Is there a place for open source, and open source collaboration in particular, in the financial services industry, with its strict security, governance, regulatory and privacy requirements?
According to the Fintech Open Source Foundation (FINOS), the answer is an emphatic "yes".
FINOS, an independent non-profit organisation, believes that as the financial services sector is going through a period of unprecedented technological transformation, organisations that embrace open source software development and common standards will be best positioned to capture the growth opportunities that this transformation presents.
The establishment of FINOS in April this year was welcomed by many of the world's leading financial services companies including JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, Citadel and UBS.
The organisation's eight programs received a boost this week when GreenKey Technologies, a leader in real-time voice technology, announced it was contributing the GreenKey SKD to the FINOS Voice Program. This program is working to define open voice standards in the fintech industry.
Defining open voice standards
The idea of the Voice Program is to enable financial services firms and vendors to participate in the development of voice technologies, voice metadata, voice APIs and workflow enablement between voice systems and other systems that financial services firms use to conduct business.
"We're excited to bring voice communication backed by our real-time financial transcription engine into any JavaScript application... We're also looking forward to contributing our voice interface and financial voice skills to the program," said GreenKey CTO, Tom Schady.
Unique challenges
FINOS is also actively seeking contributions to projects and working groups within two other recently announced programs - Open Source Readiness (OSR) and Financial Developer Experience (FDX).
The OSR program is aimed at helping to address the unique obstacles financial services firms face with open source collaboration such as legal and regulatory concerns, internal policies, cultural friction and heavily restricted technology environments. The idea is to provide financial institutions with policies, tools and practices that will enable them to deepen their engagement with open source collaboration.
The FDX programme is focused on solving some of the unique challenges developers in financial services face because of the highly regulated and risk-sensitive nature of the industry. The program includes efforts to define modern, efficient, secure, and compliant software development workflows, practices, and toolchains that can be used on the systems and networks found at large financial institutions.
Other programs in the FINOS arsenal include:
FDC3, a standards development program aimed at enabling financial desktop apps to interoperate in a plug-and-play fashion without prior, bi-lateral agreements. Over 35 banks, buy-side firms and financial services platforms are currently members of this program.
Symphony, this program is working towards building a collaborative ecosystem for open source projects around the Symphony messaging and collaboration platform. It currently contains more than 50 projects.
Hadouken, this program provides open source collaboration support around the Hadouken APIs, plugins and tooling. The software is already being used to deploy hundreds of apps to more than 400 financial firms.
Plexus Interop, a program based around this metadata-centric, language-agnostic, desktop app-to-app interoperability framework.
Financial Objects, a program that exists to help drive the adoption of new and existing Financial Object Standards across the financial services industry by bringing together the creators and users of Financial Objects.
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