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Transcript

Aaron Griswold
Good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening, wherever you are. This is Grizz Griswold of FINOS. Hope you're doing well. This is the open source and finance podcast. And on this episode of the podcast, I sit down with Jennifer Lassiter and Sultan Meghji. Both are former US regulators. And we sit down and we talk about open source and finance, open source with regulators, open source and regulators and talent, recruitment and retainment. So let's start the music

Good morning, good afternoon. Good evening, wherever you are. This is Grizz Griswold, Head of Marketing for FINOS. And today, we are joined by two people that know a lot about regulation. And I'm going to go ahead and ask them to introduce themselves. So Jennifer, let's start with you,

Jennifer Lassiter
Sure. Thank you. Thank you, Aaron, for having me. Good evening. Good morning, wherever you are. today. I'm Jennifer Lassiter. And I guess I've worked at the intersection of finance and policy in technology for about a decade now. So not too long, but a really good decade in terms of innovation. My career initially started at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, where I was brought on to help stand up what at the time, if you can believe it or not, since about 2011, ish, was the first in house custom application design and development team. And I then joined the Office of Innovation were still at the CFPB, where I built the first United States financial regulatory tech sprint program. For those of you not familiar, it's a form of private public collaboration, meant to help understand the impact of emerging technologies on rule writing and supervision. Super fun, I left it. And then I went to the FDIC for a few months actually, under Sultan who's about to introduce himself, to help stand up the framework for similar programs and just dip my feet into interagency collaboration around digital currencies. And I'll take a quick moment, that's my past. My current is a job as executive director at the Digital Dollar Project, which is a nonprofit that works to explore and generate open data around United States Central Bank, digital currencies, I'm trying really hard not to use acronyms. And we use collaboration models, similar to the ones that I used at CFPB and FDIC to generate that data and do that exploration. We call them pilots. So a little bit of a different label. But you know, all fruit, just different varieties. And I'd say lots of central bank, digital currency pilots have been conducted globally. We have not had one yet in the United States. And so the digital dollar project is actively working to change that. And then I don't know of interest. I also serve on the World Economic Forum's digital currency governance consortium, and as an advisor for the Global Business blockchain Council, and as a member of the progressive Policy Institute's mosaic economic project, so I'm a finance dork. I don't know if that came across, clearly. But that's it for my introduction. So I'll turn on tests to you.

Aaron Griswold
I'm gonna say finance geek that. Yeah, that's the cool term. Okay, probably wrong. My kids would tell me I'm wrong. So that's awesome. Thank you, Jennifer. Sultan.

Sultan Meghji
Well, thanks for having me. That's it's good. That's a lot to follow. And Jen for a little bit. It's like it's always I always love hearing her intro. And every time I hear it, it gets a little bit longer just shows like her progression. And, yeah, I know, I'm the opposite. I'm slowing down. I'm just going to get out of the way now. But yeah, so I recently left his first Chief Innovation Officer at the FDIC. Previous to that, in fact, in about a month, I celebrated my 30th year since my first NSF grant, so very excited about that mostly artificial intelligence. And I've been in and out of finance for nearly 30 years as well. I'm a professor Washington University where I teach applied artificial intelligence. I'm a scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace focused on the security of the global financial system, which that's obviously been, you know, a little busy the last couple of weeks and then I'm a member of the Bretton Woods committee, where I focus on the future finance working group, specifically digital assets, cryptocurrencies, CBC policy for central banks, and I'm currently working on building a new LinkedIn profile so I can figure out what to do next.

Aaron Griswold
That's totally fair. Totally fair. Well, thank you both for coming. And I know that both of you have been sometimes a little more involved or tacitly involved with FINOS, and in some of the things that we've done. And I believe that both of you spoke at OSSF this past year. So so thank you for that as well. Um, so want to kind of go into some, maybe some personal and professional interests and experience that you've had an open source and, and maybe first an open source, but then open source and financial services as well, that will be, you know, the basis of most of the talk. But who'd like to start off and tell us about your open source experience? Over your time.

Jennifer Lassiter
Sure, for I think you all can only hear voices Sultan is waving to me. So I will move this one up. This will be short for me because again, 10 decades and and actually, as I was I was having a conversation about this the other day, and I'm trying to coin the term open source native kind of like digitally native. I'm really lucky, because my first introduction to open source was through my brilliant design and development team at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. So I'll give a quick shout out to Audrey Chen, who was the director of the team when I started and now carries the baton for open source at the Department of Education, no easy feat. So I feel like I skipped kind of the legacy Tech, I was born into an open source environment. It's it was it's really the only way I've known to work within the regulatory community and with technologists, so I feel really quite fortunate. And I will say now, just to add to that great fortune is working with Central Bank digital currencies, who I you know, personally, I believe CBDCs will flourish if the ethos of an open source community is adopted. And I'm happy to talk about that more. I was really excited, inspired, and quite proud to be honest, that the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, in collaboration, of course, with MIT's digital currency initiative, released Project Hamilton, and open cbdc, through GitHub. And they're the first central bank to release CBDC work in open source to my knowledge, so I get to continue to touch it. And certainly, again, the spirit of open source collaboration, as we are bringing together private sector thought leaders to experiment and explore, and what that future of finance looks like, is a critical part of the conversation. So I will I'll pass the full time. He'll go deeper than me on this one.

Sultan Meghji
Well, I blinked for a second gen because I heard you say 10 decades and I realized I'm like, wait 10 decades, you're you're that's not

Jennifer Lassiter
verification, one decade, 10 years,

Aaron Griswold
we'll have fact checkers on this later.

Sultan Meghji
You know, they've gotta have something to do. If the politicians are too distracted talking about you. Yeah, so I, I kind of come from it from the other way. So I was there back in the old days back when you know, Binu got started. And all of that, you know, that era. So early 90s, when I was at NCSA, and have just been part of open source ever since whether it was moving from the kernel to the distros for Linux, or standardizing C compilers, or, you know, pretty GitHub trying to, you know, pre GitHub and pre StackOverflow trying to be a programmer, which is, you know, what I was actually originally trained at, you know, when you're building AI on multiple different platforms, and it's like, okay, well, this C compiler operates in this way. And this operates in a different way. And, you know, in the, in the universe of where we live now, with packages and all that, it's, it's all on the back of that. I actually, on New York Stock Exchange back in the late 90s, we actually put open source in there for the first time, which is when I met, you know, kind of interacted with the preceding organization to FINOS did the same thing at some of the credit card processors, credit bureaus, some of the first cloud computing companies. So it's been a, it's been a key component of my entire technical career. And frankly, I think it's a something that most people don't realize, has been foundational to the development of the Internet for 30 years, it's all been on the back of open source technology, whether we're talking about operating systems or networks or whatever. And so if you're, if you're in this space, you you are already relying on it, and it's, it's cool to see it so conversant as part of the dialogue right now.

Aaron Griswold
Right, and you're relying on it, whether you know it or not, most of the time, right.

Sultan Meghji
Over half of the production servers on the Internet are still fundamentally running on some version of open source. So an increasing percentage of the networking hardware is running on open source. You know, everything from, you know, small libraries that make my phone beep a certain way all the way through to the new quantum resilient encryption. That's starting to roll out later this year is all going to be open source. So you know, we it is a key component and a key piece of our of our ecosystem. Very cool.

Aaron Griswold
So I'm gonna switch gears a little bit and, and bring FINOS into this. And you know, as as well, you both know, but as some of the listeners may know, we launched the the open reg tech initiative at FINOS in late 2020. And the whole idea of it was to provide a venue for members and, you know, primarily bank sellside banks to come together and discuss regulatory compliance use cases that could be addressed through open source collaboration, but also to start bringing financial regulators into open into the open source conversation and understand how they could or or would they like to participate in some of our open source projects. And, Jennifer, I believe you both participate in some of our regulation innovation, special interest group meetings, and some other reg related activities, as well. So I'd really like to hear from you, having worked at regulatory bodies, how open source is perceived by financial regulators, and the value that regulators can get from open source in general.

Jennifer Lassiter
Great, thank you. Um, that's a big question. Right. So I will. So let me start talking about what currently exists within the regulators. So I mentioned earlier, the great privilege to kind of learn from the design and development team at CFPB. And the work that they did over the decade that the one year, or 10 years that I was there, included a lot of open source work, right. So that team helped write the first federal source code policy under then President Barack Obama, they migrated the home mortgage disclosure act from a fax machine and paper process to an open API and platform. They built the E regulations platform, so that financial regulators could really was like the first work into machine readable regs. So that that work has been happening. I'll also call out existing efforts to grow open source across the government, right. So for our listeners, and I'm sure you'll have notes to follow in the podcast digital.gov. Right, this is going to give you a list of all of the community practices, all of the ongoing work that's being driven and organized around open source principles. They talk about open API's, change leadership, open source software, in source code, you can look at the United States Digital Services, web design system, again, all based on open source principles. So there's work happening, and I think, probably par for the course. And what's important to understand. And really, it is it is just very general change management, you use existing problems and existing work to be able to demonstrate the value of operating in a certain way or collaborating in a certain way. And then you start to see the cultural change that is needed to really see that shift happen in terms of a longer term strategy. So it's, it's there. I think it's still project based, it's hard. It's hard work. The federal government is big and complicated. And, you know, I think at the end of the day, my determination of success is when you see resources and budget, behind these types of effort, and resources, and budget is a complicated process in the federal space. So there are some brilliant folks that are really carrying that torch forward and continuing to do that work. And again, I'll call out Project Hamilton coming out of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. And adopting those those open source principles of this is the best way to collaborate and create the best product, or at least start the discussion to create a best product as Bob Bench would correct me probably in that sentence. But it's, you know, I think the more resources that we can we can give to folks in the government and the more we can create these projects to help them and move their pieces of work forward. Through that private public partnership, the more you're going to see the the culture shift happen. Does that answer all of the question? I'm not sure. I think so. And I kind of want I will say, I'll say one more thing, Aaron. Yes. And that is just you're not going at this alone, right. So I think power and numbers so even outside of the United States, if you look at the work that Debra Young is doing, leading the reg tech Association in Australia and across Europe, Brian Zane at the CambridgeCenter for AlternativeFinance, they just announced an initiative To explore the future of money that includes private public partnerships and open source principles, Matt Fraser and Simone de Kastri, at the Cambridge Soup TecLab, so you're seeing all of these areas of support and these organizations that are saying this will bring value to our citizenry, let us help you fill some of the resource gaps and help create that momentum for that larger cultural change. So thank you for letting me get that in. Yeah, no,

Aaron Griswold
no, no, no, we'll have to document every single one of those for the sharing those things.

Jennifer Lassiter
I did that Yeah. attention away from my earlier gas thing.

Aaron Griswold
No, no. Oh, Sultan, do you want to add to that? I mean, in, you know, do you have a different view as far as how regulators are looking at open source right now? Or, or kind of the same? or what have you saw,

Sultan Meghji
I mean, I mostly agree with everything Jen says, and she and I were shoulder to shoulder on a few of these issues, not too long ago. And so I think the the thing, though, that I would add to the discussion is, you know, she's given a really good example of how kind of grassroots activities inside of the federal agencies operate, the thing that that we don't have as much of is, is leaders STEM leadership in the agencies in a lot of these government bodies. And so, you know, we basically out of the, you know, 500 or so most senior elected officials in this country, we, in the last count, there were four that had some sort of a STEM degree, and, you know, six had some sort of experience in technology professionally, before they, you know, they went into elected office. So, you know, we've got a bit of an uphill battle in terms of the cultural divide, you know, and there is a big cultural divide between the, you know, the lawyers and the baby boomers on one side, if you will, the tech first or the digital, first of the digital native types, you know, like, like we all are, and, you know, we, we leap to technology, like I, you know, as soon as I left the government, I bought a new laptop, and immediately, you know, the second thing I did on it was put GitHub on it, because that's just a core piece of how you operate. And it's, you know, whether it's, you know, building tech or acting in the communities that we all no matter, you know, we operate in a different way. And there is a big cultural divide there. And it's something that, you know, the grassroots work is fantastic. And I think he can't say enough nice, good things about the US digital service, it's just a total gem of an organization and something we should be proud of. But you also have to allow the, you know, there's an uphill battle, you know, I spent probably 25% of my time as a federal employee, explaining basic technical concepts to people over the age of 65. And that was just part of my job. And I gotta tell you, I'm very happy not to have to do that. Anyway. The the overall function, though, is that we do have to see more senior leadership actually have technical experience and actually understand these things. And so that's a, that's a generational change that we're at the beginning of.

Aaron Griswold
So that kind of leads me into the next piece. And, Jennifer, when you said that, you know, you grew up in open source, in regulation, and, you know, and where Sultan kind of came from technology and open source and then into regulation. You know, I think, honestly, I think about my kids and how they're growing up right now, and, you know, the technology that is just part of their normal, everyday life, is something that, you know, me, I'm what am I, I, I'll be 48 Soon, I'm 47 I can't remember, you know, as 40 something, you know, not over 60, but, but I've been around computers, you know, my entire life. But even some of the things that I'm seeing them just interact with, you know, very easily, it's just part of their life. So, so we kind of look at open source, and I come from the open source side, going coming into financial services as well, in my previous life, and so, you know, I've kind of watched, I watched a point to where we were doing ra, ra, ra open source, you know, 15 years ago at conferences and things like that. And now, you know, that's not a thing anymore. However, in financial services, and then maybe, especially in regulation, it still is a thing. Um, so because, you know, maybe speaking to, you know, age is one thing, but, um, you know, but also where, you know, there are older technologists that did not grow up in open source as well. So, thinking about attracting and retaining talent, this is something that, you know, we try to talk to our members about our, you know, especially our bank members about to as far as how they can kind of move up this open source readiness curve, how they can be more open in open source so that they can attract and retain better talent who's been already ingrained in open source, because that's where they came from in the first place. And that was just part of what they did to get back to what I was just saying. So Sultan, you know, thinking about that and is for regulators and for regulatory agencies, is this something? It's not a yes or no question. But is this something that, you know, that regulators should be thinking about as far as how they attract and retain talent as well? And, and how can they? Well, maybe there's a second follow up to that with you, too.

Sultan Meghji
I would, I would focus on not just attracting and retaining talent, but also growing the talent you already have. And so, you know, continuing education is a critical thing that I don't think the the US government generally does the best job it could on and certainly the regulatory community fundamentally just doesn't do it at all. Especially in technical areas, you know, just finding, for example, a good course, so you could, you know, grow your staff into Scrum Masters, you know, basic skills, something I think we've all done at some point, you know, takes effort, right, it's not just built into the the corporate universities that exist out there, right. So, you know, I think attracting talent can always be a challenge, getting them through the hiring process can be ridiculously challenging. I, you know, at one point, there was a technical role that was trying to get hired at my previous agency, and of the top three candidates, one of them was I'm not joking a bricklayer, and somehow that person was rated higher than, you know, the actual technical domain experiences. So you know, you've got, you've got a challenge around attracting, retaining is a huge challenge, because benefits are not in line with how a lot of people want to operate. But there's a great, passionate, thoughtful expert group of people in the federal government right now. And we need to do a better job of giving them the tools they need to grow into what we need them to be in the future, because it's not going to be the same thing, what you were doing five years ago, and what you're going to be doing in five years is not going to be different. And the largest vector of change, there is going to be around technology. So I think, you know, a, I think, one congressman, proposed something like a tech civil service that had, you know, kind of continuing education built into it as a core feature, I think something like that is something we should be thinking about.

Aaron Griswold
Nice. Jennifer.

Jennifer Lassiter
So, um, I actually had the opposite experience at CFPB. Where we had, we were highly encouraged and had access to a pretty good fund for continuing education. And, you know, particularly around agile methodology, methodology and different support services, or master, etc, associated with that, that ebbs and flows. So the that's the upside. The downside is that ebbs and flows with the leadership and I. So I think one of the challenges in addition to an extended budget cycle, which, again, varies across agencies, because some agencies are appropriated by Congress, and some are not, which impacts the level of agility they have in regards to funding and budgeting. But when you have a cycle, where every two to four years, you're seeing a change and leadership at the helm of your organization, it is not to say that, you know, one administration doesn't support educational services more than the other, it's to say that anytime there's a transition for 18 months, at least, there is a pause, and there is a an understanding and a resetting. And you know, that I think, at least in regards to financial regulators, where we've seen a little bit of hodgepodge and how the turnover has been happening, it's been an extended delay, and that can impact some of your services or benefits that you're providing to your civil servants. So I'll just put that out there. I will also say that I think the the federal government would agree with us in this situation. And here's why. There are incredibly talented folks coming from the private sector to participate in the Presidential Innovation Fellows space to participate in CFPB has a Technology and Innovation Fellowship, Congress just up the congressional tech fellowship, right? United States Digital Service is a termed position you apply, you are there for two to four years, and then you go back out what is very interesting in those studies, and I can only speak from experience, I haven't seen, you know, empirical data that would lead to this assumption that I'm going to state as a fact, I'll just put that out there, which is a lot of those folks are civic minded technologists taking a break in, you know, what can be a very lucrative career. And we're not seeing them leave. So we're seeing those folks in those terms positions, then go and apply to permanent positions in various agencies across the government. So again, it's a long haul it's a long process, and I agree with salt on the hiring process is really challenging and under no circumstances should you be able to cut and paste language into your resume and then get to the top of a certification process, right. But that does happen. One of the things that I think OPM has been experimenting with over the past couple of years, we just saw it come out with the chief experience officer announcement is posting a general position description under a technical category, allowing citizens and current civil servants to apply, and then allowing multiple agencies to look at that list and hire from that list. So instead of perhaps, FDIC, putting out a position description for a data analyst, and CFPB, putting out a description for a data analyst, and running it parallel, they're trying to consolidate and really, perhaps take a more open approach in terms of connecting the agencies. So small steps that I will remain optimistic will lead hopefully into, I think, a more collaborative and transparent future. But, you know, I'm forever an optimist. Hope I stay that way. And, you know, I think I think we'll get there. And we'll have generational change, you know, it'll be lots of factors that will lead us to this future place of how does the the government meet its citizenry, right, where they're at and where they're at is in that digital space.

Aaron Griswold
And, and that actually leads me to maybe my last question and thinking I'm small and incremental. Maybe to leave off, are there any small and incremental changes that you might suggest? And I know, I didn't prep you for this one? So but are there small, incremental changes that you might suggest is, you know, I think the area of attract, retain, attract, retain, and train talent, especially is something that you can kind of look at and and get hold of, are there small, incremental changes that you can make to the process, either bringing somebody in or retaining them and training them, that might be helpful right now to regulators when thinking about introducing them to open source. And I know that there has been work behind that, but introducing them to open source, making sure that that is something that they understand that is really happening within open source or within financial services now, just on the talent side is, are there small things that that we as a foundation, or others could be doing in order to impact that? Slowly? smally right now, I guess, either one of you it's fine. Or if not,

Jennifer Lassiter
yeah, no, I mean, definitely right. I would say include them in the conversation, right, don't try to solve a problem for them. Let them tell you what the problems are, I would recommend a follow up podcast where you bring on some of the regulator's I am no longer regulator, I've been, you know, now six months removed, and I just talked about how slow it was, things also change really fast. So bringing those folks on and asking them to kind of talk and where help would be a value, I think, is a really great idea. I from a banking perspective, again, I'm I talked about these various fellowships that you could join that are kind of a pause in your career, right. So maybe being supportive if you have staff that express that they would like to go off and kind of fulfill this civil service for their country, inspiring them to do so I think sharing with, you know, FINOS, like sharing the various postings when they go out and making sure that everybody is aware that those opportunities are out there. And then again, right, it's the government. So there's going to be this wall, which can be really intimidating. And in my experience, even being on the other side, it's hard, right? You're you can be kind of scared, you have to be vulnerable when you go to a regulator and and say we have an idea, we'd like to introduce you to something, it's a different type of relationship, but be willing to embrace that relationship. I think you can make some good contacts in your innovation offices, or any of the agencies that might have experienced Chief Experience Officers. And, um, you know, hold sessions, educate them, teach them, let them ask questions in a safe place. And, you know, hopefully, you start to develop those relationships and and gross.

Sultan Meghji
Jen just said a lot. I, I'm not going to have a whole lot to add to that. I think fundamentally, the thing that most people, especially in the independent regulatory agencies don't understand is that open source is a fact of life. Is it is there already right? And, you know, hearing lawyers at various agencies, you know, downgrade a piece of technology, because it's open source and they can go to the GitHub repository. They don't seem to understand that that transparency and openness is actually powerful and makes it better than some closed source bit of thing built 20 years ago sitting on a mainframe, which is what, you know, most of the banking sector still runs on. So, you know, I think there's an educational component with which Jen highlighted quite well, I think there's a need a significant need for more transparent discussions between the public sector, the private sector and academia here. And that's really falling off. And and I think the regulatory community is in a really good position to be able to host events like that, and to be able to create platforms for that and work with groups like this to create that kind of openness and dialogue. You know, the follow on the Project Hamilton, it's still a debate as to whether or not it will be open source and you know, knowing the size that are going to actually doing the production builds, it's, you know, it's interesting to hear some of those discussions that are going on, on the CDC side, since we still haven't decided on the use cases. But here's where open source activities would be incredibly useful. You know, throw out the use cases, get the get the people in the GitHub repos have them, you know, kind of having the fight between wholesale and retail, etc, etc. And so to me, the thing I would leave your listeners with is this is, if not the most exciting time to be in technology and finance, I don't know what would be better than this. We're rebuilding everything. Everything is getting redone over the next five to 10 years, every piece of technology from edge to edge case activities around cybersecurity, to the core use cases. And this is an opportunity to rebuild this order into something that is digital first digital, native, automated, predictive, and far more equitable, and far more secure. And we are in an amazing moment. And so for everyone listening, if you're if you're doubting whether or not you're adding value to this discussion, you absolutely are. So double down on that stay in there and figure out how to have even more of an impact and platforms like this. And discussions like this are the exact right things for us to be doing.

Aaron Griswold
Cool. Thank you both so much. Very insightful. Insight. Insightful insights. Good one. That's why I'm a podcaster. Folks. know, I really appreciate the conversation and your thoughts and ideas. And, and you know, in general, I hope that both of you continue to stay engaged within the FINOS community, we are lucky to have you as part of our community so so thank you very much. With that, I'm going to go hop go and head off into the sunset. So thank you both, and hope to see you both very soon.

Alright, so we really love to thank both of our guests, Jennifer Lassiter and Sultan Meghji, both former regulators for the FDIC and a whole bunch of other places, as you could tell. And if you'd like to get involved with our open reg tech Initiative, or a regulation, innovation, special interest group or SIG, please reach out to us at open-regtech@finance.org. We also have a form that you can fill out to make it a lot easier on our website. Plus, I'll put the repo for the regulation innovation special interest group in there as well. And that way, you'll know when we have projects that are on the horizon, for that SIG. And then also over the next couple of weeks. We have some information coming out for regulators themselves, but also for regtech, and then anybody that wants to involved in the regtech space, which we have a couple of projects that are in in around there as well. So I'll put links to everything, of course in the show notes. So with that get involved with the community this way or in other ways to follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn. Join us at FINOS org. Join us on our Slack channels as well links all in the show notes. We actually have an in person meetup coming up on March 16 in New York City is a hybrid so you can join online or in person. And finally if you get a chance please if your podcast platform allows for it. Rate us rate us five stars that really helps our ability to get this podcast out and give more value to our members our community but then financial services and and the value that open source can bring to my financial services in general. So with that, again, this was Grizz Griswold of FINOS, we appreciate your time. Good day, good night, wherever you are.

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