Henry A. Fernandez is MSCI's Chairman, Chief Executive Officer and President. He has served as CEO and a director since 1998 and Chairman since October 2007, assumed leadership of the MSCI business unit within Morgan Stanley in 1996, and reassumed the President role in March 2026 upon C.D. Baer Pettit's retirement (a role he first held from 1998 to October 2017).
He began his career at Morgan Stanley in 1983, working in emerging markets business strategy, equity derivatives sales and trading, M&A, and corporate and mortgage finance, and led MSCI's transition to a fully independent public company in 2007. He holds a B.A. in economics from Georgetown University and an M.B.A. from Stanford's Graduate School of Business, and pursued doctoral studies in economics at Princeton University.