Craig Costigan is chief executive of NICE Actimize, the division of NICE that sells anti-money laundering, fraud and trading surveillance software to banks and brokers. He has spent his career selling technology to the back and middle offices of Wall Street, running large businesses at SunGard and FIS before taking over Actimize in 2018.
Economics and an Early Start-up
He earned a bachelor's degree in economics at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts. Early on he was a founding partner and president of K-Tek International, an experience of building something small before he went on to run very large organisations.
Running Risk and Compliance at SunGard
At SunGard he became president of its Risk, Compliance and Global Securities business, a unit with about $650 million of revenue and more than 2,000 staff that supplied front, middle and back-office systems to large and mid-sized banks and brokers worldwide. When FIS bought SunGard, he became president of FIS's Capital Markets and Credit segment, a $1.1 billion business with about 4,000 staff serving more than 2,000 banks, broker-dealers, investment firms, hedge funds and insurers with risk, compliance, credit, securities finance, processing and market data products.
Leading NICE Actimize
He joined Actimize as chief executive in 2018 and is responsible for its strategy and every part of the business, including sales, product, research and development, international services and marketing. Actimize's software watches transactions for money laundering and fraud, screens customers and payments against sanctions lists, and monitors trading for market abuse, and its clients include banks such as DNB in Norway. Under him it has moved those systems to the cloud on its X-Sight platform. "Front and center to me each day is being focused on teamwork and collaboration," he has said.
For most of his career he sold banks the systems that process their trades and manage their risk. At Actimize he sells them the systems that watch for the people trying to abuse all of it. The plumbing is the one he spent years selling; his job now is to watch what flows through it.
