Witad Awards 2023: Vendor partnership or alliance professional of the year—Jane Gavronsky, Finos

An innovator by nature, Jane Gavronsky says that ironically, her decision to become a technologist wasn’t all that innovative. “Both my parents were in technology, so it was a little bit in our blood,” she says.

Gavronsky, the newly named COO at the Fintech Open Source Foundation (Finos), is the daughter of a Cobol programmer—her mother—who first showed her that technology could offer a more level playing field for women than other industries.

“It’s kind of like solving math problems—you get the answer right or you don’t. To me there was this association of ‘if you do well, you’ll be recognized for it,’” she says.

Gavronsky joined Finos as CTO in 2021, following a 12-year stint at Credit Suisse, where she ran the bank’s reference data technology group—“a thankless job,” she says—globally. She earned her master’s degree at Columbia University and began as a trainee at Goldman Sachs—early enough that her interviewer at Columbia hadn’t heard of the would-be mega bank downtown.

As part of one of her first projects at Goldman Sachs, she helped write the first-ever trading system for emerging market bonds. “We—meaning me; I was the one developer—and my boss,” she says. “No one had done it before, and we just went ahead and did it. And that was really cool.”

At Credit Suisse, she and her team developed a service base layer to streamline reference data access points. It was a hard project, she recalls, and it took many years to complete. But it ultimately became a “household name” tool at the bank. Central Data Distribution Service, or CDDS as it came to be called, is still up and running.

Leaving the IP-obsessed, profit-driven banking culture for the Finos ethos of open access and democratization was a huge culture shock for Gavronsky, who says she had long been curious about what life was like on the other side. Banks are process-oriented with decades of precedent. Small tech companies have to make it up as they go along.

Recently, Finos launched its Common Domain Model (CDM) in partnership with Isda, Icma, and Isla, and it has other sprawling initiatives, such as FDC3 for interoperability and Open RegTech for digitizing regulatory compliance—all of which Gavronsky is instrumental in executing.

With such a long to-do list, she’s learned to turn her brain off by cooking—though some say she still overachieves in the kitchen. “In our fridge, there’s a minimum one soup at any given time,” she says. “If there’s two, it’s extra credit.”