compa ...

Intel Corporation Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the developers of the x86 series ...

and venture capital investors. After a planned $30 million IPO fell through due to the

dot com crash The dot-com bubble (dot-com boom, tech bubble, or the Internet bubble) was a stock market bubble in the late 1990s, a period of massive growth in the use and adoption of the Internet. Between 1995 and its peak in March 2000, the Nasdaq Compo ...

, NeoVision was acquired in 2003 by

The Carlyle Group The Carlyle Group is a multinational private equity, alternative asset management and financial services corporation based in the United States with $376 billion of assets under management. It specializes in private equity, real assets, and pri ...

and merged into financial software conglomerate

SS&C Technologies SS&C Technologies Holdings, Inc. (known as SS&C) is an American multinational holding company headquartered in Windsor, Connecticut, that sells software and software as a service to the financial services industry. The company has offices in the ...

. Today the NeoVision technologies are incorporated into several SS&C products.

Sentiment Strategies

After the sale of NeoVision, Kinney shifted his focus to quantitative trading, developing a computational linguistics based trading system, which he used to manage hedge fund strategies at

Amaranth Advisors Amaranth Advisors LLC was an American multi-strategy hedge fund founded by Nicholas M. Maounis and headquartered in Greenwich, Connecticut. At its peak, the firm had up to $9.2 billion in assets under management before collapsing in September 20 ...

, and Tudor Investment Corp. Subsequently, he launched Sentiment Strategies, a New York-based hedge fund consulting firm, additionally managing a $400 million portfolio for

Millennium Management Millennium Management is an investment management firm with a multistrategy hedge fund offering. It is one of the world's largest alternative asset management firms with over $50 billion assets under management. The firm operates in America, Eur ...

, and QuantFund LLC, a quantitative hedge fund.

News Corp Social Network

In 2013, Kinney developed a social network for users for business news sites, based upon his design for a social graph to track the news consumption of a large number of readers. The system recommends articles to readers based on their profile and interests, and based on news discovered by peers sharing those interests.

Rupert Murdoch Keith Rupert Murdoch ( ; born 11 March 1931) is an Australian-born American business magnate. Through his company News Corp, he is the owner of hundreds of local, national, and international publishing outlets around the world, including ...

News Corp News Corporation, stylized as News Corp, is an American mass media and publishing company headquartered in Midtown Manhattan, New York City. The second incarnation of the News Corporation (1980–2013), original News Corporation, it was formed ...

financed the development of the concept, simply named "Network," and agreed to implement Kinney's technology in

, and other News Corp publications. News Corp announced the initiative as a

LinkedIn LinkedIn () is an American business and employment-oriented online service that operates via websites and mobile apps. Launched on May 5, 2003, the platform is primarily used for professional networking and career development, and allows job se ...

competitor. Kinney brought together a team of 70 staff from various News Corp and Wall Street Journal departments to build the technology. Network's recommendation and social features were a key element of the

WSJ.com ''The Wall Street Journal'' is an American business-focused, international daily newspaper based in New York City, with international editions also available in Chinese and Japanese. The ''Journal'', along with its Asian editions, is published ...

redesign, launched in 2015. Kinney intended Network to be used by a consortium of leading publishers, aggregating their reader's interests, to enable cross-publication recommendations. Although ''

The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...

'' , ''

The Washington Post ''The Washington Post'' (also known as the ''Post'' and, informally, ''WaPo'') is an American daily newspaper published in Washington, D.C. It is the most widely circulated newspaper within the Washington metropolitan area and has a large nati ...

'',

Time, Inc. Time Inc. was an American worldwide mass media corporation founded on November 28, 1922, by Henry Luce and Briton Hadden and based in New York City. It owned and published over 100 magazine brands, including its namesake ''Time'', ''Sports Illu ...

, ''

Forbes ''Forbes'' () is an American business magazine owned by Integrated Whale Media Investments and the Forbes family. Published eight times a year, it features articles on finance, industry, investing, and marketing topics. ''Forbes'' also re ...

'' and other publishers expressed interest, News Corp decided to acquire Network in order to keep it exclusive to its own publications.

Flont

In 2016, Kinney launched Flont, a platform to introduce designer fine jewelry into the sharing economy. Flont provides fine jewelry as a service, in partnership with over 40 brands. A software developer and

jewelry Jewellery ( UK) or jewelry (U.S.) consists of decorative items worn for personal adornment, such as brooches, rings, necklaces, earrings, pendants, bracelets, and cufflinks. Jewellery may be attached to the body or the clothes. From a western ...

retailer, it enables high-touch sales via

E-commerce E-commerce (electronic commerce) is the activity of electronically buying or selling of products on online services or over the Internet. E-commerce draws on technologies such as mobile commerce, electronic funds transfer, supply chain manageme ...

, delivering jewelry to consumers on demand. Flont provides software and logistics services to global jewelry brands, department stores and jewelry retailers for their own sharing services. In 2018,

Chow Tai Fook Chow Tai Fook group is a Hong Kong–based, privately-owned conglomerate with holdings in the jewellery, property development, hotel, department store, transportation, energy, telecommunications, port, casino, and other businesses. Despite the ...

, the largest jewelry retailer in Asia with a market cap of HK$106 billion, announced a joint venture with Flont, to open up to 500 locations in China, inside Chow Tai Fook retail stores.

Diamond Standard Co.

In June 2019, Kinney launched Diamond Standard, the producer of the first regulator approved, fungible natural

diamond Diamond is a Allotropes of carbon, solid form of the element carbon with its atoms arranged in a crystal structure called diamond cubic. Another solid form of carbon known as graphite is the Chemical stability, chemically stable form of car ...

commodity In economics, a commodity is an economic good, usually a resource, that has full or substantial fungibility: that is, the market treats instances of the good as equivalent or nearly so with no regard to who produced them. The price of a comm ...

, which is delivered as a coin or a bar, and traded as a regulator-approved digital token. The Diamond Standard commodities are the underlying spot asset for a futures contract being listed on the CME and an ETF being listed on the

NYSE The New York Stock Exchange (NYSE, nicknamed "The Big Board") is an American stock exchange in the Financial District, Manhattan, Financial District of Lower Manhattan in New York City. It is by far the List of stock exchanges, world's largest s ...

, subject to regulatory approvals.

Awards

*Carnegie Mellon Entrepreneur of the Year 1994 *Pennsylvania Small Business Entrepreneur of the Year 1994

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Kinney, Cormac American computer programmers Living people 1971 births Businesspeople from St. Louis People from Manhattan Carnegie Mellon University College of Engineering alumni