Nigel Faulkner
No. 13
Chief Information Officer, Global Equities
Credit Suisse
Speed was always of the essence as Credit Suisse invested heavily in becoming Wall Street’s leader in advanced execution services over the past decade. Today decisions are more nuanced as the bank pays closer attention to how it allocates finite resources in such areas as equity derivatives, prime services and proprietary trading. “The question for us is to recognize the areas where losing a microsecond counts, versus areas where you could lose five milliseconds and no one would notice, and invest accordingly,” says Nigel Faulkner, CIO for global equities. Faulkner, who joined Credit Suisse in New York in June 2010 after nine years at Goldman, Sachs & Co., the last four as chief technology officer for equities, says that as a result of 22 cost management, or TCO (total cost of ownership), initiatives, he is ahead of his two-year plan to reduce the equity business’s technology bill. A graduate of the U.K.’s Sheffield Hallam University with a master’s degree in management and information technology, Faulkner, 46, has overseen the development of the third generation of Agora, Credit Suisse’s 12-year-old order management system, and the adoption of high-performance processors such as field-programmable gate arrays, which have also powered aerospace and telecommunications industry innovations.
