Jean Donnelly

Jean Donnelly is a Boston-area fintech operator and ecosystem builder best known as the founding Executive Director of FinTech Sandbox, the non-profit she built and led from roughly 2014 to 2020. A self-described "recovering engineer," she holds an undergraduate degree in Industrial Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) and an MBA from the University of Edinburgh, and brings more than 20 years of experience across technology, operations, and process excellence in both financial services and clean tech.

Before FinTech Sandbox, Donnelly held roles at established institutions and startups alike, including GE Capital, Fidelity Investments, and the clean-energy company EnerNOC, along with time at a digital-forensics startup. Her background spans insurance operations and process excellence, giving her a rare combination of large-enterprise financial-services depth and hands-on startup experience.

At FinTech Sandbox, she built a program that gives well-qualified fintech startups free access to premium financial data sets and infrastructure — taking no fees and no equity — so founders can build and test products faster and more cheaply. Under her leadership the organization grew to support dozens of startups (later cited at 90+) across Boston, New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Toronto, and London, working with 30+ data partners. She also helped establish Boston FinTech Week, a large free fintech conference held each September.

After stepping back from the Executive Director role, Donnelly joined Sandbox Banking (first as Chief of Staff, later COO), a banking-integration ("Glyue") platform. Following nCino's acquisition of Sandbox Banking, she moved into a Director, Channel Partnerships role at nCino, while continuing to serve on the FinTech Sandbox Advisory Board and, previously, the Founders Workbench (Goodwin) Advisory Board.

• Operates primarily as an ecosystem builder and early-stage enabler rather than a traditional check-writing angel — FinTech Sandbox provides data, infrastructure, and network access to seed-stage fintech founders, explicitly taking no fees and no equity.
• Focuses on data-oriented fintech startups at the point where access to premium financial data is most impactful to product development and testing.
• Backs founders who will collaborate and give back to the fintech community — the Sandbox model expects participating startups to share learnings that benefit the broader ecosystem.
• Emphasizes empathetic, operational leadership; in her own talks she stresses "effective leadership, and the important role that empathy plays," reflecting an operator's lens on what makes early teams succeed.
• Sector conviction is squarely in financial technology and financial-data infrastructure, informed by her years at Fidelity, GE Capital, and EnerNOC.