V incent Viola is a self-made American billionaire who built his fortune as a pioneer in high-frequency electronic trading. The son of an Italian immigrant truck driver, he grew up in Brooklyn and was the first in his family to attend college. He graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point and served as an officer in the U.S. Army. He later began his career on Wall Street as a commodities trader on the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX), where he eventually served as chairman. He was a visionary in the transition from open-outcry trading pits to electronic markets.

His career-defining success was the founding of Virtu Financial in 2008, a company that became one of the world's largest and most successful high-frequency trading and market-making firms. Virtu uses sophisticated, high-speed computer algorithms to execute a massive volume of trades across global financial markets. He took the company public in 2015. In addition to his finance career, Viola is the owner of the Florida Panthers of the National Hockey League (NHL). He was briefly nominated by President Donald Trump to be the Secretary of the Army but withdrew his name before confirmation.