A Quiet Builder

There is a certain kind of person who builds things that outlast the noise around them — who works for thirty years without ever once needing the room to look at him. Alex Tsigutkin is that kind of person. Tonight, as his eldest son Jeremy stands under the chuppah at Cipriani on Wall Street, it is worth saying out loud what those of us who daven beside him every day already know: almost everything good he has built, he has built quietly. I first met Jeremy 2 years ago, and when I asked him what type of Chasid he is, he looked me dead in the eyes and cracked, "I'm with the Neturai Karta," now we are brothers. FROM MARIUPOL TO WALL STREET Alex came to the United States from Mariupol, Ukraine, in 1980 — out of a country where Jewish life had been pressed nearly out of existence, into a city that asked him to start from nothing. He earned his bachelor’s degree at Yeshiva University and a master’s in information technology and business at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University. Software engineering became the trade; Torah remained the anchor. He has never treated the two as being in tension. In 1991 he founded Axiom Software Laboratories, AxiomSL, on a conviction almost no one else held at the time: that the world’s banks were about to face a data problem of a kind they had never seen, and that regulatory reporting would become one of the hardest engineering challenges in finance. He designed the original framework himself, and patented a dynamic approach to managing data for risk and regulatory reporting, an architecture flexible enough that a rule written in Frankfurt and a rule written in Singapore could run on the same engine. He was right, and he was early. Over three decades AxiomSL became the system of record for regulatory reporting at many of the largest financial institutions on earth: Deutsche Bank, JPMorgan, Bank of China and Standard Chartered among them, covering more than 110 regulators across 55 jurisdictions from offices on four continents. Alex served as CEO from 1991 until 2021, when AxiomSL merged with Calypso to form Adenza, on whose board he now sits. In 2023, Nasdaq acquired Adenza for $10.5 billion, among the largest transactions in the history of financial technology. Which is to say: the software a young immigrant began writing alone in 1991 sits today inside Nasdaq’s core technology, quietly helping keep the global financial system honest. Thirty years, one company, no shortcuts — and he almost never mentions any of it. THE ALTNEU The building that means the most to him has no ticker symbol. In 2021, together with Rabbi Benjamin Goldschmidt, Alex and Diana set out to create a shul on the Upper East Side — serious about learning, warm to the stranger, unembarrassed about beauty. They called it the Altneu, “old-new,” after Prague’s Altneuschul: the oldest active synagogue in Europe, and a name that carries exactly the argument Alex has spent his life making — that the most ancient thing we have is also