The 2015 Tech 50: Stephen Neff

Fidelity Investments pioneered earlier generations of financial technology — it was one of the first to go online and to offer mobile services — and never stopped pushing the envelope. The Boston-based firm, which has $2 trillion of assets under management, has been continuously upgrading its mobile app and is moving on to wearables, having recently begun to deliver real-time quotes and other notifications to theApple Watch, another first. It all results from the money management giant’s focus and insistence on “moving things quickly from concept to something very specific and tangible,” says enterprise CTOStephen Neff. The 63-year-old, a former Salomon Brothers and IBM Corp. technologist who has been with Fidelity since 1996 and in his current role since 2013, has even more futuristic developments on his radar. These include blockchain technology and its potential impact on transparency and on reducing settlement times and costs for digital assets; and Oculus Rift, the virtual reality headset developed by Oculus VR, which Facebook acquired last year for $2 billion in cash and stock. The power of start-ups like Oculus and the way they change personal computing have direct bearing on the financial services industry, says Neff. They “enable new customer behavior models and ways for consumers to more actively interact with and manage their financial resources.” He sees the advent of robo-advising in a similar light: “Fidelity has always believed that we can take advantage of these types of innovation to give more people access to the knowledge and financial know-how that have traditionally been difficult for many consumers to obtain.”

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