This content is from: Portfolio
The 2016 Tech 50: Robert Alexander
The CIO of Capital One Financial Corp. moves up one spot to No. 23.

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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![]() 2. Jeffrey Sprecher Intercontinental Exchange ![]() 3. Lance Uggla Markit ![]() 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 |