The 2014 Tech 50: Gary Scholten

July 08, 2014

< The 2014 Tech 50: Moving Out of the Lab and Into the Cloud

Gary Scholten

Chief Information Officer

Principal Financial Group

Last year: 38

Chief information officer of Principal Financial Group since 2002 and as of this year an executive vice president, Gary Scholten describes his current priorities in simple, pragmatic terms: “We want to build self-service capabilities to make us easier to do business with.” At the same time, he insists on a certain amount of blue-sky thinking. “All companies are just scratching the surface when it comes to using data in their businesses,” he notes. How these efforts play out could change the way corporations operate, and Scholten wants Principal, a Des Moines, Iowa–based global investment manager and insurer with $483 billion of assets under management, to be prepared. Last year he oversaw a major upgrade of the global research platform for equities, allowing traders and managers using any type of device to integrate external data and complex algorithms into their models. “We can leverage broad amounts of data [in ways that are] really important for risk management and investment performance,” says the 56-year-old, who joined Principal as an assistant planning analyst in 1980 after graduating from the University of Northern Iowa. This year Scholten is focused on “the customer experience,” including website designs and mobile applications. Meanwhile, information security has become an obsession at Principal, and “we’re thinking outside the box,” sharing information with other companies about vulnerabilities and solutions.

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