Profile · Brookfield, Wisconsin
Jenny Just
Brookfield native
$480 million
Jenny Just is the Brookfield-raised fintech founder who co-built PEAK6 and Apex Fintech Solutions, the brokerage plumbing behind firms such as SoFi, Ally, and Webull. A Brookfield Central High School graduate in the class of 1986, she grew up with two working parents and four brothers—experience she later credited for making a trading floor feel like home—and a crew of girlfriends she still calls the Gidgets, thirteen friends who started before grade school and still reunite as Packers fans. After Michigan's Ross School of Business in 1990 she headed to Chicago because it was the big city, taking a job at O'Connor & Associates because there was beer in the fridge. They sat her on a step at the Board of Trade the day Drexel filed for bankruptcy; there was no women's restroom. She stayed. By her mid-twenties she and Matt Hulsizer had built an over-the-counter equity-derivatives desk. When a merger wanted them in Connecticut, they stayed in Chicago, put up about $1.5 million, and in 1997 founded PEAK6—she was twenty-nine and a single mother. They later married. Apex became the clearing and brokerage infrastructure under major retail trading apps. The fortune is Chicago finance; the origin is a Brookfield Lancer childhood, not a imported executive myth.