Finastra Names Ex-Avantax CEO Chris Walters as New Chief Executive

U.K.-based financial services software firm Finastra has a new chief executive.

Chris Walters, a veteran of financial services firms like Avantax, has joined Finastra as CEO, the company announced Monday (Jan. 6). He replaces Simon Paris, who is stepping down after nearly a decade of heading the company.

“Chris brings a wealth of experience from senior executive leadership positions, driving innovation and scaling technology companies,” Finastra said in a news release. “He recently served as CEO of Pluralsight and Avantax, a leading company within financial services, where he orchestrated significant performance improvement and the company’s successful sale.”

Before that, Walters held a range of leadership roles, including being a partner at McKinsey & Company and chief operating officer of Bloomberg Industry Verticals Group.

The release noted that Paris’ leadership of the company included the formation of Finastra itself, out of the merger of Misys and D+H in 2017. The company now has more than 8,000 clients in 130 countries, including 45 of the top 50 banks in the world.

“This journey with Finastra has been a privilege,” Paris said. “Chris is a seasoned professional, and I am honored to ‘pass the baton’ to him. I leave incredibly proud of what Finastra has achieved so far and excited for the company’s future under Chris’s leadership.”

In other news from the financial services space, PYMNTS wrote recently about the sector’s ongoing shift to open banking.

“The premise and the promise of open banking is this: Individuals have the ultimate control over their financial data, including account-level data,” that report said. “They decide who gets to see that information — and how that information is ultimately employed by the financial services and products they are offered and use in everyday life.”

This trend is one toward personalization, with banks and FinTechs vying for customer loyalty, capturing that data to extend credit and underwrite decisions in real time, or verify identities, or streamline account-to-account payments.

“APIs are at the center of it all, enabling the points of connection between providers and all of that permissioned data,” PYMNTS added.

Research last year by PYMNTS Intelligence found that 46% of consumers were interested in using open banking for at least one product or service. However, other reports showed a commensurate percentage of banking executives who felt the risk of things like fraud outweighed the benefits of offering those services.