History of Penson
Founders
Penson's founders, Daniel P. Son and Phil Pendergraft began Penson Financial Services, Inc. in 1995 with a staff of nine team members. The firm entered the securities clearing marketplace as a start-up enterprise competing with financial giants such as Fidelity Investments and Merrill Lynch.
Early Efforts
Penson Financial Services, Inc. focused its early efforts on serving the needs of active trading broker/dealers and investors. Penson grew rapidly, quickly becoming known for its innovative use of technology, advanced automation and exceptional customer service. We soon began to expand our capabilities to serve all types of investors. In 2000, Penson Worldwide Inc. was formed as the primary holding company for Penson Financial Services, Inc. and two other companies that Penson acquired that year, now known as Penson Financial Services Canada, Inc. and Penson Financial Services Limited. With these acquisitions, Penson entered the Canadian and European securities clearing industry which positioned us to take advantage of the expected dramatic growth in online trading in these markets. In 2001, Penson formed Penson Financial Futures, Inc. to enable National Futures Association (NFA) registered correspondents and their customers access to electronically-traded futures contracts.
Going Forward
The following year, Penson acquired Integrated Trading Solutions, Inc. and made an investment in Nexa Technologies, Inc., both software firms that develop and market front-end trade entry software platforms. With our acquisition of the remaining ownership interest in Nexa Technologies in 2004, Integrated Trading Solutions was merged into Nexa Technologies.
In that same year, Penson's technology firm Nexa Technologies, Inc. acquired the assets of Tick Data, a leading provider of historical stock price data to facilitate automated traders' ability to back-test their models and algorithms.
Penson Worldwide, Inc.'s initial public offering was May 16, 2006. The next day, May 17, our common stock began trading on NASDAQ under the symbol: PNSN. Later that year, Penson founded Penson Asia, based in Hong Kong, to provide a range of flexible securities-processing technology and other products and services to financial-industry clients in the Asia-Pacific region.
In February of 2007, the Chicago-based company Goldenberg, Hehmeyer & Co. was acquired and joined the Penson Worldwide group of companies as Penson GHCO. Penson GHCO provides global access to an array of exchange-traded futures and options, including those based on US and foreign equity index products, single stock futures, foreign exchange, interest rate products, foreign yield curves and agricultural and industrial commodities.
Penson Technology
Most of Penson's business is conducted through the Internet. The Company's substantial and continuing investment in innovative and ever evolving systems technology allows it to process a high volume of transactions without sacrificing stability and reliability. Penson utilizes redundant disaster recovery facilities with full replication of data, and the technology infrastructure incorporates load-balanced servers and redundancies to ensure prompt data access capabilities. The Penson technology advantage makes it the flexible choice in global securities services.
