This content is from: Portfolio
The 2015 Tech 50: Robert Alexander
The Capital One CIO moves up to No. 24 on this year’s Tech 50 ranking.
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.”
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 |