< The 2017 Tech 40

16. Guy Chiarello
President
First Data Corp.
Last year: PNR

No online and mobile payments system in the world is bigger than Alipay, a service of Alibaba's Ant Financial Services Group, with 450 million active users. For its entry into North America this year, Alipay turned to the biggest of all payment processors, First Data Corp., with a network serving 6 million business locations and 4,000 financial institutions in more than 100 countries, handling 2,800 transactions per second, adding up to $2.2 trillion annually. "Staggering" is how First Data president Guy Chiarello describes it — not just the volume numbers, but also the data byproducts, "the macro- and micro-level information" they yield for insights on consumer spending habits and trends. To deal with the complexities and deliver on the opportunities takes a technology company, Chiarello says. First Data is exactly that, with a New York money-center flavor, given that Chiarello has served as chief information officer of Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase & Co., and chair and CEO Frank Bisignano is a former JPMorgan co-COO and former CEO of Citigroup Global Transaction Services. Chiarello, 57, says his experiences as a prominent Wall Street CIO were ideal preparation for $11.6 billion-in-revenue First Data, which, since going public in a record-setting 2015 IPO, has been paying down debt from a Kohlberg Kravis Roberts leveraged buyout and turned profitable in 2016. The debt overhang did not prevent dealmaking and product development like that which followed the 2013 acquisition of Clover, a Silicon Valley remote-payments startup that Chiarello says is a game-changer.

 
The 2017 Tech 40

1. Adena Friedman NASDAQ 2. Catherine Bessant Bank of America Corp. 3. Robert Goldstein BlackRock 4. Jeffrey Sprecher Intercontinental Exchange Sponsored Is the Market Really Sure About Its Direction? Sponsored by CME Group October 27, 2025 5. Lance Uggla IHS Markit

6. Shawn Edwards & Vlad Kliatchko Bloomberg 7. David Craig Thomson Reuters 8. Michael Spencer NEX Group 9. Don Callahan Citigroup 10. Elisha Wiesel Goldman Sachs Group

11. Michael Bodson Depository Trust & Clearing Corp. 12. Terrence Duffy CME Group 13. Charles Li Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing 14. Sean Belka Fidelity Investments 15. Chris Concannon CBOE Holdings

16. Guy Chiarello First Data Corp. 17. Steven Lieblich Citadel 18. David Rutter R3CEV 19. Blythe Masters Digital Asset Holdings 20. Alfred Spector Two Sigma Investments

21. Neil Katz D.E. Shaw Group 22. Lee Olesky Tradeweb Markets 23. Richard McVey MarketAxess Holdings 24. David Gledhill DBS Bank 25. Seth Merrin Liquidnet Holdings

26. Antoine Shagoury State Street Corp. 27. Peter Brown & Robert Mercer Renaissance Technologies 28. Lou Eccleston TMX Group 29. Peter Cherecwich Northern Trust Corp. 30. Mike Chinn S&P Global Market Intelligence

31. Chris Corrado London Stock Exchange Group 32. Neal Pawar AQR Capital Management 33. Gary Norcross Fidelity National Information Services 34. Steven O'Hanlon Numerix 35. Sebastián Ceria Axioma

36. Brian Conlon First Derivatives and Kx Systems 37. Tyler Kim MaplesFS 38. Michael Cooper BT Radianz 39. Robert Schifellite Broadridge Financial Solutions 40. Jim Minnick eVestment