Retail Banking Vet Deanna Oppenheimer Joins Tech Vendor Finsphere

Veteran retail banking executive Deanna Oppenheimer has joined the mobile identity-authentication vendor Finsphere as a strategic adviser.

Finsphere has developed a geolocation analytics engine that helps financial services companies provide stronger authentication, to help prevent accounts from being compromised. Oppenheimer will help Finsphere sell its wares because she has "extensive experience in financial services," said Michael Buhrmann, co-founder, chairman and chief executive of the Bellevue, Wash., company in a press release Wednesday.

"Finsphere has benefitted from Deanna's counsel for several years and we're happy to take our relationship to a higher level," Buhrmann said.

Oppenheimer worked at Washington Mutual from 2000 to 2005 as the president of consumer banking. She helped transform the Seattle thrift into a national retail-banking player with a distinctive, open branch design. (Washington Mutual, which was also an aggressive mortgage lender during the housing boom, failed in 2008 and was taken over by JPMorgan Chase & Co.)

Oppenheimer became the chief executive of U.K. retail banking operations at Barclays in 2005. She worked at the London-based Barclays holding titles such as vice chair of global retail banking and chief executive of U.K. and European global retail banking, for seven years before leaving to create her own business consultancy firm called CameoWorks in Seattle.

Oppenheimer was named American Banker Magazine's second-most powerful woman in banking five years ago. In 2009 and 2008, she ranked seventh and eighteenth, respectively, on this list.

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