The 2017 Tech 40: Chris Corrado

With an "open access model," serving London Stock Exchange Group constituents (such as the flagship LSE, LCH Group, and Borsa Italiana) and supplying systems to more than 40 external entities (including the London Metal Exchange and Singapore Exchange), "we have to be better" with information technology, Chris Corrado says. "The external customers keep us disciplined commercially and technically in a way that an internal-only IT shop is typically not." A veteran Wall Street technologist who has worked for Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank, Merrill Lynch, and UBS, 57-year-old Corrado has also served as chief technology officer of eBay and was MSCI's chief information officer for two years before LSEG named him COO and CIO in November 2015. That was just in time to ride out the ultimately disbanded LSEG-Deutsche Börse merger agreement. Corrado remained preoccupied with bringing a vast array of technology assets under a more streamlined management structure. In addition to having CIOs in the business units reporting to him, Corrado hired a chief information security officer (Adrian Asher, formerly of HSBC Group) and chief technology officer (Greg Allen from Toronto's TMX Group). The latter is running an emerging technologies function, currently concentrating on blockchain applications, cognitive computing, applied data analytics, and what Corrado calls "elastic computing," leveraging cloud environments.