MacKay Shields Weathers Storms with Vigilante's Tech Vision

Anthony Vigilante has been a busy man over the past 12 months. From helping to establish MacKay Shields’ new presence in London, to overseeing an office move to the firm’s current location at 1345 Avenue of the Americas in New York, with a total infrastructure overhaul as a part of that, things have been proceeding apace for the head of IT at the New York-headquartered investment manager. The firm, an autonomous subsidiary of the New York Life Insurance Company, manages over $76 billion in assets. Its focus is on the entire fixed-income spectrum, including core fixed income, high yield, global and emerging markets, investment grade, municipal, and convertible mandates.

Vigilante is a veteran of MacKay Shields, having been at the firm for 14 years in an IT capacity. Born in Belleville, NJ, to parents who emigrated from Italy, he describes himself as having spent his life in the tri-state area of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. Technology has been the defining quality of his career, which began with an information systems management major at New York University, and afterwards, working his way up in IT roles.

“I’ve been in IT for about 20 years, but I was working at different organizations, starting at the bottom on the help desk for desktop support, network administration—your basic skill sets,” he explains. This experience gives him a number of different perspectives that he finds useful in his day-to-day work, consolidated with post-graduate studying. A master’s degree in computer science at Fordham University, New York, followed his undergraduate degree, which he further strengthened with an advanced certificate in financial econometrics and data analysis.

“Being in the financial industry, I was trying to tie it together, so I can better support the business and understand it,” he says. “These days, technology really needs to sit in the room with the business heads, so you can understand what their needs are, and be ahead of the curve. Having a good understanding of the financial industry is important.”

Planning Ahead
Vigilante runs a traditional IT department at MacKay Shields, one that concerns itself with the nuts and bolts of a technology backbone. Over his near decade-and-a-half there, he’s seen, firsthand, how the role of technology has come to be a critical factor in the firm’s ability to stay competitive and current, and his team has expanded accordingly. Originally, he recalls, there were two people in the IT department when he joined, including himself, and they managed a couple of servers. Now, there are eight full-time employees, and they run over 70 servers across a number of locations and geographies. Underpinning this expansion in capacity and technological firepower, he says, has been a thorough approach to planning ahead, and anticipating the future needs of the firm, sometimes long in advance of its competitors.

“One of my first initiatives at MacKay Shields was to get our disaster recovery (DR) plan together, and that was one of the reasons why I joined, to be involved with that,” he recalls. “The reason why we initiated it in 1999 was, if you remember, because of the Y2K bug. We didn’t know if it was anything real, but it didn’t really matter. That was the catalyst for designing a DR plan and building a DR site. By Y2K, we were ready. It was a non-event, but it was good for us and it got people prepared for what came after, which was 9/11. When that happened, we had a failover plan, and we were able to jump into action. We went from no DR to a fully fledged DR plan.”

This preparation, and the constant updating of MacKay Shields’ DR book, bore fruit during Hurricane Sandy last year, which shut down much of Manhattan for days, and the surrounding areas for much longer.

“We were in the midst of getting ready for this major move, and I was bouncing back and forth between these two buildings,” Vigilante says. “When it happened, fortunately for us we’d already understood the importance of mobility and redundancy, so it allowed us to tell the users to work from home.”

The event provided a big test for MacKay Shields’ DR facility and operational plan, particularly when the Manhattan offices had to be evacuated at the height of the storm. A broken crane, damaged by the storm, hung precariously from the side of the One57 development on West 57th Street, and city officials were concerned that if it were to drop, the 26,000-pound boom would hit the gas main directly below. Vigilante recalls going door-to-door in the office, getting staff out of the building, with the last two to leave being the president, Lucille Protas, and CEO Jeffrey Phlegar.

In the days following Sandy, staff either worked from home or from the DR facility in New Jersey, which had workstations and mirrored servers, staffed by two of his team. Vigilante, for his part, kept the Manhattan office open for those who lived nearby to come in, and says he is pleased with how the infrastructure performed.

“That was a great test for us, because everyone worked remotely and it really tested our ability to do that via virtual private network (VPN) and other means,” he says. “So we had this office open, our DR site was open, and people’s homes were open.”

Always On
The response to Sandy and other events, such as steam-pipe explosions outside the office, and more hurricanes that have plagued New York in recent years, have continued to highlight the importance of technology strategies such as mobility and security to Vigilante and his team. Indeed, he cites the desire to work from anywhere, at any time, on any device, as one of the primary changes he’s witnessed over his career at the firm.

“Things have changed a lot since 1999, when I started,” he says. “Now, people are always on, when back then it wasn’t like that. The requirements and the expectations of a user at home were not the same. Today, people want to be able to do the same thing from home, from on the road, or wherever they happen to be, from whatever device they’re working on. Back then, people went home when they went home, and we didn’t even have BlackBerrys at that point. Palms didn’t really get started until their earlier 2000s, so nobody was really connected, and VPN was in the early stages.”

The shift from workers punching in and out, to being able to work as effectively on a Saturday night as they can on a Wednesday afternoon, doesn’t just happen organically. It requires support and investment from the business side, and Vigilante readily credits Protas, the firm’s president, and CEO Phlegar as key facilitators in ensuring that he has the necessary resources to keep MacKay Shields ahead of the curve.

“I think our advantage was that we started early, and what really helped was my boss, the president, has been with the company for 40 years,” Vigilante says. “She understood the importance of it, so every time that I went to her and said that we need to do something, she got it. And she still does today. She’s willing to invest in areas that are important. She allowed us to grow as a group, and me as a professional.”

Future Scope
Given this consistent view to the future, Vigilante is exploring various avenues for future technology development. Continuing the theme from the past few years, he says DR will continue to be important, and that these concepts aren’t the kinds of areas that you do once, put into a box marked “completed,” and leave to gather dust. Like technological development itself, everything is organic. Everything, though, is predicated on solid communication within the company.

“The important thing is that when we sit in a room to talk about it, not only am I in the room, but so is the president and upper management, asking how we can do it better,” he says. “So absolutely, DR, and business contingency, or whatever you want to call it, is always going to be a conversation.”

Outwardly, MacKay Shields continues to embrace mobility strategies. The firm already has a bring-your-own-device (BYOD) policy in place, and various areas are always being looked at, along with security as a continual top priority. Newer technologies, too, provide possible areas of investment, but Vigilante isn’t the type to go for full adoption right away.

“Compliance is obviously going to be a big issue, and we’re constantly focusing on that,” he says. “We don’t want to be blindsided by needing to make a change by the end of the month—we’re doing it as needed. Mobility is going to constantly change, and we want to be able to do that better. Cloud is a big one that we’re constantly watching, to see where we can take advantages of some opportunities. Sometimes it makes sense, and sometimes it doesn’t, and security and cost are concerns. It’s not an easy formula, in that it’s not always the case that it’s cheaper in the cloud, or it’s safer, or even vice versa. You never know and you have to evaluate.”

Evaluation and Moderation
Indeed, when it comes to the wider IT strategy for MacKay Shields, Vigilante is a firm believer in analyzing the benefits of building and buying on a case-by-case basis. This, more than anything else, seems to define his approach to technology—one of careful consideration, forward planning and thoughtful analysis of what it will actually add to the core business.

“Years ago, everything was off-the-shelf, but as we’ve grown and our assets under management have grown, and the technology has changed, we’ve started to do some in-house development,” he explains. “That started a while ago, but now we’re building up that team. You can’t say build everything or build nothing, though—you have to evaluate each specific need and decide whether it’s worth re-inventing the wheel and spending the resources on that, or recognizing when someone else has already done it. If it’s not going to give you any competitive advantage, what’s the point?”

The development team at MacKay Shields, a growing part of the firm, isn’t under Vigilante’s direct remit. Instead, IT provides the underlying infrastructure that allows developers to work efficiently and securely, but he likes to encourage a user-facing culture within the team itself. Even as he sits down with heads of department, chief compliance officers and others from across the business, his team is also involved with its other employees.

“My team knows our motto, and how we plan to be successful. They understand that communication and innovation are a huge part of it, so we need to be aware of not only what we’re doing, but also what the portfolio managers and analysts are doing, so that we can be proactive and see if there’s a better way to go about things,” he says. “That’s really important, and the team definitely does that. The good thing is that almost everyone is here, and our help desk is customer-facing, so they’re the kind of folks who can go into the office, talk to the people there and see if they can find different ways of doing things. That’s already happening.”

Maxim
The team’s maxim—innovation, partnership, accountability, communication and trust—is at the heart of MacKay Shields’ IT efforts. The remit is not just technology, of course, but operational as well, in terms of training and defining policies. As for whether it proves challenging to juggle these various hats, Vigilante pauses for a moment, his normally animated voice dropping by an octave, into a serious timbre.

“It’s a lot of work, but I’m lucky to have a great team. It’s a collection of great folks, who are truly dedicated,” he says. “They’re dedicated to the company and the team, they want to succeed, and the self-sacrifice is amazing. That’s really the only way to do it—by having a team that takes pride in its work, and will do whatever it takes to do it right. Everyone understands that what we’re doing is the backbone of the company, and there’s no room for error. I’m lucky to have them.”

Anthony Vigiliante Fundamental Data
Name: Anthony G. Vigilante
Title: Managing director, head of information technology, MacKay Shields
Tenure: 14 years
Education: Bachelor of Science in information systems management, New York University; Master of Science in computer science, Fordham University; advanced certificate, financial econometrics and data analysis, Fordham University
Favorite Sport: New York Jets football team
Favorite Film: The Godfather Part II