The 2015 Tech 50: Chris Corrado

Before former Morgan Stanley and UBS technologistChris Corradojoined MSCI in October 2013, the New York–based company best known for its benchmark indexes and risk and portfolio management systems had never had a chief information officer. Corrado quickly embarked on a “technology transformation” that may more resemble a tsunami. The overhaul is geared, he says, to a postcrisis world in which “the things we do, such as risk management, portfolio construction and portfolio analytics, are all important for our clients to make money as well as abide by the changing regulatory landscape.” No mere systems upgrade, Corrado’s work in progress is an extensive platform architecture to serve institutional customers, conceptually similar to Goldman Sachs Group’s opening of its technology to clients (seeR. Martin Chavez, No. 7). “It’s a platform with which we provide our services to external customers,” Corrado explains. “It has all the mission-critical criteria and requirements that you’d expect to find in internal technology groups in banks and other institutions, but all of it is client-facing.” The 55-year-old and his team are currently demonstrating the implementation internally. They will begin opening portfolio management to customers in the fall, with risk management to follow. Corrado says he had two strategic choices — “take the existing platform and add new features, or redo the platform and put the new functionality on that” — and the latter was clearly superior. Portfolio management will not be “100 percent complete from a coding standpoint” when it rolls out, but it has the intended functionality, and “we’ll effectively be able to migrate our customers. The architecture implementation won’t be complete because it has to take on all the risk functionality down the road.”

See the full story, “The 2015 Tech 50: Racers to the Edge.”