This content is from: Portfolio
The 2015 Tech 50: Chris Corrado
The CIO of MSCI jumps to No. 30 on this year’s Tech 50 ranking.
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.”
See the full story, “The 2015 Tech 50: Racers to the Edge.”
 1. Jeffrey Sprecher Intercontinental Exchange  2. Catherine Bessant Bank of America Corp.  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 |