Wellington Management joins FINOS

By Edlyn Cardoza

The Fintech Open Source Foundation recently announced Wellington Management, one of the world’s largest independent investment management firms, as its newest Platinum member. In addition, Wellington’s Co-Head, Technology, Madeleine Dassule, will join the FINOS board of directors. This membership highlights the value and long-term benefits that open-source collaboration brings to buy-side firms, with FINOS being recognised as the neutral umbrella for all industry constituents of the financial services ecosystem to leverage and contribute to open source technology.

“On an industry-wide scale, we are seeing an increased diversity of organizations joining the open source movement and playing an instrumental role in driving innovation throughout the ecosystem,” said Gabriele Columbro, Executive Director of FINOS. “The engagement and open collaboration of buy-side firms and adoption of FINOS’ open standards drives fundamental technology principles, enhancing interoperability across the industry. The impact of transformation through open source continues to be measured by the global recognition of value among leading institutions.”

Year after year, FINOS continues to expand the diversity of its corporate members, now showcasing the recognition of value in open source among leading buy-side institutions, including large asset managers and hedge funds. The addition of Wellington as a Platinum member empowers the drive of technology standards in critical areas, such as interoperability with the sell-side and industry-wide data. Leveraging the power of open-source technology through projects contributed to FINOS, like FDC3 and Legend, buy-side institutions enable direct connectivity with their counterparts and reduce vendor lock-in.

“As we come together to tackle common technology challenges our industry faces such as application interoperability, we empower our clients and counterparties to manage workflows and establish connectivity better and faster,” said Dov Katz, a Distinguished Engineer and Managing Director at Morgan Stanley and Member of the FINOS Governing Board. “With buy- side firms like Wellington joining FINOS, we are further strengthening the ecosystem and harnessing the benefits from frameworks such as FDC3 to achieve our vision of continuous innovation to drive open standards and effective collaboration.”

“Buy-side participation in the open source movement plays a pivotal role in establishing vendor-neutral collaboration with sell-side conglomerates,” said Kim Prado of The Bank of Montreal and Vice-Chair of the FINOS Governing Board. “Through projects like FDC3, Wellington and other firms support the development of unified industry congruence. The addition of Madeleine to the FINOS Governing Board aids in addressing key challenges facing financial services.”

Wellington’s Madeleine Dassule, Co-Head, Technology, joins the FINOS board of directors. Dassule assumes her role in leveraging the power of FINOS’ open source projects. As a Platinum representative on the FINOS Governing Board, Dassule represents the buy-side of the ecosystem, influencing the direction of the foundation to deliver tangible business value to her respective industry and closely related counterparts.

“As our bank partners continue to innovate and introduce rich sets of data and analytics, we are eager to integrate these valuable insights into our portfolio construction and risk transfer processes,” said Dassule. “Advancement in desktop integration and interoperability will allow our investors and traders to leverage these tools in a manner that is frictionless and compatible with their existing workflows. We are excited to collaborate with the industry to further provide investment excellence to our clients.”

“The FINOS technology standards developed by the FDC3 community create opportunities for banks to collaborate with clients to improve their overall experience. Citi and Wellington recently completed a proof of concept that successfully integrated an analytics function in CitiVelocity alongside Wellington Management’s proprietary company and security level investor tools,” said Biswarup Chatterjee Head of Innovation, Global Markets at Citi.