Northern Trust's Scott Murray: A Man of Action

In an age when many financial services companies are facing strong revenue headwinds, Northern Trust is quietly continuing to improve its position in the market. At the Chicago-based custody, asset servicing and asset management company, which has $704 billion in assets under management and $4.6 trillion in assets under custody, business certainly is growing. And the technology organization that serves the firm's customers and approximately 14,000 employees is keeping pace.

"We have continued to grow through this business and economic cycle," says Scott Murray, EVP and CTO at Northern Trust. "As we have continued to grow as a bank, we are making investments in growing client capabilities. Technology is of strategic importance to servicing our clients."

While many of Murray's peers at other Wall Street firms are struggling to find ways to do more with less, Northern Trust has actually upped its technology expenditure to a little more than $600 million per year, according to Murray, whose responsibilities include overseeing application development, support, technology infrastructure and the architecture innovation functions bankwide. Currently, Murray is responsible for a technology team of around 2,700, which includes a mixture of internal staff and contractors.

Read the rest of Greg MacSweeney's profile from Wall Street & Technology's 2012 Gold Book. Greg MacSweeney is editorial director of InformationWeek Financial Services, whose brands include Wall Street & Technology, Bank Systems & Technology, Advanced Trading, and Insurance & Technology. View Full Bio