Rooted in FINOS’ Origins, Symphony’s CIO is Elected Board Director Along with a Marketing Leader from GitLab

New York, NY -- August 26, 2021 -- The Fintech Open Source Foundation (FINOS), a nonprofit whose mission is to accelerate adoption of open source software, standards and best practices in financial services, today announced two new governing board chairs and two new board directors as part of the natural annual rotation of the board leadership. John Madsen, chief architect for technology, Goldman Sachs, will be FINOS board chairman and Russell Green, head of cloud architecture at Deutsche Bank is the new vice chairman. Dietmar Fauser, Symphony’s chief information officer and Traci Robinson-Williams, head of marketing insights at GitLab are new board directors.

“The new board leadership reflects the enormous commitment of established financial institutions and also increased activity among fintechs, which highlights the diverse representation not only in financial and technological intellectual capital, but open source collaboration as well,” said Gabriele Columbro, executive director of FINOS. “With this new leadership we expect to increase engagement in our community continuing to build on the great work their predecessors have done over the past year.”

Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank are long-time collaborators and contributors to the open source movement in financial services with projects like Legend and Waltz. These institutions bring considerable financial technology acumen and business savvy, which will help FINOS enhance existing open source projects and build new ones. With Symphony and GitLab joining the governing board, the foundation adds considerable “tech for fin” and fintech expertise, which will help attract more fintechs to the community and create meaningful open source projects that will have a far-reaching technological impact on the entire financial services industry. 

A long-time Goldman Sachs technology leader, Madsen brings extensive experience, previously holding the CTO position at the company and leading the Enterprise Platforms team. 

“As a founding member of FINOS, Goldman Sachs is committed to supporting an open source foundation that addresses the needs and concerns of the financial services industry. We believe FINOS is uniquely positioned to accomplish this. Through FINOS, we were able to open source our data management platform and get meaningful feedback from other market participants which only makes our software better,” said Madsen.

Green has held numerous software engineering positions in several industries before focusing on software architecture and system design in the financial sector. His current focus is on ensuring that Deutsche Bank applications are onboarded to the cloud efficiently and securely, while adhering to all relevant controls.

”Deutsche Bank’s collaboration with FINOS has been very beneficial in helping the industry to address common challenges such as data modelling and consensus-based pricing, as well as increasing the reach of some of our open source contributions,” said Green. “I’m excited about the opportunity that this role presents to further strengthen that relationship and increase the collaborative spirit of financial services around open source software.”

Fauser’s expertise spans open source development, cloud-native distributed systems and mission-critical systems engineering. At Symphony, he leads the product and engineering organizations with teams in New York, Palo Alto, Sophia-Antipolis, and Stockholm. He focuses on the design and implementation of Symphony's platform and product offering and mission-critical IT systems.

“I am very honored and pleased to be a member of the FINOS board. Open source is the best way to solve common and industry-wide problems. There is a strong need for consolidation, for example in the data exchanges and cross-organizational workflows in the financial industry. At Symphony we believe in open collaboration and open standards and will take an active role in the FINOS open source projects,” Fauser explained.  

GitLab is an important part of the Goldman Sachs Legend contribution, which is deployed using the open core company for modeling source control. GitLab sees its role with FINOS to help simplify complexity, improve compliance, reduce costs and increase efficiencies across the financial services industry.

“GitLab has always been deeply committed to stewarding open source code and to the importance of actively participating in the wider open source software community,” said Robinson-Williams. “I am eager to further contribute to FINOS’s mission of fostering open source adoption and collaboration and to helping drive engagement for silver member organizations.”

Robinson-Williams currently leads the Market Insights team for GitLab where she previously served as a senior product market leader focused on driving DevOps transformation in regulated industries, including financial services, fintech and the public sector.

FINOS’ governing board is composed of executives and senior technologists from several of the world's largest banks, financial technology providers and big tech software vendors. Its purpose is to set the direction of the foundation to address the biggest challenges facing the financial services industry.

“We also want to thank our outgoing board chairs Dov Katz and Kim Prado. They have been exceptional stewards of the foundation as we continue to push forward the open source movement in financial services. We are continuing to build strong leadership from outstanding technologists in financial services and fintech as our membership grows and our collaborative model broadens across the industry,” added FINOS CTO Jane Gavronsky.

About FINOS

FINOS (The Fintech Open Source Foundation) is a nonprofit whose mission is to foster adoption of open source, open standards and collaborative software development practices in financial services. It is the center for open source developers and the financial services industry to build new technology projects that have a lasting impact on business operations. As a regulatory compliant platform, the foundation enables developers from these competing organizations to collaborate on projects with a strong propensity for mutualization. It has enabled codebase contributions from both the buy- and sell-side firms and counts 37 major financial institutions, fintechs and technology consultancies as part of its membership. FINOS is also part of the Linux Foundation, the largest shared technology organization in the world.

Contact

Jamie Kemp

jamie@calibercorporateadvisers.com

(516) 417-3975

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