< The 2015 Tech 50: Racers to the Edge

Before former Morgan Stanley and UBS technologist Chris Corrado joined MSCI in October 2013, the New York–based company best known for its benchmark indexes and risk and portfolio management systems had never had a chief information officer. Corrado quickly embarked on a “technology transformation” that may more resemble a tsunami. The overhaul is geared, he says, to a postcrisis world in which “the things we do, such as risk management, portfolio construction and portfolio analytics, are all important for our clients to make money as well as abide by the changing regulatory landscape.” No mere systems upgrade, Corrado’s work in progress is an extensive platform architecture to serve institutional customers, conceptually similar to Goldman Sachs Group’s opening of its technology to clients (see R. Martin Chavez, No. 7). “It’s a platform with which we provide our services to external customers,” Corrado explains. “It has all the mission-critical criteria and requirements that you’d expect to find in internal technology groups in banks and other institutions, but all of it is client-facing.” The 55-year-old and his team are currently demonstrating the implementation internally. They will begin opening portfolio management to customers in the fall, with risk management to follow. Corrado says he had two strategic choices — “take the existing platform and add new features, or redo the platform and put the new functionality on that” — and the latter was clearly superior. Portfolio management will not be “100 percent complete from a coding standpoint” when it rolls out, but it has the intended functionality, and “we’ll effectively be able to migrate our customers. The architecture implementation won’t be complete because it has to take on all the risk functionality down the road.”

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The 2015 Tech 50

1. Jeffrey Sprecher Intercontinental Exchange 2. Catherine Bessant Bank of America Corp. Why Bitcoin's Relationship with Equities Has Changed Sponsored by CME Group June 2, 2025 3. Phupinder Gill CME Group 4. Lance Uggla Markit 5. Robert Goldstein BlackRock

6. Shawn Edwards & Vlad Kliatchko Bloomberg 7. R. Martin Chavez Goldman Sachs Group 8. Deborah Hopkins Citi Ventures 9. Stephen Neff Fidelity Investments 10. Adena Friedman Nasdaq OMX Group

11. David Craig Thomson Reuters 12. Daniel Coleman KCG Holdings 13. Michael Spencer ICAP 14. Michael Bodson Depository Trust & Clearing Corp. 15. Charles Li Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing

16. Chris Concannon BATS Global Markets 17. Christopher Perretta State Street Corp. 18. Antoine Shagoury London Stock Exchange Group 19. Kevin Rhein Wells Fargo & Co. 20. Neil Katz D.E. Shaw & Co.

21. Lee Olesky Tradeweb Markets 22. Richard McVey MarketAxess Holdings 23. Seth Merrin Liquidnet Holdings 24. Robert Alexander Capital One Financial Corp. 25. Frank Bisignano First Data Corp.

26. John Marcante Vanguard Group 27. Joseph Squeri Citadel 28. Lou Eccleston TMX Group 29. Claude Honegger Credit Suisse 30. Chris Corrado MSCI

31. David Gledhill DBS Bank 32. John Bates Software AG 33. Michael Cooper BT Radianz 34. Gary Scholten Principal Financial Group 35. Sunil Hirani trueEX Group

36. Hauke Stars Deutsche BÖrse 37. Brian Conlon First Derivatives 38. Jim Minnick eVestment 39. Lars Seier Christensen & Kim Fournais 40. Tyler Kim MaplesFS

41. Jim McGuire Charles Schwab Corp. 42. Steven O'Hanlon Numerix 43. Sebastián Ceria Axioma 44. Yasuki Okai NRI Holdings America 45. Stephane Dubois Xignite

46. Mazy Dar OpenFin 47. Brian Sentance Xenomorph Software 48. Mas Nakachi OpenGamma 49. John Lehner BNY Mellon Technology Solutions Group 50. Jock Percy Perseus