Kip Twitchell is a Certified Public Accountant (US CPA), consultant, and system architect with over 30 years of experience at IBM Consulting, and the founder and managing director of Sharealedger, NFP — an Arizona nonprofit dedicated to open innovation in financial and business systems.
In his consulting career, he has consulted at 12 of the top 25 banks in the world and constructed major book-of-record systems for Fortune 500 companies and global banks. He has deep expertise in ERP, reporting, analytics, high-volume ledger systems, and regulatory projects.
Sharealedger
Sharealedger, NFP is the organizational home for everything on this site. It is an Arizona 501(c)(6) nonprofit business league whose mission is to encourage understanding of existing financial systems and promote open innovation in ledger architecture. LedgerLearning is Sharealedger's public educational gateway — the research, open-source code, and member community live at sharealedger.org.
Existing financial systems have been tuned for lower costs and higher security for decades, but their underlying architecture is built on computing constraints that no longer exist. Sharealedger explores how shared ledger architectures, metric engines, and open-source collaboration could dramatically reduce the cost of financial reporting — and make that innovation available to the whole industry.
Conceptual Model
Open framework for event-driven, mathematically consistent financial architecture. Public on GitHub — contributions welcome.
Ledger Lab
Open-source prototypes, high-performance join engines, and event-driven financial system experiments.
Member Community
Free membership gives access to PDF books, research monographs, slide decks, and the private member repository.
Conversations with Kip
As @finsysvlogger, Kip's YouTube channel Conversations with Kip has released new videos continuously since April 2016 — now containing hundreds of episodes with tens of thousands of views. The series explores why accounting software stagnated after early automation, how modern computing can unlock transformative efficiencies, and what a shared ledger architecture could mean for financial services.
Books & White Papers
Kip is the author of two freely available books:
- Balancing Act: A Practical Approach to Business Event Based Insights (2010, updated online) — 68 chapters covering accounting history, REA analysis, data supply chains, GenevaERS, and a plan for financial systems renewal.
- Metric Engine: Reinventing the Data Supply Chains for Business (2015) — a technical white paper on high-performance reporting engines and the architecture of pre-summarized metric repositories.
Community Roles
GenevaERS — Linux Foundation
Founding chair of the GenevaERS open-source project under the Linux Foundation's Open Mainframe Project. GenevaERS has been used to build very high-volume, enterprise ledgers for national and international financial services companies.
Open z/OS Enablement Work Group
Active in the Linux Foundation's Open Mainframe Project, promoting open-source transformation of legacy systems integral to the modern financial world.
BSV Blockchain
Member of the Technical Standards Committee of BSV Blockchain, and a panelist at their global convention exploring blockchain's role in financial system architecture.
Career Background
Kip began his career with Price Waterhouse, which became PricewaterhouseCoopers and then PwC Consulting in 1998, which was acquired by IBM in 2002. He has spent his career at the intersection of accounting, high-volume data processing, and enterprise system architecture — and has spent the last decade documenting and sharing that 30 years of knowledge publicly through LedgerLearning and the Sharealedger community.