< The 2014 Tech 50: Moving Out of the Lab and Into the Cloud
30
Robert Alexander
Chief Information Officer
Capital One
Financial Corp.
Last year: 37
Capital One Financial Corp. is a $290 billion-in-assets bank holding company, but for chief information officer Robert Alexander, it’s all about technology. “What we’re focused on is how do we become a great software development organization,” says the U.S. Air Force veteran and former Bain & Co. consultant, who joined the McLean, Virginia–based bank in 1998 and has been CIO since 2007. “If you’re going to be a great software company, you have to have the network and hardware to support it.” The 49-year-old has gone so far as to brand his department Capital One Technology. The unit aims to bring top software engineering talent together in work spaces away from headquarters to encourage collaboration and creativity in an “agile development” environment. The bank is certainly up to speed on cloud computing and big data, using a private cloud along with public utilities like Amazon Web Services and Hadoop, an open-source platform for extremely large-scale processing and analytics. The technology group has been working on security and antifraud measures, mobile apps and online innovations including a feature that translates credit card billing disclosures into plain English. “If you’re not building it better, faster, more innovatively and creatively,” Alexander says, “then you’re going to get left behind.”
The 2014 Tech 50
| 1 | 1 | 3 | 4 | 5 |
| Thomas Secunda Bloomberg | Jeffrey Sprecher Intercontinental Exchange | Catherine Bessant Bank of America Corp. | Stephen Neff Fidelity Investments | Lance Uggla Markit |
| 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 |
| Robert Goldstein BlackRock | David Craig Thomson Reuters | Phupinder Gill CME Group | Anna Ewing NASDAQ OMX Group | R. Martin Chavez Goldman Sachs Group |
| 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 |
| Deborah Hopkins Citi Ventures | Dan Mathisson Credit Suisse | Daniel Coleman KCG Holdings | Michael Spencer ICAP | Michael Bodson Depository Trust & Clearing Corp. |
| 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 |
| Joe Ratterman BATS Global Markets | Dominique Cerutti Euronext | Ron Levi GFI Group | Gaurav Suri D.E. Shaw Group | Charles Li Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing |
| 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 |
| Lou Eccleston S&P Capital IQ | Lee Olesky Tradeweb Markets | Richard McVey MarketAxess Holdings | Seth Merrin Liquidnet Holdings | Antoine Shagoury London Stock Exchange Group |
| 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 |
| Christopher Perretta State Street Corp. | Kevin Rhein Wells Fargo & Co. | Peter Carr Morgan Stanley | Hauke Stars Deutsche Börse | Robert Alexander Capital One Financial Corp. |
| 31 | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35 |
| David Gershon SuperDerivatives | Chris Corrado MSCI | Joseph Squeri Citadel | Tanuja Randery BT Global Services | John Bates Software AG |
| 36 | 37 | 38 | 39 | 40 |
| Gary Scholten Principal Financial Group | David Gledhill DBS Bank | Simon Garland Kx Systems | Cristóbal Conde FinTech Innovation Lab | Jeff Parker EidoSearch |
| 41 | 42 | 43 | 44 | 45 |
| Kim Fournais & Lars Seier Christensen Saxo Bank | Kenneth Marlin Marlin & Associates | Tyler Kim MaplesFS | Jim McGuire Charles Schwab Corp. | Jim Minnick eVestment |
| 46 | 47 | 48 | 49 | 50 |
| Steven O’Hanlon Numerix | Sebastián Ceria Axioma | Yasuki Okai Nomura Research Institute | Niki Beattie Market Structure Partners | Mas Nakachi OpenGamma |
