Ben Mendoza founded MDSL in 1995 with a vision to provide financial trading organisations with the tools to drastically improve the management of their market data services costs down to an individual user level. Ben's technology career began in 1974 and has included telecommunications engineering with British Telecom, applied electronics design with Marconi Space and Defence Systems, data network design with Timeplex, and North Sea oil platform systems implementations with Marathon Oil UK. Ben founded his first company in 1984. Digital Networks International Limited (DNI) was an independent IT consultancy firm providing network design and implementation services to customers such as Lehman Brothers, BAII and The Target Group. In 1987 Ben turned his hand to software, creating a Help Desk system called HDE. HDE customers included British Telecom, BP Oil, Barclays Bank, Robert Fleming & Co. and Levi Strauss & Co.