Global Finance 600: The world's most powerful financial players, The

A Liverpudlian who built Schroders- money management arm, Sedgwick is Win Bischoff's right hand.As deputy chairman, he now oversees corporate advisory subsidiary J Henry Schroder Wagg as well. He and Bischoff tagged David Salisbury, 46, to run Schroder Investment Management last year.

BRAZIL

Roberto Egydio Setubal

Setubal is rapidly expanding the insurance and pension fund business of Banco Itau (founded by his father Olavo, a former foreign minister and mayor of Sao Paulo).The former Citibanker also bought Argentina's Banco de Buen Ayre in April.A critic of foreign rivals, Setubal, 43, has helped form a national consortium to bid for state-owned bank Banespa, slated to be auctioned late this year.

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UNITED STATES

David E. Shaw

A former Columbia professor of computer science, Shaw, 46, may be the world's best quant stock picker Since he started his proprietary trading firm D.E. Shaw a decade ago, assets have grown from $38 million to $1.7 billion. Using algorithms that measure stocks' previous performance against the market, he simply picks stocks and hedges with derivatives. On a given day he accounts for 5-10% of New York Stock Exchange volume.

TAIWAN

Stan Shih Chen lung

A cult figure in his home country, Shih founded Acer Group, whose Acer Computers boasts Taiwan's best-known global brand name. Originally the beneficiary of government funding, Shih has made Acer a darling of international investors. He's now trying to interest IBM and Microsoft in making cheap digital machines for single purposes, such as accessing the Internet.

UNITED STATES

Walter Shipley

Booted out of Williams College for preferring basketball to studies, Shipley rose to chair Chemical Banking. His two daring acquisitions, of Manufacturers Hanover and Chase, catapulted him past Citicorp to become boss of America's biggest bank (until the BankAmerica-NationsBank merger last April).Though Chase Manhattan leads the world in syndicated corporate lending, Shipley must find a way into equity investment banking to keep up with rivals.

JORDAN

Abdul Majeed Shoman

Called the patriarch of the Palestinian diaspora, Shoman, 88, has expanded his father's Arab Bank across the Levant and North Africa, helping Palestinian exiles restart businesses.A staunch opponent of the Oslo accords, he has nonetheless become the West Bank's biggest banker with 18 branches. His bank's $17 billion is assets in about twice Jordan's GDPA passionate baseball fan who once worked at Chase, Shoman often serves as a diplomatic back channel to King Hussein.Younger brother Khaled runs asset management; son Abu runs credit activities.

WITZERLAND

Yaffa-Nilly Sikorsky

President of Geneva's secretive Capital International (an arm of Capital Group in Los Angeles), the tanned and bejeweled Nilly Sikorsky invests some $50 billion in Europe,Africa, and Asia. From an Egyptian Jewish family that fled the 1956 Suez crisis, she developed in the 1960s the world-renowned Morgan Stanley Capital International indexes. Known for her panEuropean investing style, she's likely to attract even more money as pension plans drop their country-by-country approach in the euro era.