Long Island financial services leader Robert Schifellite, 65, has died
Robert Schifellite, 65, of Fort Salonga, had most recently been president of Investor Communication Solutions, part of Lake Success financial services company, Broadridge Financial Solutions. Credit: Broadridge Financial Solutions
Robert Schifellite, an accountant who helped grow a Lake Success financial services company, Broadridge Financial Solutions, into one of the biggest public companies on Long Island, has died.
Schifellite, of Fort Salonga, died Sept. 24 at a Northport hospice. He was 65.
The cause was pancreatic cancer, said a cousin, Paul Pustorino.
Schifellite worked most recently as president of Investor Communication Solutions, the biggest division for Broadridge, a quiet juggernaut with $6 billion in revenues and 14,000 employees, including more than 1,000 on Long Island.
The company serves as a sort of back office for much of corporate America, running board elections for almost every public company, delivering billions of corporate governance documents to shareholders annually and processing trillions of dollars in stock trades each day.
Schifellite began his career at Touche Ross & Co. before Richard Daly, now Broadridge’s executive chairman and then part-owner of a company called Independent Election Corp. of America, hired him in 1985.
“I told him, ‘Whatever you’re making, 20 years from now, you’ll be two grades above where you are now. Come help me build something,’” Daly said.
Daly was working for ADP when the payroll giant bought Independent Election in 1992. In 2007, ADP spun off its brokerage services business as Broadridge, a separate publicly traded company, with Schifellite as president.
Under its new president, Daly said, the company invested more than $1 billion in building, at massive scale, secure digital tools that made it easier for remote voting by shareholders.
In 2016, industry publication, "Institutional Investor," named Schifellite to its "Tech 50" list, citing his “spearheading” of Broadridge’s work on online shareholder voting and voting by proxy. That process — by which a shareholder can designate someone to vote on matters of corporate governance like board makeup or executive compensation — was not widely adopted at the time, but “is going to be a huge deal for corporate governance,” he told the publication.
Schifellite also pushed Broadridge to develop tools, known as pass-through voting, to give investors in funds more of a voice in how asset managers vote on underlying equities. Those tools are important because investments like index funds have grown over the last decade to hold vast capital. “It’s true democratization,” Daly said.
Robert Schifellite — "Bob" to friends — was born Sept. 22, 1958 in Brooklyn. His mother, Cecilia, was an administrative assistant at Hofstra University; his father, Anthony, was a special agent for the Internal Revenue Service.
The family later moved to Franklin Square, where Schifellite was a standout football and baseball player at H. Frank Carey High School.
A senior year shoulder injury ended his athletic career, but Schifellite kept up with another childhood hobby, the accordion. “He was serious and he was talented,” playing at public venues and gatherings, said Pustorino.
Schifellite earned a business degree in accounting and an MBA in finance from Hofstra University.
He was predeceased by his wife, Karen. He is survived by their two teenage children and by his sister, Carol Kelly, of Fort Salonga.
Last year, Pustorino said, the two cousins vacationed in Italy, and they had planned a trip to Sicily, to visit the house where Schifellite’s grandfather had once lived.
In 2018, Pustorino said, they rented a bus and took their families on a tour of the Brooklyn neighborhoods where the earlier generations had lived, then worked their way out to Long Island, finishing up with a family meal at Patrizia's in Hicksville.
It was a lesson for the children who “didn’t understand stoops and alleyways,” Pustorino said, and a cherished memory for him. His cousin, he said, “brought a sense of family to everything he did.”
A funeral service was held Thursday at Abiding Presence Lutheran Church in Fort Salonga, followed by burial at Pinelawn Memorial Park.
Nicholas Spangler is a general assignment reporter and has worked at Newsday since 2010.
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