The 2015 Tech 50: Gary Scholten

< The 2015 Tech 50: Racers to the Edge

34
Gary Scholten
Chief Information Officer
Principal Financial Group
Last year: 36

Running technology for Principal Financial Group, which has 19.9 million customers around the world, would seem to be enough of a handful for Gary Scholten, chief information officer since 2002 and head of corporate strategy since 2012. It takes an information technology team of 2,600, including 500 in India, to keep up with the systems development, operational and innovation requirements of this diversified investment management, retirement services and insurance enterprise with a total of $530 billion in assets under management. But Scholten, a 35-year veteran of the Des Moines, Iowa–based company, doesn’t confine his concerns and responsibilities to within the proverbial four walls of the firm. He is constantly on what might be called cyberalert, having gone so far as to call data security an obsession. “Everybody is responsible for security, not just the information security department,” Scholten, 57, declares. Indeed, Principal provides extensive security training to its nearly 15,000 employees, is an active member of the Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center and supports legislation to encourage more sharing of threat intelligence. Scholten also worries about the future workforce, saying, “We are not graduating enough people in science, technology, engineering and mathematics, and economic growth will be held back if we don’t address this.” He has rallied to the cause as a member of the Iowa Governor’s STEM Advisory Council (of which Google, IBM Corp. and Principal, among others, are corporate partners). A Principal product innovation with a public service flavor is the Retirement Wellness Score, which draws on behavioral economics to nudge clients toward improved later-life solvency. “We have this problem of people not being ready for retirement,” says Scholten. “We can positively disrupt that trend.”

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

The 2015 Tech 50