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Jan Shelly Brown

PartnerNew Jersey

Helps financial institutions modernize technology to unlock significant cost savings and speed to market while enhancing risk and compliance measures

Jan Shelly helps financial institutions use technology to drive change and create lasting impact. A technologist at heart, her expertise lies at the intersection of digital, technology, and risk and security—she helps chief information officers and senior IT leaders define the business value of technology.

She is passionate about leading core technology transformations in financial services and highly regulated industries including cloud migration, security, agile, and DevOps. With a professional and academic background in software engineering, she brings a wealth of experience to her client work. She has built large-scale tech systems and led software delivery teams for leading global financial institutions.

Her recent client work includes the following:

  • leading a DevOps and cloud transformation for a regional bank, shifting 80 percent of on-premises workloads to public cloud
  • modernizing risk and security for a North American bank, insourcing technology delivery, building a cloud-native technology architecture, and reimagining the risk and cyber framework
  • leading an 18-month agile and DevOps transformation for a financial services company, yielding 25 percent productivity gains and threefold improved time to market by shifting product teams to agile ways of working, automating software delivery risk and controls, and shifting to a standard enterprise continuous-integration and continuous-deployment toolchain
  • developing and deploying an automated risk-assessment solution for a financial-services organization to identify, mitigate, and monitor risks providing transparency to the second line of defense and integrating into product-delivery tools and backlog-management tools
  • managing a two-year infrastructure operations transformation for a financial-services organization, resulting in approximately 15 percent in captured savings and improved employee morale

In addition to her client work, Jan Shelly is active in McKinsey’s efforts to advance racial equity and inclusive growth globally. Previously, Jan Shelly was vice president in technology at Goldman Sachs, leading product teams through design and development for the fixed income, currency and commodity, and global securities-services divisions.

Published work

What should you be asking your team after the CrowdStrike outage?,” McKinsey & Company, July 2024

The impact of generative AI on Black communities,” McKinsey & Company, December 2023

It’s (past) time to get strategic about DEI,” McKinsey & Company, May 2023

How to close the Black tech talent gap,” McKinsey & Company, February 2023

Security as code: The best (and maybe only) path to securing cloud applications and systems,” McKinsey & Company, July 2021

Lessons from banking to improve risk and compliance and speed up digital transformations,” McKinsey & Company, June 2021

Six digital trends gaining momentum—and why they matter,” McKinsey & Company, August 2020

Implementing agile ways of working in IT to improve citizen experience,” McKinsey & Company, March 2020

Past experience

Goldman Sachs
Vice president, technology

Education

Haas School of Business University of California, Berkeley
MBA, technology and entrepreneurship

Howard University
BS, computer science