Work in Finance? Introduce yourself!

pb
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
August 28, 2017

Welcome to the Finance interest group! We would love to hear about you, your role/team within your company and what you're hoping to get out of connecting with other Finance customers. 

 

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Denis Boisvert August 29, 2017

I'm Denis , Atlassian Director of the National Bank of Canada. My team and I are trying to make everyone have the best experience(numbers or not) with Atlassian tools!

pb
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
August 29, 2017

Welcome, Denis!  I look forward to meeting you in person.  I have dear friends (and family) up your direction and have spent many enjoyable summers in various parts of Canada.

Joseph Pollone August 29, 2017

Hello, Joseph Pollone here from Seibels, a Business Process Outsourcing company for insurance carriers. I am the solutions architect responsible for the implementation of core insurance systems using Guidewire software. Would love to get started with Atlassian tools.

Like Drew Magenya likes this
pb
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
August 29, 2017

Excellent!  Welcome, Joseph.

Jennifer Lang August 30, 2017

Joseph, Texas Mutual Insurance also uses Guidewire software for our core insurance systems.  Would love to chat with you at Summit!

Joseph Pollone August 30, 2017

Fantastic, Jennifer! Would love to hear your thoughts.

Jennifer Lang August 29, 2017

My name is Jennifer Lang. I am a Senior Project Manager with Texas Mutual Insurance.  I used JIRA and Confluence at my two previous companies.  TXM has made the decision to use these Atlassian tools along with Fisheye and Crucible.  While I was an end user before, I am learning everything I can of the Admin side.   I am very interested in best practices as well as experiences of others.  

pb
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
August 29, 2017

Glad to welcome you back, Jennifer, and to welcome TXM to the Atlassian family.

Andrew Bilukha August 29, 2017

I'm Andrew Bilukha -- VP of Change,  Configuration and Release Management at AQR Capital. I architected and now manage Atlassian stack solution for 10 years in two cutting-edge financial firms.  Our team runs and manages a stack of Atlassian tools at AQR, trains end users, our own team, and our offshore dev and qa resources..  We run a shop with ~1000+ users in JIRA and Confluence. Bamboo with ~700 build and ~2100 deployment plans, and we manage and own the environments into which our software is getting deployed. In addition to that, we own and manage on-prem HipChat, FishEye/Crucible, Artifactory.  Our CI/CD Bamboo platform spans Windows and Linux; various dev platforms - .NET, .NET Core, Java, Python, MathLab, MVN, IIS, Tomcat. We're venturing into DevOps technologies with Docker and Ansible.

pb
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
August 29, 2017

That's excellent!  You've got the whole menu of Atlassian goodness, don't you, Andrew?

Thomas Schlegel
Community Leader
Community Leader
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August 29, 2017

Hi, 

I'm Thomas, working for HanseMerkur, a German insurance company.

I'm an administrator and responsible for various systems here in the beautiful city of Hamburg. I take care of 1500 people working with Atlassian's tools, answer questions, update our servers, create Jira workflows, spaces and fabulous Confluence pages ;-)

And in the meantime, I do my best to answer questions and write hopefully enjoyable articles on this platform.

pb
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
August 29, 2017

For those who aren't aware, Thomas is one of our community champions - they're volunteers who step forward and answer the hundreds of weekly questions posted here, and try to ensure that our users have the best possible experience.  Thanks for all that you do, Thomas.

Monique vdB
Community Manager
Community Managers are Atlassian Team members who specifically run and moderate Atlassian communities. Feel free to say hello!
August 29, 2017

PSA: You can see what Thomas and Philippe and I look like, and post your own lovely faces, in this selfie thread.

Madhusudhan Matrubai
Community Leader
Community Leader
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August 29, 2017

Hi There,

This is Madhusudhan Matrubai, I work for a premier Hedge fund -Citadel in Big Apple. I have been using Atlassian products for a decade now and experience spread across Jira, Confluence, Bitbucket and Bamboo. I also play the role of the NYC Atlassian User group co-leader and I have been fortunate to have spoken at the last two summit's and would be scoring my hatrick this year thanks to Atlassian for giving me this opportunity.

pb
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
August 29, 2017

Hi there Madhusudhan!  Great to meet you...  Thanks for being here, and introducing yourself!

Joakim Olsson August 29, 2017

Hi,

I'm Joakim Olsson. I head up a lean and mean team at Nasdaq that provides a set of tools as a service to the rest of the organization. The team do everything around the tools: operate, support, educate, improve, integrate etc. The Atlassian part of our toolset are used widely within IT but also partly by the business.

I'm always curious and keen to learn from and share experiences.

pb
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
August 31, 2017

Joakim, awesome.  NASDAQ has a really neat new space in San Francisco.  I went to a workshop there once.

I'm always interested in how non-IT ./ "business" users use JIRA.  Before I joined Atlassian, I was the community manager at reddit, and we used it for tracking tasks and support cases there.

Adam Pryce September 6, 2017

Hi,

I'm Adam Pryce. I'm a devloper and I work in parallel Joakim's team. I manage a small Bamboo and help developers with using the tools global that Joakim manages.

Jason Smith August 30, 2017

My name is Jason Smith. I am a Senior Software Developer and Integrator at USAA and have administered Confluence for the past five years. I am most excited to learn about Confluence/JIRA integration, and how to engage our non-IT users who are more comfortable with spreadsheets and SharePoint.

pb
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
August 31, 2017

Hey Jason, thanks for my auto insurance!  Have had USAA since I was 16 (when, by some miracle, they didn't cut me off).  

Confluence/JIRA is a fairly smooth integration, drop by the community lounge at Summit, and we'll show you - or drop by the product hub and one of those great engineers will show you.  

Jason Smith August 31, 2017

Philippe, thank you very much for being a member. I’ll make sure to stop by the community lounge. Thanks!

Dawn Cooper August 30, 2017

Hello, I am Dawn Cooper from Transamerica Life Insurance Company. A Life Insurance Company is actually a finance company but maybe not in the traditional sense that most people think. Our company offers many products and services beyond life insurance.

I have been the Systems Administrator for our information technology division for just over 10 years. All divsions use our tools to request, manage and repoort on project and support work. So I am currently supporting 10,000+ users. Our goal is to have the ability to report on data at enterprise and team levels.

We have been transitioning to agile and migrating some teams towards kanban over the last 5 or so years. We are attempting to move everyone to 'one tool' for our projects, and Jira was the chosen one. That has been going on for about a year. Now the more I learn, I know that Jira is just a small part of the Atlassian family of tools. So far we are also using Confluence. WOW! its like your smartphone, there's a plugin for that! Trying to pick and choose what is best, getting more bang for the buck, pleasing everyone and as less maintenance possible for me all at the same time.

So as a newbie for Jira, I am really looking forward to learning as much as possible!

pb
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
August 31, 2017

Dawn, out of curiosity, how many administrators do you have to support 10K users?  

I love confluence on mobile apps... it works amazingly well there!  

Danny Zuccaro
Community Leader
Community Leader
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August 30, 2017

Hi everyone,

I am Danny Zuccaro and I work for TD Securities in Toronto. We use a number of Atlassian tools throughout the bank and we've been working to recently consolidate our instances. I'm also a co-lead of the Toronto AUG and this will be my third Summit. Looking forward to meeting you all in person in the next week!

Denis Boisvert August 30, 2017

Interesting. We have consolidated  all our instance here at NBC here last year :) I have 2 remaining in my backlog.

pb
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
August 31, 2017

Danny, another community champion!  Thanks for that!  And an AUG leader to boot.  :-) 

Third summit, huh?   What's your one "must know" thing for those of us going to our first?

Danny Zuccaro
Community Leader
Community Leader
Community Leaders are connectors, ambassadors, and mentors. On the online community, they serve as thought leaders, product experts, and moderators.
August 31, 2017

Suggest downloading the app and trying to plan which sessions you will attend. Pretty easy to get overwhelmed with all the wonderful content and things to do. Oh and don't miss the bash - it is awesome!

pb
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
September 6, 2017

Good to know, and I can second the advice to not miss Bash - huge things planned for this year!

Kelly Schuknecht August 30, 2017

Hi all!

I am a manager in the PMO at FirstBank in Colorado, and I oversee the Atlassian applications we use (so far, JIRA and Confluence, but hopefully more soon!) We are a medium-sized bank (~$17B in deposits, ~2,500 employees) but we have a large IT department and develop many of our own applications, both internal and customer-facing. We implemented JIRA and Confluence Software Server last year and have been using it to manage most of our project work. We recently migrated to the Data Center model, and some of our biggest challenges have been around security. I'm looking forward to meeting all of you next week!

Matt Jones August 30, 2017

Hi, I'm Matt Jones, and Administrator at Auto-Owners Insurance in Lansing, MI.  I started off using JIRA about 8 or 9 years ago, and we've been using more and more Atlassian products, most recently bringing in Bitbucket, SourceTree and FishEye.  Looking forward to hearing how other companies deal with compliance issues (such as PCI) that are part of being in financial services.

pb
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
September 6, 2017

That's great to know, Matt.  I've asked that someone from our compliance team come in to talk to the group at some point during the discussion.

Mark Hellerman August 31, 2017

Greetings, my name is Mark Hellerman.  I am a Business Systems Analyst and Process Expert at Vanguard, a large financial/investment company located outside Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.   I am working with our department to implement best practices using JIRA and Confluence.  After exploring the capabilities of these tools for six months,  I am coming to the conference to learn more about how to best use these two.  We want to integrate their capabilities into our continuously improving software development process.  I am also hoping to hear real-life examples of how  these products improve the work flow of other financial companies. 

pb
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
September 6, 2017

That's fantastic - Continuous Improvement is a hugely interesting area to look at.  Our Continuous Delivery collection here on the community may be a good place for you to start getting some ideas.

Scott Kellerman August 31, 2017

Hi, my name is Scott Kellerman.  I'm the IT Project Management Process Owner and an IT Project manager for Vanguard's Retail business.  I've been helping with the transition to several Atlassian products over the past few years.  I'm coming to the conference to learn more about the tools we are currently using and to learn about tools we could potentially bring in house.  Right now we're evaluating HipChat and I'm very interested in learning about that tool.

pb
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
September 6, 2017

Hey Scott, that's awesome.  I <3 Hipchat.  Are you looking at a server or cloud deployment?

Scott Kellerman September 7, 2017

Server deployment.  I've got my team in the initial eval group at my organization.  So far so good, but I'm interesting in learning about it's power beyond that of a standard chat application.

Monique vdB
Community Manager
Community Managers are Atlassian Team members who specifically run and moderate Atlassian communities. Feel free to say hello!
September 7, 2017

Would you be open to a cloud deployment, @Scott Kellerman? We just released Stride today and it rocks.  (If you need to stay server-side, there will be some major investments in HipChat Data Center as well.)  But Stride is so new and shiny. :) 

Scott Kellerman September 12, 2017

I'd love to be able to utilize a cloud deployment.  Still working on getting my organziztion's security group comfortable with having potential PII stored outside of their firewall though....

pb
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
September 12, 2017

Yeah, that's a tough conversation to have with security folks.  I feel ya.  I don't suppose it would work to just look at them and say "But it's new and SHINY!"?  No, I didn't think so....

 

(Seriously, we've been using it internally for a while, and it is really a cool product.)

Justin August 31, 2017

Hello! My name is Justin Witz, I'm the CTO of FRA PlanTools is a retail financial advisory solution and we have a development arm that builds custom solutions for recordkeepers, banks, broker-dealers and third part administrators. I'm attending Summit as a User Group Leader and to learn more about BitBucket and JIRA integrations.

pb
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
September 6, 2017

Thanks for participating in our AUGs, and for being a community champion as well!

 

Can't wait to meet you.

cheunglu August 31, 2017

Hello! My name is Lun Cheung. I'm the lead DevOps engineer for Mercedes-Benz Financial Services. We are using majority of the Atlassian products. While we have many scrum projects, I am interested to learn how others have used JIRA for waterfall projects. I know it sounds like going backward but those in FS industry will understand.

pb
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
September 6, 2017

Can you help me, as a financial industry dummy (seriously. Can't balance my checkbook.  Or maybe just "wont".) understand why you would use JIRA for waterfall projects?  I mean, JIRA is certainly flexible enough for that - it'll do just about anything - but I'm curious about the motivation.

cheunglu September 6, 2017

We had been using another requirement tool prior to JIRA mainly supporting waterfall projects. We want to move away from that tool and use JIRA exclusively. However, not all teams are ready to switch to scrum methodology. So they will not use sprint/backlog to organize their project tasks.

I see that JIRA can handle just about anything. I look forward to hearing how others use JIRA to support waterfall projects, what workflow changes they made, what add-ons they used specifically for this weird scenario.

Semi Kefi [demicon GmbH]
Rising Star
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January 21, 2018

Hello @cheunglu,

still searching for ideas on how to use jira for waterfall projects?

Regards

Semi

Rhonda Fitzpatrick August 31, 2017

Hello,

My name is Rhonda Fitzpatrick.  I am the Vice President- Technology Integrations at MegaStar Financial, an independent mortgage bank located in Colorado.

We recently began using Jira Service, Jira Development and Jira Core.  Our developers also use confluence.  I'm looking forward at learning more about Jira and how to make the most of reporting tools as well as how best to structure Jira Core for our teams.

pb
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
September 6, 2017

Here's my deep dark secret - I used to work on Mediawiki some, but I think that Confluence is a much better knowledge sharing platform.  I've been fascinated to watch the migration of folks that I know used to be mediawiki over to confluence.  It makes sense, right?  Mediawiki does what it does (serve continuously changing content to large audiences) extremely well, but that really isn't the use case that most of us have for knowledge sharing platforms.  

Does the rest of your org use something other than Confluence?  You mention your Devs are using it, but there are beautiful integrations to service desk that might be really cool too.

Juby John September 2, 2017

Hi

My name is Juby John. I am an IT First Flyer at Freedom Mortgage.

I have been working as Jira admin for a year now. I am looking forward to learning more about Jira, Workflows, Reporting tool, Jira integration with other platforms like Zephyr and services or features that can help execute automated test cases in Jira.

pb
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
September 6, 2017

Workflows are so cool.  I've been playing with an instance that I have set up in a private little corner of the web to model out a 2.0 platform for my team, and I've had fun playing with potential workflow.

Jonathan Chatwin September 5, 2017

Hi I'm Jon Chatwin, I'm a Product Owner and Analyst at Farm Credit Canada. We're Advancing Canadian Agriculture! 

I'll be at Summit this year. Hope to see you there! 

I have been a JIRA Admin for about 18 months now and am looking to learn how other FI's use JIRA in their DevOps and in the business. We currently use it all over the organization for Business Critical workflows from our Lending Systems and Contact Centre, Project Management, Time Keeping and a number of other uses. We are heavily invested and use cases are growing to use JIRA all over! 

I'm also interested in using Confluence more, and how to integrate more into DevOps with builds/releases. 

pb
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
September 6, 2017

I love hearing how people use their instances of JIRA - I have a dream of a "tell us about your JIRA" section on this site where people can show off the cool ways they use it, so that we can all get ideas. 

The Confluence -> JIRA integrations are really sweet.

Monique vdB
Community Manager
Community Managers are Atlassian Team members who specifically run and moderate Atlassian communities. Feel free to say hello!
September 6, 2017

@pb you may not be aware of this, but we have a collection for JIRA where you could post a discussion....  ;) 

pb
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
September 6, 2017

She's sassy, that @Monique vdB.  I long for the day when my team feared me.  FEAR!  

You may stop snickering now.  I'm lucky, most days, to get the team to experience emotion that's much beyond "mildly bemused."  You see what I'm dealing with here?

Howard Eberhart
Community Leader
Community Leader
Community Leaders are connectors, ambassadors, and mentors. On the online community, they serve as thought leaders, product experts, and moderators.
September 5, 2017

Hey!  Howard Eberhart at BNY Mellon.  I was the JIRA product owner/administrator when we first brought JIRA into the company.  Now I am the Northern New Jersey AUG co-leader.  I am in the Global Quality Assurance Center of Excellence currently and work to facilitate the adoption of DevOps from the QA perspective.

pb
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
September 6, 2017

An early champion of JIRA to your company.  Awesome!  And as you know, we love our AUG leaders, thanks for everything that you do there!

Karen Hayden September 5, 2017

Hello everyone!

I am Karen Hayden, Systems Consultant, with Pacific Life Insurance company in southern California.  I am currently the JIRA & Confluence Administrator and am responsible for process improvements for the IT department of our Life Insurance Division. 

We have had JIRA for over 4 years and have recently added Portfolio for JIRA to our collection.

Look forward to sharing unique challenges for financial institutions in this product space!

pb
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
September 6, 2017

Portfolio is such a neat product!  I would love to see how you're using it in this industry.

Ruth Struck September 18, 2017

We are looking for good Portfolio for JIRA training for our PMO group. Any suggestions?

Ronald Koster September 18, 2017

We made our own based on the overall Portfolio concept we have. Check the presentation from Atlassian Summit 2017 in Barcelona to get a first glimp

Karen Hayden September 19, 2017

We are currently only targeting our IT managers for this tool.  I'm not sure if this tool will meet all of our PMO department's needs - that will be a future investigation.

I just attended the Planning with Portfolio for JIRA (at Summit US 2017).  It was very good.  Great overview of UI and even better information on the calculation methods used by the tool (a must to understand the tool)!

I don't know if they offer it on-line or recording of it, so just check Atlassian Training to see if they have future offerings.

pb September 19, 2017

Excellent!  I'll check in with the training team, Ronald, and see what they suggest, if you'd like.

margusrosin September 6, 2017

Hi!

My name is Margus Rosin and i'm joining from Europe, small country called Estonia. I'm the head of IT services in Bigbank. Bigbank AS was established in 1992 in Tartu, Estonia. It specialises in term deposits and consumer loans and now operates in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Finland, Spain and Sweden, while providing cross-border services on the German, Austrian and Dutch markets. We are coming with 4 people from Bigbank to the Summit.

We are using a variety of Atlassian services for approx. 4 years for now.

Waiting forward to meet you.

Monique vdB
Community Manager
Community Managers are Atlassian Team members who specifically run and moderate Atlassian communities. Feel free to say hello!
September 6, 2017

@margusrosin, a friend of mine just spent three years living in Estonia! Unfortunately we didn't get a chance to visit her there, it looks beautiful. and I know she loved it. :) 

pb
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
September 6, 2017

I remember talking to a friend from Estonia about the singing festivals.  It always sounded so neat.

margusrosin September 27, 2017

Yes, the singing festivals (Laulupidu in estonian) are really have to be events in our heart and souls.

Brad Hoben September 6, 2017

Hello everyone, my name is Brad Hoben and I work for State Street Global Advisors, an institutional asset management firm in Boston. I manage our Project Portfolio Management team and our newly created DevOps group within IT. I also have the responsibility of driving Agile adoption across the organization and I would be interested in speaking with people who have used Atlassian tools to help drive or support Agile adoption and Continuous Integration in their environments. We have deployed Bitbucket and Fisheye/Crucible into production and are actively piloting JIRA and Confluence.  

 

Looking forward to meeting as many of you as I can next week!

pb
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
September 6, 2017

Hi Brad - have you checked out our continuous delivery and agile collections here?  They may have some resources for you.

Kevin McBride September 6, 2017

Hello all!  I'm at Capital One. I was really looking forward to making my 3rd Summit and our time together in San Jose. Unfortunately, I'm having ankle surgery tomorrow and my docotr told me I'm not going anywhere (my wife concurred).  I'm in the Small Business Digital Engineering group and worked with JIRA the past 3 years. I was one of the early adopters here at Capital One, transitioning from VersionOne to Jira. Learned the product, built all our flows, and a lot of the Admin configuration. I've been in Financial Services software development for over 25 years www.linkedin.com/in/kevinjmcbride 

Looking forward to our future interactions. Have fun at the Summit!

pb
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
September 6, 2017

Nooooooooo!  So sorry to hear that you won't make it.

 

I asked @Danny Zuccaro above what his one "must know" tip for those of us going to our first summit would be.  Do you have one for me? 

Ronald Koster September 6, 2017

Hi all

I work for ABN AMRO a Dutch Bank. I do product implementations (from idea to operation) for Business and IT development work including the Atlassian products. Me and my fellow team members are responsible to help development teams deliver fast and good (Agile, CICD, DevOps) by providing them the tools to succeed.

Currently I am working on a concept to enable teams do their work based on product delivery (no projects anymore). Teams must become owner of their product: backlog (JIRA), information (Confluence), software (Bitbucket), releases and deployments and manage deliveries from idea to code to sales and marketing.

I am not attending the next Summit as I did Barcelona this year. I like to learn and share experiences from the different things I do and looking forward to interactions. https://www.linkedin.com/in/kosterronald/

pb
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
September 12, 2017

Ronald, I'm sorry that we won't see you in San Jose!  Hopefully I'll meet you at some point in the future though.

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