< The 2016 Tech 50

The Amazon Web Services re:Invent conference and the South by Southwest pop culture fest aren’t on traditional bankers’ schedules. But the banker label doesn’t fit Robert Alexander, who was a physics undergrad at (and later earned an MBA from) Harvard University and served as a U.S. Air Force officer. He views Capital One Financial Corp., which he joined in 1998 from Bain & Co. and where he has been chief information officer since 2007, as something other than an ordinary bank. “Few realize that underpinning our credit card and banking services is a technology company,” Alexander blogged last October, recounting his keynote speaking gig at the AWS event. “At Capital One, it isn’t enough to have a slightly better IT shop than other banks. We have to be a great technology company” — which means a heavy reliance on engineering talent, participation in open-source communities and adoption of DevOps (development and operations) and other systems-innovation methodologies. “There’s a lot of power in the application of technology to disrupt and reinvent how banking is done,” the 51-year-old tells Institutional Investor. In March, at SXSW in Austin, Texas, $314 billion-in-assets Capital One became the first bank to announce that its customers could access financial information and even pay bills via Amazon voice-enabled devices such as Echo and Fire TV. The company’s Wallet app, formerly known as Capital One Mobile 5 and the first to incorporate Android tap-to-pay, offers real-time transaction information as well as fraud alerts. At SXSW the bank also announced Capital One DevExhange, an application programming interface platform that allows third parties to innovate on top of Capital One–developed technology. Last year McLean, Virginia–based Capital One contributed to the open-source world Hygieia, a dashboard for managing DevOps teams and tools. Looking ahead, Alexander sees a “convergence of the availability of more and more data with the ability to process data in real time. Many banks will find this hard to do.” The answer lies in “machine learning, which allows you to more intelligently get insights from that data that you’re processing in real time,” he adds. “That is a real game changer for banking.”

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The 2016 Tech 50

1. Catherine Bessant Bank of America Corp. 2. Jeffrey Sprecher Intercontinental Exchange 3. Lance Uggla Markit Gold and Bitcoin Decouple. What's Driving the Divergence's? Sponsored by CME Group April 24, 2025 4. Phupinder Gill CME Group 5. Shawn Edwards and Vlad Kliatchko Bloomberg 6. R. Martin Chavez Goldman Sachs Group

7. Robert Goldstein BlackRock 8. Adena Friedman Nasdaq 9. Deborah Hopkins Citi Ventures 10. Daniel Coleman KCG Holdings 11. Stephen Neff Fidelity Investments 12. David Craig Thomson Reuters

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. Blythe Masters Digital Asset Holdings 18. David Rutter R3CEV

19. Neil Katz D.E. Shaw & Co. 20. Lee Olesky Tradeweb Markets 21. Richard McVey MarketAxess Holdings 22. Seth Merrin Liquidnet Holdings 23. Robert Alexander Capital One Financial Corp. 24. Brad Katsuyama IEX Group

25. Antoine Shagoury State Street Corp. 26. David Gledhill DBS Bank 27. Lou Eccleston TMX Group 28. Andreas Preuss Deutsche BÖrse 29. Dan Schulman PayPal Holdings 30. Scott Dillon Wells Fargo & Co.

31. Mike Chinn S&P Global Market Intelligence 32. Craig Donohue Options Clearing Corp. 33. Gary Norcross Fidelity National Information Services 34. Steven O'Hanlon Numerix 35. Sebastián Ceria Axioma 36. Michael Cooper BT Radianz

37. Tyler Kim MaplesFS 38. Neal Pawar AQR Capital Management 39. David Harding Winton Capital Management 40. Chris Corrado London Stock Exchange Group 41. Brian Conlon First Derivatives 42. Jim Minnick eVestment

43. Stephane Dubois Xignite 44. Mazy Dar OpenFin 45. Yasuki Okai NRI Holdings America 46. Kim Fournais Saxo Bank 47. Jock Percy Perseus 48. Robert Schifellite Broadridge Financial Solutions

49. Brian Sentance Xenomorph Software 50. Pieter van der Does Adyen