Featured Speakers

Ritesh Bansal has spent over two decades building core trading and quant infrastructure at global banks and hedge funds. His work spans data ingestion pipelines, simulation engines, execution platforms, and distributed compute frameworks.  Ritesh is passionate about turning infrastructure into a strategic advantage—enabling teams to build, experiment more, and scale faster.  He is currently focused on open platforms that accelerate quant productivity.

Michael Abbott leads Accenture’s global banking and capital markets practice. With over 25 years of digital banking and operational technology experience, he helps banks and capital markets firms innovate and transform their operating models to deliver a superior customer experience through technology, data and AI.

Before joining Accenture, Michael was the founder and CEO of Softcard, which was acquired by Google in 2015 and is now the mobile wallet platform for Google Pay. Prior to founding Softcard, he spent a decade at GE Capital, where
he significantly expanded the company’s consumer finance business, establishing it as a leading embedded finance player in North America. Michael holds a BS in Mathematics, a BS and MS in Electrical Engineering, and an MBA
from Columbia Business School.

Michael is a frequent speaker and a prolific author. He has been a Forbes contributor since 2022, covering topics such as how banks are leveraging gen AI to reinvent talent and ways of working, the top banking technology trends for the year ahead and the mobile payments blind spot that could cost banks billions. His insights have also been featured in the Financial Times, Reuters, Wall Street Journal and American Banker. Follow him for ongoing insights into the technological transformation of the banking sector.

Sitija is a Managing Director and Technical Fellow at BlackRock, leading the development of scalable architectures, and creating innovative frameworks and products. With over 12 years at BlackRock, Sitija has been instrumental in shaping the user experience and technology strategy for Aladdin, BlackRock’s premier multi-asset end-to-end investment management platform.
One of Sitija’s core responsibilities is overseeing the Web, Desktop, and Mobile strategy for Aladdin Applications.
As a new member of the FINOS Board, Sitija is passionate about leveraging open source to enhance connectivity and efficiency in the financial industry. She sees FINOS as a crucial platform for community building, knowledge sharing, and collaboration across different subjects and geographies in the financial sector.

Hilary Carter joined the Linux Foundation in 2021 to launch and lead LF Research, established to deliver empirical insights into open source trends, opportunities, and challenges. Prior to joining the Linux Foundation, Hilary led a global, syndicated research institute focused on blockchain technology based in Toronto, Canada. She has authored and led nearly 200 research projects focused on open source innovation and its adoption across industries. Hilary holds a Master of Science in Management from the London School of Economics, and holds dual Irish and Canadian citizenship.

Gabriele is an open source 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. He has recently won the Tech Leadership Award at FinTech Futures USA Banking Tech Awards.

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. He then led FINOS to join the Linux Foundation umbrella to accelerate growth, ensure long term sustainability of efforts and reduce fragmentation in the Foundation’s ecosystem. In 2022, he took on a dual role as General Manager of the newly launched Linux Foundation Europe, which was created to foster regional open collaborations in the European continent and expand the global platform of the Linux Foundation.

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.

Tosha Ellison has over 25 years of experience in financial services and technology, spanning roles in banking, software, and start-ups. At FINOS, she leads initiatives that highlight the value of open source in financial services, having previously served as COO and Director of Member Success. Before joining FINOS, she co-founded eCo Financial Technology to transform how banks source and evaluate software. Earlier in her career, Tosha spent 13 years at Credit Suisse in London and New York, holding senior technology and COO roles across Equities and FICC. She began her career at a Silicon Valley fintech after earning dual BAs in Psychology and Mass Communications from the University of California, Berkeley.

Brian Stevens is Red Hat’s Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) for AI, where he drives the company’s vision for an open, hybrid AI future. His work empowers enterprises to build and deploy intelligent applications anywhere, from the datacenter to the edge. As Red Hat’s CTO of Engineering (2001-2014), Brian was central to the company’s initial growth and the expansion of its portfolio into cloud, middleware, and virtualization technologies.

After helping scale Google Cloud as its VP and CTO, Brian’s passion for transformative technology led him to become CEO of Neural Magic, a pioneer in software-based AI acceleration. Red Hat’s strategic acquisition of Neural Magic in 2025 brought Brian back to the company, uniting his leadership with Red Hat’s mission to make open source the foundation for the AI era.

Jennifer Samolyk is a Cloud Governance Senior Manager at Fannie Mae, where she acts as the company’s Cloud FinOps SME. With over 12 years of experience at Fannie Mae, she manages a multi-million dollar cloud environment , overseeing cost optimization efforts and guiding teams toward a full chargeback model. Her expertise is in uniting Finance, Technology, and Business leaders to make smarter decisions on cloud migration costs and usage visibility, providing a practical foundation for her talk on evolving enterprise culture. A FinOps Certified Engineer and Practitioner, Jennifer also holds a Doctor of Law (JD) from Roger Williams University School of Law, offering a unique perspective on governance and finance in a technology-driven world.

Mike Bursell is the co-chair of the OpenSSF’s Cyber Policy Working Group andExecutive Director of the Confidential Computing Consortium. He is one of the co-founders of the Enarx project and was CEO and co-founder of Profian, a start-up based on Enarx. He has previously served on the Governing Boards of the CCC and the Bytecode Alliance and currently holds advisory board roles with various start-ups.

Mike is author of “Trust in Computer Systems and the Cloud”, published by Wiley in 2021.

Frank Nagle is an assistant professor in the Strategy Unit at Harvard Business School and the Advising Chief Economist at the Linux Foundation. Professor Nagle studies how competitors can collaborate on the creation of core technologies, while still competing on the products and services built on top of them – especially in the context of artificial intelligence. His research falls into the broader categories of the future of work, the economics of IT, and digital transformation and considers how technology is weakening firm boundaries. His work utilizes large datasets derived from online social networks, open source software repositories, financial market information, and surveys of enterprise IT usage.

Professor Nagle’s work has been published in top academic journals as well as in practitioner-oriented publications like Harvard Business Review, MIT Sloan Management Review, and Brookings Institution TechStream. He has won awards and grants from AOM, NBER, SMS, INFORMS, EURAM, GitHub, the Sloan Foundation, and the Linux Foundation. He is a faculty affiliate of the Digital, Data and Design (D^3) Institute at Harvard, the Managing the Future of Work Project, and the Laboratory for Innovation Science at Harvard (LISH).

Positioned in the Office of the CTO at Block (formerly Square), Manik Surtani is the Open Source lead and is responsible for Block’s open source strategy and culture, and Block’s Open Source Programs Office (OSPO). 

His long tenure at Block has seen him wear many hats, including VP of Platform Engineering for CashApp (one of Block’s business units), leading strategic initiatives such as monolith decomposition, and as a staff IC responsible for highly fault tolerant distributed payments infrastructure. Prior to Block, Manik was a staff IC at Red Hat, was the creator and lead engineer of Infinispan.org (which is today a multi-billion dollar product line for Red Hat). He was also an early engineer on JBoss (an open source Java EE application server) which later got acquired by Red Hat. 

He has a background in distributed and fault tolerant systems, data grids, networking and load balancing, and performance tuning of JVMs, and is a strong proponent of open source development methodologies, ethos, and collaborative processes. He has been involved in open source since his first forays into computing, ever since compiling Slackware Linux in the early 1990s, with contributions to Linux, MySQL, PHP, OpenJDK, and many popular Java libraries you probably still use today. 

In addition to leading open source, Manik spends a lot of time thinking about the intersection between AI and open source, and how open source can create the right balance between transparency, safety, and velocity for the explosive growth of AI, particularly with Goose, Block’s new open source agent framework.

Bhupesh has over 20 years’ experience working in the front office trading technology for some of the world’s leading investment banks. Beginning his career at Barclays working across Infrastructure, Equity Derivatives, Fixed Income and Credit Derivatives, he moved to Lehman Brothers for 4 years in 2005 before returning to Barclays where he held a number of senior management positions and was to inevitably head up Credit, Municipal and Securitized Products Technology alongside running Trade Capture across Markets. He subsequently left Barclays to take on the opportunity as Europe Head of Capital Markets Quantitative and Technology Services at RBC in July this year. With deep expertise in risk, analytics and electronic trading and passion for technology, Bhupesh has continued working closely with innovators in the FinTech space to build forward looking platforms in Investment Banking.