Robert McWilliams - Co-Founder
Rob McWilliams co-founded FORMAS in 2003, and led strategic marketing and content projects for major customers. He is now Vice President, Content Group, at Thomson Financial. Rob holds an advisory role at FORMAS.

Rob has 20 years experience of developing and marketing information and technology solutions for financial institutions and other professional markets. He has lived and worked for extensive periods in the US, Brazil, Venezuela, Japan, Hong Kong and Europe.

Rob has a Bachelor of Arts degree in Modern History from Wadham College, Oxford University, UK. He speaks fluent Spanish and (Brazilian) Portuguese, good French and German, and some conversational Japanese.

Prior to founding FORMAS, Rob held various strategy, marketing and data production roles at Reuters, the global information and technology provider.

From 2000 to 2002, Rob was VP, Strategy and Marketing, in Reuterspace (later Corporates and Media), the Reuters division charged with creating new businesses outside core financial markets. He researched and negotiated potential partnerships in B2B e-commerce, created and market tested a business plan for offering portal and content solutions to corporations, and negotiated a reseller agreement with Yahoo! for enterprise software.

From 1999 to 2000, Rob managed Reuters data production teams for emerging markets equity and fixed-income content in Stamford, CT, and Toronto, ON. He fostered a new customer-focused culture, and added new data sets in record time.

In 1993, Rob had been transferred to Reuters Latin America where he headed marketing groups in the Andean countries (1994-1996) and in Brazil (1996-99). He built local market news and data services in close alliance with customers, culminating in the 1998 launch of Reuters first ever Portuguese-language news service for Brazil. During his time as Marketing Director in Brazil, customers and revenues both grew over by 75%.

Rob had joined Reuters in London in 1986, but was quickly transferred to Asia where he was instrumental in building and marketing a new generation of financial information services and technology platforms. He was based in Hong Kong from 1987-90, and Tokyo from 1990-93.