Witad Awards 2022: Vendor partnership or alliance professional of the year—Mitra Roknabadi, OpenFin

There are many people working across the capital markets who had no specific industry training and “fell” into it through a mix of opportunity and serendipity. One of these people is Mitra Roknabadi, OpenFin’s global head of marketing and winner of the vendor partnership or alliance professional of the year category in this year’s Women in Technology and Data Awards.

Not only did Roknabadi not have any financial or technology training or experience when she started at OpenFin, but she arrived at the New York-based firm from one of the most far-removed of all industries: retail beauty. “I was very green when I started and I didn’t have a background in finance or technology―I used to do product placement and merchandising for retail focused on beauty,” she says. “In terms of opportunities and in order for me to thrive in such a male-dominated environment, I have to give it up to Adam [Toms, CEO OpenFin Europe], Chuck [Doerr, president and CIO of OpenFin], and Mazy [Dar, CEO of OpenFin]. They allowed me to be creative in a space where things were very conservative.”

Roknabadi was instrumental in developing and launching OpenFin Workspace, an initiative that helped the firm transition from a pure technology provider to one offering products with greater brand visibility. “Historically, OpenFin has been more of a tech-led company,” she explains. “We’ve lived under the hood and we’ve sold directly to developers who leveraged OpenFin to build their environments. With Workspace, we started to build an identity beyond the brand and now we’re much more of a product-led company. Now we have an identity on the desktop and users can interact with the OpenFin environment itself. My role in all that was to speak to multiple personas―we’ve always spoken to developers and product owners, but now we also speak to the business and end-users.” 

Roknabadi also played a pivotal role in the establishment of FinJS, the firm’s JavaScript-focused conferences unveiled in 2015, which she oversaw from conception to launch. “Back then, OpenFin was about five years old and the first few years we spent building our engine,” she says. “We had to convince institutions to leverage OpenFin in order to modernize their environments, and we had to rely on our clients and partners to show the industry what OpenFin does. We ended up receiving a lot of questions [from the industry] about how to leverage JavaScript―they were more about web technology and less about our product.” 

Roknabadi explains that FinJS was established so that industry practitioners could get together to learn how to build robust, innovative and future-proof environments. She had never hosted a conference before, but she backed herself to pull the first one off, which took a few weeks to organize and was attended by 120 industry professionals. 

As for mentors and role models, Roknabadi says she has had many during her decade-long tenure at OpenFin, but one―Kim Prado, who is CIO of US capital markets, investment and corporate banking and office of the COO at BMO Capital Markets―stands out. “Whenever I need advice, I can text her and she responds immediately,” she says. “She is a force of nature.”