Featured Speakers

Jo Ann Barefoot is CEO & Founder of AIR – the Alliance for Innovative Regulation, Cofounder of Hummingbird Regtech, and host of the podcast show Barefoot Innovation. A noted advocate of “regulation innovation,” Jo Ann is Senior Fellow Emerita at the Harvard Kennedy School Center for Business & Government. She has been Deputy Comptroller of the Currency, partner at KPMG, Co-Chairman of Treliant Risk Advisors, and staff member at the U.S. Senate Banking Committee. She’s an angel investor, serves on the board of Oportun, serves on the fintech advisory committee for FINRA, is a member of the Milken Institute U.S. FinTech Advisory Committee, and is a member of the California Blockchain Working Group Advisory Board. Jo Ann chairs the board of directors of FinRegLab, previously chaired the board of the Financial Health Network, and previously served on the CFPB’s Consumer Advisory Board. In 2020 Jo Ann was inducted into the Fintech Hall of Fame by CB Insights.

Pierre is a Managing Director at Goldman Sachs and the Lead Architect of the recently open sourced Data Management Platform Legend. In addition, he co-manages Goldman’s global Data Platform team which is responsible for developing data-centric and user-focused solutions to power the firm’s Data Strategy. During his 15-year tenure at Goldman Sachs, his technological designs significantly increased data quality and streamlined data production flows. Before joining Goldman Sachs, he was a senior Consultant at Gemini Systems building out a software to uplift various trading floor workflows at the NYC Stock Exchange. Before that, he was Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer at Apeera.

John Jeremiah is an enterprise DevOps evangelist and the product marketing leader at GitLab.  He is a multifaceted IT software leader with over 20 years of IT leadership and software experience including developing and shaping DevOps positioning and go-to-market strategy as well as serving as an application developer, project/program manager, and IT Director. John has led software delivery transformation, adopting an Agile and CMMI Maturity Level 3 process framework, and has held a variety of leadership roles with the U.S. Navy, IT consulting, and Fortune 500 IT organizations.

Alejandra “Ali” Villagra is a Managing Director in the Markets and Securities Services division of Citi.   She is the head of Citi Velocity, Citi’s #1 ranked Digital Platform for Institutional Clients.   Since joining Citi in 2001 she has held positions in investment-grade debt origination, institutional fixed income sales and in Citi’s innovation organization.    She is also an active participant in women’s leadership and development networks at Citi. Ali is a graduate of Dartmouth College and lives in New York with her husband and 4 yr old son. 

Dov Katz is a Managing Director and Distinguished Engineer at Morgan Stanley. He has been at the Firm for 21 years, and has been involved in a wide array of technologies ranging from instant messaging, to client facing electronic trading, to web platforms and toolkits, devops, and developer experience.  He currently leads the Morgan Stanley Software Developer Experience organization, responsible for providing toolchains, libraries, and expertise to support the Firm’s more than 15,000 developers.

Dov has been an active board member of FINOS since its inception, serving as Chairman in 2020, and currently still an active Chairman Emeritus.

Dov holds a BSc in Computer Science from Columbia University and an MBA from New York University.

An IBM Fellow and CTO Open Technology for IBM, Christopher has been involved in the architecture, design, and engineering of distributed systems for most of his 40+ year career in IT. He has been actively engaged in open standards and open source development since 1999. He has overall responsibility for setting the strategy and overseeing the execution of IBM’s strategic open source and standards initiatives. He represents IBM on the Hyperledger Technical and Open Source Security Foundation Board of Governors.

Sarah Novotny has long been an Open Source champion in projects such as Kubernetes, NGINX and MySQL. She is part of the Microsoft Azure Office of the CTO, sits on the Linux Foundation Board of Directors, previously led an Open Source Strategy group at Google and ran large scale technology infrastructures before web-scale had a name.

Alessandro leads the business and technology strategy to accelerate the adoption of Red Hat open source technologies in the FinServ/FinTech industry working with customers, technology and service partners across product management, engineering, marketing and sales.

In his role, he leads Red Hat in assisting banks and other financial services firms in the go-to-cloud journey, adopting DevOps, influencing Red Hat R&D to focus on solving Finserv line of business’ challenges developing open source reference architectures and open collaborative environments.

Prior to Red Hat, Alessandro has spent sixteen years serving top financial institutions including Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch Bank of America, Societe Generale, Citicorp and Deutsche Bank. He has covered leading roles as a consultant covering engineering, operations, software development, and consulting. As banking IT director he has implemented mission-critical distributed solutions for capital markets and retail banking, managing large international teams.

Alessandro graduated in Master Computer Engineering and Business Administration at the University of Trento, Italy, and lives in New York.

Matt Van Buskirk is Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Hummingbird Regtech. Hummingbird gives superpowers to the people fighting financial crime by reducing paperwork, providing smart, data-rich analytics, and enabling collaboration for compliance professionals and law enforcement agents. Before launching Hummingbird, Matt was the Director of Regulatory Affairs at Circle.com, an international consumer payments startup leveraging blockchain technology. He was previously a consultant with Treliant Risk Advisors, a Washington-based management consulting firm specializing in the financial services industry, and a regulator with the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Thrift Supervision. His speaking credentials include the American Bankers Association Regulatory Compliance Conference, the Monetary Authority of Singapore’s Fintech Festival, Money 2020, Finovate Europe, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, and the Department of Homeland Security’s annual AML conference.

Dan Abramov is a software engineer at Facebook, member of the React Core team and co-author of Create React App. Prior to joining Facebook, Dan co-authored Redux, a predictable state container for JavaScript applications, which catapulted Dan as an influential conference speaker and successful Twitter commentator.

Neal is a technology leader in the Financial Industry,  who as CTO has led Engineering at Quantitative funds AQR Capital and D. E. Shaw & Co, as well steered large technology organizations as CIO at UBS and most recently Deutsche Bank. He is an advocate for open source and is proud of AQR’s decision to open source Pandas in 2008. He has been a recurring member of the “Institutional Investor Top 50 in Tech” lists and is currently working with technology start-ups a board member,  advisor,  and investor.

Tosha has spent more than 18 years in financial services and technology working with banks, software companies and start-ups in a wide variety of roles. Leveraging this experience Tosha is driving our Member Success initiative to help our members maximize value from their engagement with FINOS and open source software more generally. Before joining FINOS Tosha co-founded eCo Financial Technology to give banks a new way to source and evaluate software. Prior to that Tosha spent 13 years at Credit Suisse in London and New York where she held a range of technology roles in both Equities and FICC before becoming COO for eFX and then FID eCommerce.  Tosha started her career in a Silicon Valley financial  technology start-up after earning BAs in Psychology and Mass Communications from the University of California, Berkeley.

Gabriele is an open source executive and technologist at heart. He spent over 15 years building developer ecosystems to deliver value through open source across Europe and the US. He thrives on driving innovation both contributing to open source communities and joining commercial open source ventures, whether it’s for an early-stage tech startup, a Fortune 500 firm, or a non-profit foundation. Previously Director of Product Management at Alfresco, as Executive Director Gabriele grew the Fintech Open Source Foundation FINOS from the ground up, with the vision of creating a trusted arena for the global financial services industry to innovate faster, leveraging open source as a model of collaboration. Gabriele holds a Master in Computer Engineering, is a Committer for the Apache Software Foundation, and advises open source startups. He’s a passionate soccer fan, reggae music connoisseur, and special needs dad and advocate wannabe.