The View from the Office.

I met up with Ryan Terpstra, the CEO of ITRS, at the company’s flagship event, Elevate NY, arranged for clients on 42nd Street. I had an Old Fashioned and tapas. 

Ryan joined ITRS about a year and a half ago from ION. ITRS provides real-time observability and monitoring for the IT systems of the world’s largest banks. It’s backed by two private equity firms, Montague and TA Associates 

This is Ryan’s first time running a PE-backed company, but not his first rodeo as a CEO. He founded Selerity in December 2008 and ran it for more than a decade. The company used AI to extract event data from primary sources and structure to give financial firms. 

He started the business at age 26 during the depths of the global financial crisis and ran it out of an apartment at 99 John Street in lower Manhattan with one unpaid intern. His CTO was a former Morgan Stanley technologist who helped out on weekends.

At the time it launched, Ryan could look out his apartment window and see limousines pulling up to the New York Fed. JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon and other bank CEOs were meeting with Fed officials to try to save the global financial system.

Ryan raised $5 million from fintech incubators backed by high-frequency trading entrepreneurs. They were “the only people with money,” Ryan said, because volatility during the period was through the roof.

Selerity took longer to build than expected, but Ryan eventually sold the company to Dealogic, a unit of ION, the financial software group run by Andrea Pignataro, the former Salomon Brothers quant. 

Ryan became chief product officer at ION Analytics under CEO Jodie Doullard. In the process, he “caught the bug for innovation at scale” which helps explain his later move. 

He was head-hunted to run ITRS and during his first year visited the firm’s top 40 clients. He pushed ahead with an initiative to integrate agentic AI into the product. 

Ryan said it’s an exciting time because so much foundational technology is in flux. He is pushing ITRS employees to leverage AI more in house and with clients. 

Inside ITRS, he surveyed 150 employees and found more than 25% productivity gains from AI tools and that was before Claude Opus 4.6, which he said raised their ability to grow by a step-function change.

The firm is now in the process of rolling out AI embedded in its core product. 

You can connect with Ryan via LinkedIn or DM me for a warm intro.