Barring the unforeseen, our magazine supplement detailing winners of the FTF News Technology Innovation Awards for 2014 will be online soon. We’re featuring profiles of the fintech providers in attendance for the gala presentation and insights from the individuals recognized for their major contributions. To complete the package, we have photos from a perfect cruise of the New York harbor.
The supplement will include detours from our strict focus on operational and IT management issues.
We get to ask Ops Business Person of the Year Cynthia Meyn, executive vice president for operations at bond fund manager PIMCO, about the challenge of being a woman in a field dominated by men. “I think most people in your 360-stakeholder world are evaluating a given person’s ability to fit in, as well as their skills and competences,” Meyn says. “So, in general, I’ve felt that three things matter: it’s can do, will do, and fit. Ability, motivation and willingness to fit in and partake in the give and take of decision-making.”
We also ask FinTech Person of the Year Stephen Marsh, entrepreneur, founder and CEO of Smarsh, if the email and social media compliance company got its start in a garage. “Sort of,” Marsh reports. “It wasn’t in a garage; it was in an apartment, a desk in an apartment. If I’d had a garage in Brooklyn, it would’ve probably started there. But the space was so small, we didn’t have one. … The closest thing to this garage type of start-up, with people piled into it, there was an office when we were in Portland where we had 12 people crammed into a room that was probably the size of a medium bedroom.”
And, last but certainly not least, Bart Chilton, the former CFTC commissioner, who was singled out via an Editor’s Choice award for his service to the industry, about his idea for boosting the CFTC’s budget. “I had another idea for funding the agency and that was allowing it to use fines and settlements that had been obtained with regard to the Libor [London Interbank Offered Rate] settlement,” Chilton says. “Over a little more than a year, we collected $1.7 billion in fines. Yet our annual budget was just over $200 million a year.”
We did more than offer insightful profiles. We also have a gallery of photos from the awards dinner on June 16 aboard the Hornblower Infinity yacht, which launched from Pier 40 in Manhattan.
Ultimately, it’s the readers that should stop a moment and consider the accolades that they have given to all of the winners. Except for the Editor’s Choice award, the winners were selected by qualified online voters. (Industry participants, a panel of judges and the FTF News staff helped narrow down a long list of nominees.)
As we look to next year’s awards competition, it’s really not too early to start thinking about how you want to recognize, reward and celebrate the Ops and IT professionals, financial technology vendors, service providers, industry bodies, regulators and all others that are making significant strides and achievements toward operational excellence.
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