FINOS Expands Financial Services Open Source Ecosystem with Six New Members and Creation of Associate Member Program for Nonprofits

Intel, SUSE and Diffblue Broaden Industry Representation in the Open Ecosystem for Financial Services; Associate Membership Provides Open Source On-Ramp for Nonprofits, Industry Consortia, Academic Institutions and Public Agencies

NEW YORK, NY / ACCESSWIRE / November 12, 2020 / Today, at its annual flagship conference, the Open Source Strategy Forum (OSSF), the Fintech Open Source Foundation (FINOS), announced three new corporate members – Intel and SUSE, joining as gold members, and Diffblue at the silver level. FINOS also announced today the launch of its Associate Member Program and three inaugural associate members, the Alliance for Innovative Regulation (AIR), InterWork Alliance(IWA), and the International Swaps and Derivatives Association (ISDA).

“From big tech to financial institutions, from regulators to fintech vendors, we are bringing together a community that is actively contributing valuable IP and sweat equity because it has now realized how the ‘open source way’ has the concrete potential to solve long standing challenges in this industry and beyond,” said Gabriele Columbro, executive director, FINOS.

These six new members further broaden industry representation across FINOS’ membership base, which now includes over 10 financial institutions and 20 technology vendors. Today’s announcement is also the latest example of accelerating growth in FINOS membership in the last year; with today’s announcement, the total count of FINOS members is now 38. “Our continued growth in members reflects the ongoing shift in financial services as more institutions embrace open collaboration to drive new business models, reduce costs, attract and retain talent, and gain competitive advantage,” remarked Tosha Ellison, FINOS Chief Operating Officer.

“Open source in financial services is a positive-sum game,” added Columbro. “Not only does it help industry consortia and regulators resolve important and complex issues at the crossroads of policy and technology, but it also provides technology and fintech companies with the ability to generate business opportunities through a commercial open source ecosystem, especially for those who will enjoy a first-mover advantage by engaging early in communities like FINOS.”

Technology Companies Join the Financial Open Source Movement

Intel is joining FINOS as a gold member. The company is an industry leader, creating world-changing technologies that enable global progress and enrich lives. Intel is also one of the largest software organizations in the world, and a leader in the development of open source technology.

“Intel technology can help banks unleash the power of data to deliver real-time insights and more value to their customers,” said Mike Blalock, general manager for the financial services industry at Intel. “As a strategic partner with FINOS, we will actively collaborate with the open source community to deliver leading-edge hardware and help bring this transformation to reality.”

SUSE, also joining FINOS as a gold member, is similarly an open source innovator. The world’s largest independent open source company, SUSE is a leader in enterprise Linux, edge computing and artificial intelligence. Its container and cloud platforms and software-defined infrastructure, enable businesses to create, deploy, and manage workloads.

“SUSE is passionate about open source innovation. We foster the potential to simplify complexities, modernize systems and accelerate discovery in banks and financial institutions,” said Alan Clark, who leads the SUSE Industry Standards and New Initiatives Program. “SUSE is proud to be a contributing member of FINOS and we will collaborate and address industry challenges around financial technologies, data modeling, machine learning, edge computing, hybrid cloud, security and containerization. Building on our FinTech experience and partnerships, SUSE will be an active member and guidepost for the FINOS community.”

A spin-out from Oxford University backed by Goldman Sachs, Diffblue is the creator of one of the world’s first AI for code solutions that automates writing unit tests and will join FINOS as a silver member. Its first product, Cover, writes Java unit regression tests that help software teams to find bugs sooner and so ship faster, with fewer defects. Its pioneering technology, developed by researchers from the University of Oxford, is based on reinforcement learning.

“We’re thrilled to be joining FINOS as a silver member so that we can collaborate more broadly with our financial services customers on open source projects that matter to them,” said Mathew Lodge, CEO of Diffblue. “As a commercial open source company, Diffblue’s Community Edition is free for open source projects so we will be contributing both better tests and tools as part of the community.”

New Associate Members Showcase FINOS’ Capabilities Beyond Traditional Financial Services

FINOS’ Associate Membership is for nonprofits, foundations and academic institutions with complementary missions to FINOS. These organizations can contribute to projects and bring attention to the numerous applications of open source technology, while FINOS provides its expertise and battle-tested open source governance to enable faster innovation in these adjacent communities.

As the regulatory landscape is ever changing, globally, AIR, a nonprofit dedicated to modernizing the financial regulatory system, will share its expertise with FINOS to drive open source solutions that standardize the way financial regulation is implemented and supervised.

“The mission of FINOS and the open source orientation of the FINOS community are an ideal complement to the work we do with financial regulators,” said David Ehrich, executive director, AIR.

ISDA is a trade association for participants in the global derivatives market, with more than 925 member firms in 75 countries. A key part of ISDA’s role is the development of standards and mutualized industry solutions for the derivatives market, including the Common Domain Model (CDM), which establishes a set of digital standards for trade events and processes. ISDA joins FINOS as an associate member, having recently participated in the successful pilot of Legend, the data platform contributed to FINOS by Goldman Sachs.

“The standards developed by ISDA are critical to derivatives workflows and, by extension, tons of fintech use cases,” said Rob Underwood, Chief Development Officer of FINOS. “In the pilot phase of Legend, extensions to the CDM were built using Legend. ISDA was central to Legend’s pilot and that overall open sourcing effort.”

“ISDA has long produced standards and definitions for the derivatives industry, and we have been working to digitize and distribute those standards in formats that work best for the fintech community. Engaging with fintech firms and providing those standards in open source should result in a rapid development of industry solutions and contribute to the transformation of financial markets,” said Ian Sloyan, Director, Market Infrastructure and Technology, ISDA.

IWA is a nonprofit, member-led organization creating platform-neutral specifications and trusted certification to define how digital token business processes can interwork regardless of location or market segment. Areas of expected collaboration include specifications for tokenizing institutional bond and equity instruments.

“World-scale adoption of standards is accelerated when those standards can be paired with open source reference implementations,” said Paul DiMarzio, executive director, IWA. “The IWA is excited to collaborate with FINOS to build pairings between FINOS open source projects and the IWA business working groups standardizing tokenized services for financial services.”

The announcement comes on the first day of OSSF, which is an annual conference recognizing leaders within the open source and financial services industry. The virtual event will bring together experts for engaging conversations and breakout sessions on how to best leverage open source software to solve industry challenges.

Some notable keynotes include:

• Opening Remarks by FINOS Chair and Global Head Kim Prado – RBC and Dov Katz FINOS Chair, Morgan Stanley
• Welcome and Opening Remarks – Gabriele Columbro, executive director, FINOS
• “Open Sourcing Legend: The Flagship of Goldman Sachs’ Data Strategy — and Now Yours?” – Pierre de Belen, managing director, Goldman Sachs
• “Innovation + Security = Innovation Joy: Stop Sacrificing Customer Experience for Security” – John Jeremiah, product marketing leader & DevOps evangelist, GitLab
• “Quickly Deliver Modern Open Source Projects and Services with Modularity, the Enterprise Open Source Way” – Alessandro Petroni, global director and head, strategy financial services, Red Hat
• Talks with Sarah Novotny, open source wonk, Azure Office of the CTO, Microsoft and Alejandra Villagra, managing director, Citi

To check out sessions from today’s virtual conference, please visit: https://events.linuxfoundation.org/open-source-strategy-forum/program/schedule/.

About FINOS

FINOS (The Fintech Open Source Foundation) is a nonprofit whose mission is to foster adoption of open source, open standards and collaborative software development practices in financial services. It is the center for open source developers and the financial services industry to build new technology projects that have a lasting impact on business operations. As a regulatory compliant platform, the foundation enables developers from these competing organizations to collaborate on projects with a strong propensity for mutualization. It has enabled codebase contributions from both the buy- and sell-side firms and counts 33 major financial institutions, fintechs and technology consultancies as part of its membership. FINOS is also part of the Linux Foundation, the largest shared technology organization in the world.

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SOURCE: FINOS