The 2014 Tech 50: Cristóbal Conde

July 08, 2014

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

Cristóbal Conde

Executive in Residence

FinTech

Innovation Lab

(PNR)

In 2011, when Cristóbal Conde retired after nine years as president and CEO of SunGard Data Systems, the company not only was one of the leading technology vendors to the financial industry, but it had grown into the world’s biggest privately held business software and information technology services company, with $5.6 billion in revenue and 26,000 employees. That’s a pretty fair legacy, but Conde, then 51, wanted to leave his mark in other ways: as a senior adviser to private equity firm TPG Capital, a director of Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Co. and, what he says is “so much fun,” as a mentor to start-ups. This is the third year of Conde’s residency with the Partnership Fund for New York City’s FinTech Innovation Lab, a competition administered by consulting firm Accenture to identify promising entrepreneurs and hook them up with venture funding and prospective financial institution customers. Conde liked some of the contestants so much that he literally bought into them: He is executive chairman of True Office, which builds interactive training systems; chairman of fund transaction and settlement network Calastone; director of cybersecurity innovator Centripetal Networks; and director of surveillance and analytics developer Digital Reasoning. Conde, who sold his own company, Devon Systems, to SunGard in 1987, says financial firms “have focused on compliance and incremental systems changes” in recent years and therefore “need disruptive start-ups more than ever.”

The 2014 Tech 50