Createathon’s Executive Sponsor Shares Excitement for the 2024 Event
Createathon, FINRA’s premiere innovation event, isn’t your average hackathon. Sure, there is a healthy dose of exploratory and rapid engineering in the name of problem solving, but this event is so much more.
For the ninth year in a row, FINRA casts a wide net across the organization to encourage anyone and everyone to participate and solve essential business problems during this multi-day event. It’s geared not only toward FINRA Technology; all staff from all business units are encouraged to show up and collaborate.
Eric Weller
“It’s a very inclusive event,” says Eric Weller, VP of Data Platform and Credentialing, Registration, Education and Disclosure Technology, who moonlights as Technology’s executive sponsor for the event. “It’s a celebration of FINRA culture. We want to have creativity and high levels of collaboration. We want people to demonstrate their expertise. We want people to innovate. We want to bring all sorts of different people and their ideas, aspects and lenses together and be able to showcase that to the organization.”
Additionally, the output of the event doesn’t end at the closing ceremony, which is regularly attended by hundreds of FINRA staff members.
“Some of those projects pick up business sponsorship and turn into initiatives,” explains Eric. “Or they could get turned into a Research and Development project if they need to mature a little bit more before becoming an initiative. It's not just a one-and-done thing. The work doesn’t get parked or shelved, it progresses depending on what the idea is and the level of business sponsorship.”
FINRA’s Research and Development (R&D) Program is affectionately referred to as FINRA’s “innovation engine.” To date, the program has supported over 60 projects and allows FINRA Technology and the business to partner and test the feasibility of use cases, some of which are developed from the event itself.
“Everything we do for the Createathon has a whole mini-Createathon behind it,” Eric continues. “It takes a small army to get all the different areas and workstreams together to make sure every aspect and angle is covered.”
Eric goes on to say this includes working with FINRA CIO, Steve Randich, to ensure that FINRA’s Management Committee are aware of and engaged with the event, including CEO, Robert Cook.
Empowering FINRA staff to attend is another topic close to Eric’s heart. He says he works with peers, dubbed Createaleads, to ensure staff feel they can participate and still get their day-to-day work done.
“We don’t want our staff to feel pressure that they can’t participate because they need to get other things done,” explains Eric. “We try to be proactive so our executive team can help create some buffers in advance, so people don't feel that pressure.”
Eric calls this year’s Createathon a “homecoming” to the Thomas R. Gira Building in Rockville, Maryland, the Technology team’s homebase that has recently been completely renovated. “Staff can travel in because it is a Presence With Purpose (PWP) event,” Eric added.
One of the ways FINRA provides a competitive work environment is with our hybrid work policy and PWP events. FINRA staff have the flexibility to work remotely or from the office depending on which makes business sense. FINRA also hosts PWP events to bring teams together.
This year’s Createathon theme is Formula: One FINRA.
“I'm personally so excited for Formula: One FINRA,” Eric shares, noting the play on Formula 1 (F1) racing and the data and analytics, experimentations and creative fun that can happen with that theme. He goes on to say that while the last several Createathons were 100% virtual, this year’s is a hybrid event.
This year’s Createathon will also feature DeepRacer, Amazon Web Services’ Racing Simulator Software. “We're going to have a racetrack; we're going to have cars and maybe we will even have pit crews,” Eric says.
“The nice thing about DeepRacer is that the business can participate. We can work and experiment together and it will demonstrate on the track. How is the vehicle adapting to what you’re teaching it and the inputs you’re giving it?”
Eric believes the DeepRacer activity will be a key collaborative bridge between FINRA Technology and business units: “When we think about building software and technology in our day-to-day work in the cloud, this experimentation and iterative type of approach, feeling comfortable with a failure here and there, learning from that failure and embracing data to help you learn and educate what you're going to do next... it helps inform the next set of considerations to think through. We can still get to the outcome we want and learn something along the way. It's important for us to keep embracing that here at FINRA moving forward because that is how software is being built in the cloud. The more that business and technology can learn those things together, like with these experiments, I think that's a powerful way for FINRA to grow.”
