Supporting Growth

From his fourth floor office at his firm's Boston headquarters, Joe Antonellis looks out over State Street's securities lending division's trading floor. But that's just one piece of State Street's network of businesses that Antonellis, as CIO and the executive in charge of global operations, needs to keep an eye on. He does so with an approach that blends collaboration, vision and hands-on industry knowledge. "Just thinking of the CIO piece of it, my budget is probably the single largest budget in the company," he says. "I affect everybody's business here."

For someone who's technology leadership has as much impact on State Street as Antonellis' does, it's surprising to learn that his background is all business. A 1976 Harvard University graduate, he later received an MBA from Bentley College. "I'm not a technologist really, but I have been involved with technology both from major conversion and implementation teams to actually running some of our applications development teams as part of a larger unit," he says.

Antonellis joined State Street in 1991 from Bank of Boston, and he held various positions at the institution, including mutual fund custody division head, before being appointed to replace outgoing CIO John Fiore in August 2002. Under Antonellis' leadership, State Street's IT group is responsible for developing and implementing global architecture to support the large-scale transaction processing, product capabilities and investment strategies of clients worldwide.

State Street has been on a growth surge of late. It rose to take the No. 1 spot this year on Institutional Investor's annual ranking of asset managers, with $1.2 trillion in institutional assets under management. In 2003, State Street's assets rose by about 44 percent, due in large part to the acquisition of the record-keeping and securities-lending business of Deutsche Bank. This required a major conversion effort, and Antonellis was at the helm during the switch. Deutsche Bank had multiple accounting systems that State Street had to bring onto its global multicurrency accounting system and custody system. "It [required] large teams of analysts and implementors around the world to complete that conversion," says Antonellis. State Street completed conversions in every region except for Germany, which will be finished by mid-2005. "It's been a great acquisition for us, and we accomplished some pretty lofty targets," he adds.

State Street's ambitious target was to hold onto 98 percent of client revenue from the acquired Global Securities Services business. It didn't hit that goal, but the bank was able to keep a still-impressive 88 percent. Antonellis attributes the achievement in part to the IT team and the IT project management operation (PMO), which he set up as a subset of the corporatewide PMO of both business and IT personnel, which was created to handle the Deutsche Bank acquisition. "Had it not been for our IT team and our IT PMO, we would not have been able to deliver successfully," he says.