< The 2015 Tech 50: Racers to the Edge

As Capital One Financial Corp. aims to solidify brand loyalty on the platforms of its customers’ choosing, the mobile channel is job No. 1 for chief information officer Robert Alexander. “Mobile is a huge megatrend with consumers,” he says. “There’s tremendous potential for mobile to be the bank in your pocket.” Delivering on that promise requires an impeccable user experience, for which Apple is widely regarded as the standard-setter. To play in that league, Alexander took the lead last fall in closing Capital One’s acquisition of pioneering San Francisco design firm Adaptive Path, which counted Airbnb, Flickr and Twitter among its clients. Now it is part of the McLean, Virginia–based bank’s design and innovation group. “We align [Adaptive Path] with all our projects — how we design digital experiences,” says the 50-year-old Alexander. Examples are online sites and apps like Auto Navigator, touted as a reinvention of car shopping, and Credit Tracker, for monitoring credit scores. Also available, in a beta test phase, is Capital One Mobile 5, the $306 billion-in-assets bank’s latest app for all-accounts access, remote depositing, bill paying, person-to-person payments and more. Meanwhile, Capital One’s 6,000 technologists are focused on analyzing and leveraging data collected in real time, says Alexander, a former U.S. Air Force officer and Bain & Co. consultant who joined the company in 1998 and has been CIO since 2007. He relies heavily on, and avidly contributes to, the open-source movement for most software development. Noting that the bank is hiring data scientists and software engineers by the hundreds, Alexander adds, “It’s all about speed to innovate.”

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The 2015 Tech 50

1. Jeffrey Sprecher Intercontinental Exchange 2. Catherine Bessant Bank of America Corp. Podcast: Uncovering Opportunities in Direct Real Estate Sponsored by Fidelity Investments June 30, 2025 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