The 2015 Tech 50: Robert Alexander

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< The 2015 Tech 50: Racers to the Edge

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Robert Alexander
Chief Information Officer
Capital One
Financial Corp.
Last year: 30

As Capital One Financial Corp. aims to solidify brand loyalty on the platforms of its customers’ choosing, the mobile channel is job No. 1 for chief information officer Robert Alexander. “Mobile is a huge megatrend with consumers,” he says. “There’s tremendous potential for mobile to be the bank in your pocket.” Delivering on that promise requires an impeccable user experience, for which Apple is widely regarded as the standard-setter. To play in that league, Alexander took the lead last fall in closing Capital One’s acquisition of pioneering San Francisco design firm Adaptive Path, which counted Airbnb, Flickr and Twitter among its clients. Now it is part of the McLean, Virginia–based bank’s design and innovation group. “We align [Adaptive Path] with all our projects — how we design digital experiences,” says the 50-year-old Alexander. Examples are online sites and apps like Auto Navigator, touted as a reinvention of car shopping, and Credit Tracker, for monitoring credit scores. Also available, in a beta test phase, is Capital One Mobile 5, the $306 billion-in-assets bank’s latest app for all-accounts access, remote depositing, bill paying, person-to-person payments and more. Meanwhile, Capital One’s 6,000 technologists are focused on analyzing and leveraging data collected in real time, says Alexander, a former U.S. Air Force officer and Bain & Co. consultant who joined the company in 1998 and has been CIO since 2007. He relies heavily on, and avidly contributes to, the open-source movement for most software development. Noting that the bank is hiring data scientists and software engineers by the hundreds, Alexander adds, “It’s all about speed to innovate.”

See the full story, “The 2015 Tech 50: Racers to the Edge.”

The 2015 Tech 50