FARIBORZ GHADAR Chairman, Intrados Group As a full-time college professor, Fariborz Ghadar moonlighted as a consultant to finance ministers and central bankers in developing nations. His message: Brace yourselves for the deregulation of global markets. Their response: Don't just teach us, help us adapt. So Ghadar, 49, founded the Intrados Group in Washington to help bring capitalism to emerging markets around the globe. With a staff of 200, Intrados has helped build stock exchanges in nearly two dozen nations, including Kazakhstan and Romania. ''We can set up a stock exchange for a million bucks--and that's a bargain,'' boasts Ghadar. He moves fast, before political winds change. In Romania, says Richard Burns, a top privatization official at the U.S. Agency for International Development, ''they were able to mobilize quickly, and yet with a lot of diplomacy.'' In just a little more than a year, Romania's RASDAQ market, a screen-based system patterned on NASDAQ, is handling monthly volume of more than $75 million, approaching established Polish and Czech markets. Intrados' main competitive weapon is its software for building clearance-and-settlement systems. This ensures that buyers get stock certificates and that sellers get cash, not always a given on Third World exchanges. ''Our vision for the year 2020 is a clearance-and-settlement system that can support a global stock exchange,'' says Ghadar. He was born in Iran but grew up in the U.S. and is still a Penn State B-school professor. With new projects in Africa and the Mideast, Ghadar is building that network piece by piece. By Dean Foust in Washington Return to main story

Updated Oct. 16, 1997 by bwwebmaster
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