Witad Awards 2021: Vendor partnership or alliance professional of the year—Tosha Ellison, Finos

“’You’re too pretty to take seriously.’”

Tosha Ellison recalls someone saying that to her on a trading floor several years ago. “Really? I mean, really? What does that have to do with anything?” she says.

Ellison, COO at the Fintech Open Source Foundation (Finos), hasn’t heard comments like those so much in the last five years or so, at least not in the way she did 15 years ago, and she’s glad things have changed.

Ellison never made a conscious decision to work in finance or even technology. Having studied psychology and mass communications in college, she stumbled into them when she landed a marketing internship after graduation at a risk management software company based in Silicon Valley.

“That was way over my head, but it had a great startup vibe, and there were some stronger women there in the marketing department and in sales,” she says. “So I think that probably made a difference, and then that led to a total career in financial services and technology.”

She worked her way up, finding a deep appreciation for the craft that is development work. She moved from marketing to development to product management, running a quality assurance support and training team. She credits many great male and female bosses she had along the way, who looked out for her and invited her to meetings she might otherwise not have been able to sit in on.

Before joining Finos, Ellison co-founded eCo Financial Technology to give banks a new way to source and evaluate software. Prior to that, she spent 13 years at Credit Suisse in London and New York where she held a range of technology roles in equities and fixed income, or as she puts it: “When I was at Credit Suisse, I had three or four different careers.”

Ellison co-leads Finos’s Open RegTech initiative, encouraging use of open software and standards to address inefficiencies in the regulatory landscape. And in a full-circle, serendipitous kind of way, the once-mentee is now a mentor, providing guidance and support to open source project teams.