Dive Brief:
- The Fintech Open Source Foundation onboarded seven new members, including hyperscaler AWS, market infrastructure provider DTCC and chipmaker Intel, the organization announced Wednesday.
- AWS joined its hyperscale competitors Microsoft and Google Cloud in the FINOS alliance. The nonprofit organization has membership support from numerous financial services companies, including Capital One, Citi, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley, as well as from technology providers Red Hat, Databricks and CloudBees.
- “By joining FINOS, AWS becomes part of the effort to enhance the financial services industry's technology ecosystem through open-source initiatives,” Gabriele Columbro, executive director of FINOS and GM of Linux Foundation Europe, said in an email.
Dive Insight:
Open source software needs buy-in across providers and businesses to deliver on its promise of reducing cost, shoring up security and limiting vendor lock-in. Adding the largest hyperscaler to its ranks brings the growing FINOS alliance one step closer to achieving that goal.
The new members strengthen the nonprofit’s position as “the commons” for cooperation around financial services technology standards, Coumbro said. It’s also another feather in the cap of the broader open source community.
FINOS is part of the larger Linux Foundation and adjunct to the FinOps Foundation, which welcomed AWS to its ranks in October. The FinOps Foundation also counts Microsoft and Google Cloud as members. The consortium announced the general availability of version 1.0 of its FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification framework, called FOCUS, on June 20.
FINOS has several key initiatives underway, including an open standard Common Cloud Controls project to rationalize compliance controls, a desktop application interoperability consortium called FDC3 and an AI governance working group launched in May.
As banking becomes a digital-first business, financial companies have embraced open source as an innovation accelerator and technical debt eraser.
“Financial services value streams are rapidly evolving and driving greater specialization in capabilities,” David Tomljenovic, principal research director at Info-Tech Research Group, told CIO Dive. “As a result, there is a movement towards composable systems and a movement away from integrated monolithic systems.”
Organizations like FINOS and the Banking Industry Architecture Network nonprofit group are plotting a course for standardizing and interoperability in fintech solutions, Tomljenovic added.
AWS contributed its cloud-based, open-source high-performance computing solution, called HTC-Grid, to the FINOS portfolio.
FINOS also extended its purview to sustainability as the Linux Foundation folded its open-source climate community into the financial services unit. Current OS-Climate projects, which include a climate data commons platform, an ESG reporting specifications standard and a climate risk and resilience toolkit, were added to the FINOS portfolio, the Linux Foundation said in an announcement.
The goal of the merger is to create common technology and standards for ESG reporting in banking and finance, the Linux Foundation said.
The merger aligns with a broader FINOS push to extend the value of open source beyond the developer community.
“The strategic value of our open source and open standard projects is now widely recognized not only in the technology and data engineering departments of financial institutions but directly in the most critical areas of the business,” Columbro said.
