On October 29th, 2025. Morgan Stanley was the site for history as we hosted the first ever FINOS event in Canada. As part of the event, we welcomed representatives from multiple financial institutions in Montreal, including Royal Bank of Canada (RBC), Société Générale, National Bank of Canada and Finance Montréal.
Author: Khalid Elsawaf, FINOS Ambassador, Morgan Stanley
David Cardon welcomed the audience to the event, and highlighted the parallels between FINOS' mission to foster collaboration in FinTech to solve common problems and innovate together, and our office's goal of building out a similar community in Montreal.
Elspeth Minty, Managing Director at RBC, Morgan Stanley alumni and former head of Java Platform Engineering, gave us a walkthrough of FINOS, the importance of Open Source in modern software development, and the benefits in can have on professional growth by encouraging developers to raise their game since their work will be in the public domain.
I had the opportunity to walk everyone through the Evolution @ Scale working group, and the importance of being able to flatten the effort curve as complexity and scope increase.
Add the bi-weekly Evolution @ Scale WG call to your calendar. Join the DevOps Automation SIG mailing list to keep up to date with the conversation!
And finally, Jonathan Schneider, Co-Founder and CEO of Moderne, walked us through the origins of the company, from his time at Netflix. He explained the difference between AST and LST, walked us through how recipes are created, how support was added for JavaScript and C# (and the surprising amount of overlap between the support for these languages and the original Java implementations) and gave us a preview of what is next. When asked about whether recipes should be run centrally or by the repo owners, Jonathan delivered this memorable quote: "A PR from an external team is like unwelcome advice from an in-law!"
It was truly a wonderful event. I am incredibly grateful to everyone who made it possible:
- Our amazing volunteers: Liborio Thomas Ciccarello , Dirieh Mahdi Ali, Kevin Ferreira, Mathieu Gervais , Pierre-Luc Dupont , Everton Maldonado , Joy Cai, Vincent Tessier , Mimi Flynn (our amazing photographer!), Negar Mohseni , Simon Berthiaume , Olivier BEAU (our impromptu MC!), Sara Haddad
- Nelly Vassileva and Vanessa Houle for their amazing COO support and David Cardon for the event intro and outro
Looking forward to the next one!
Add the bi-weekly Evolution @ Scale WG call to your calendar. Join the DevOps Automation SIG mailing list to keep up to date with the conversation!
P.S. If you're wondering....no, it was completely unplanned that Elspeth, Jonathan and I each referenced the same XKCD comic strip!
Author: Khalid Elsawaf, FINOS Ambassador, Morgan Stanley
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