Nelson Chai

Chai served in senior positions at AlliedSignal and Philip Morris before joining medical diagnostics products manufacturer Dade Behring in 1997 as corporate vice president of worldwide field finance; he later became their senior vice president of business development.

Archipelago

Chai was named chief financial officer of Chicago, Illinois-based electronic communication network company Archipelago Exchange in June 2000. Chai was a major driving force behind the merger between Archipelago and the New York Stock Exchange; he repeatedly pressured his boss Archipelago CEO Gerald Putnam, to meet with NYSE officials, though Putnam felt that the NYSE would be uninterested and hoped instead to pursue an acquisition of rival ECN Instinet. In April 2005, when Archipelago formally announced its pending acquisition by the NYSE, it was decided that Chai would take over as CFO of the NYSE in May 2006 from Amy Butte, who had held that position since February 2004. Butte later decided to leave the exchange entirely rather than continue at her planned new position as executive vice president of strategy and product development. In 2006, Chai received a salary of $750,000 and a bonus of $825,000 from the NYSE; combined with other payments, his cash compensation for the year totalled $2,168,922.

Merrill Lynch

On 3 December 2007, John Thain, the new chief executive officer at Merrill Lynch and Chai's former boss at the NYSE, announced that Chai would join Merrill in the position of chief financial officer starting on 10 December; the move was part of a management shake-up at Merrill, initiated due to their losses in the subprime mortgage crisis. Chai replaced Jeffrey Edwards, who had held the position of CFO since 2005; Thain stated Edwards would assume another unspecified role within Merrill. Chai's new employer revealed that he would receive a bonus of $2.5 million for the 2007 fiscal year, split evenly between cash and stock, for his three weeks of work that year, bringing his total compensation for the year to $3.1 million. Merrill justified the bonus by pointing out that Chai would not receive any year-end incentive payment from his previous employer. Chai was slated to receive a salary of $600,000 in 2008. However, he and other top-level Merrill executives received no bonus that year, due to the 2008 financial crisis.

Chai was born in 1965 in New York City to Korean immigrant parents. He studied as an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania, and went on to receive an MBA from the Harvard Business School. He has three children with his wife Jung, a stay-at-home mom. They lived in Lake Forest, Illinois before moving to New York City. Chai previously drove an Isuzu Trooper compact sport utility vehicle, but traded it in for a Toyota Prius hybrid electric vehicle in 2004.

Chai has served on the board of directors of the United States-India Business Council since August 17, 2007. He is also a member of the national board of directors of the U.S. Fund for UNICEF.