No online and mobile payments system in the world is bigger than Alipay, a service of Alibaba's Ant Financial Services Group, with 450 million active users. For its entry into North America this year, Alipay turned to the biggest of all payment processors, First Data Corp., with a network serving 6 million business locations and 4,000 financial institutions in more than 100 countries, handling 2,800 transactions per second, adding up to $2.2 trillion annually. "Staggering" is how First Data president Guy Chiarello describes it — not just the volume numbers, but also the data byproducts, "the macro- and micro-level information" they yield for insights on consumer spending habits and trends. To deal with the complexities and deliver on the opportunities takes a technology company, Chiarello says. First Data is exactly that, with a New York money-center flavor, given that Chiarello has served as chief information officer of Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase & Co., and chair and CEO Frank Bisignano is a former JPMorgan co-COO and former CEO of Citigroup Global Transaction Services. Chiarello, 57, says his experiences as a prominent Wall Street CIO were ideal preparation for $11.6 billion-in-revenue First Data, which, since going public in a record-setting 2015 IPO, has been paying down debt from a Kohlberg Kravis Roberts leveraged buyout and turned profitable in 2016. The debt overhang did not prevent dealmaking and product development like that which followed the 2013 acquisition of Clover, a Silicon Valley remote-payments startup that Chiarello says is a game-changer.
 1. Adena Friedman NASDAQ  2. Catherine Bessant Bank of America Corp.  3. Robert Goldstein BlackRock  4. Jeffrey Sprecher Intercontinental Exchange  5. Lance Uggla IHS Markit |
 6. Shawn Edwards & Vlad Kliatchko Bloomberg  7. David Craig Thomson Reuters  8. Michael Spencer NEX Group  9. Don Callahan Citigroup  10. Elisha Wiesel Goldman Sachs Group |
 11. Michael Bodson Depository Trust & Clearing Corp.  12. Terrence Duffy CME Group  13. Charles Li Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing  14. Sean Belka Fidelity Investments  15. Chris Concannon CBOE Holdings |
 16. Guy Chiarello First Data Corp.  17. Steven Lieblich Citadel  18. David Rutter R3CEV  19. Blythe Masters Digital Asset Holdings  20. Alfred Spector Two Sigma Investments |
 21. Neil Katz D.E. Shaw Group  22. Lee Olesky Tradeweb Markets  23. Richard McVey MarketAxess Holdings  24. David Gledhill DBS Bank  25. Seth Merrin Liquidnet Holdings |
 26. Antoine Shagoury State Street Corp.  27. Peter Brown & Robert Mercer Renaissance Technologies  28. Lou Eccleston TMX Group  29. Peter Cherecwich Northern Trust Corp.  30. Mike Chinn S&P Global Market Intelligence |
 31. Chris Corrado London Stock Exchange Group  32. Neal Pawar AQR Capital Management  33. Gary Norcross Fidelity National Information Services  34. Steven O'Hanlon Numerix  35. Sebastián Ceria Axioma |
 36. Brian Conlon First Derivatives and Kx Systems  37. Tyler Kim MaplesFS  38. Michael Cooper BT Radianz  39. Robert Schifellite Broadridge Financial Solutions  40. Jim Minnick eVestment |