The 2013 Tech 50: Lou Eccleston

Not unlike competing information purveyors, McGraw Hill Financial — the parent of Standard & Poor’s, until recently known as McGraw-Hill Cos. — has been cutting costs while simultaneously investing in future growth. In 2012 it took nearly $175 million in personnel and other overhead out of its cost structure companywide. Growth investments are concentrated in Lou Eccleston’s departments: S&P Capital IQ, the $1.1 billion-in-revenue research and analytics business of which the 56-year-old has been president since a 2011 reorganization; and S&P Dow Jones Indices, a joint venture chaired by Eccleston that increased revenue 20 percent last year, to $388 million. “We identified capabilities we needed and moved into execution mode with our acquisitions,” says the former Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters executive, who joined S&P as head of fixed-income risk management services in 2008. The risk- and analytics-focused acquisitions included Paris-based QuantHouse and  Toronto’s R2 Financial Technologies, both in 2012. Capital IQ’s workforce jumped from 6,500 to 7,200 in the past year, with most new hires in product management and technology. The company is working to create new visualization methods, Eccleston says, because “you can’t possibly track big data in traditional user interfaces.”