Edward Wray - Agenda Setters 2008

Name: Edward Wray

Title: Betfair co-founder

Position: 33    Last year: Not ranked

Why? Online betting exchange success

Agree with panel rating?

• Neelie Kroes
• back to list
• Brent Hoberman

Back in 1998 former JP Morgan trader Edward Wray teamed up with software programmer and professional card player Andrew 'Bert' Black to create a peer-to-peer gambling site. Betfair launched two years later, bringing technical and business innovation well beyond its sphere.

The betting exchange - which allows punters to take and place bets directly with each other - now matches more than five million bets per day and serves more than three billion page impressions per week.

Behind all this is a technology infrastructure way ahead of its competition - one which even outstrips some of the leading financial exchanges in terms of capacity and the sub-second settlement of transactions.

One Agenda Setters panellist explained Wray's importance: "A fast-paced innovator of business models and their enabling technologies, radically rewriting the consumerisation of the judgement of chance, confirming that business innovations on the web are always exploited first in betting and pornography."