In the vibrant setting of the FINOS Open Source in Finance Forum 2024, industry leaders gathered to discuss the future of financial technology and open source collaboration.

Gabriele Columbro, FINOS Executive Director, along with special guests Rhyddian Olds from Citi and Madeleine Dassule from Wellington Management, and Emily Kei Kei Cheung from UBS, presented key initiatives and welcomed new members to the community.

Their insights highlighted the significant growth of the FINOS ecosystem and the critical role of collaborative projects like GitProxy, Common Cloud Controls, and the AI Readiness SIG in driving innovation and addressing industry challenges.

Want to be part of these groundbreaking discussions in finance? Save your seat for the next Open Source in Finance Forum in New York City, September 30th & October 1st. Don't miss out!

TRANSCRIPT

Gabriele Columbro: [00:00:00] Welcome. Welcome to the open source and finance forum 2024. A little rusty. I have to say, I've been out on paternity leave for a while. So hopefully I can keep this, snappy. We have a lot of great news and announcements. Thank you so much for being here. When I look back, it's been now two years since we were in London.

We have almost twice the amount of people registered for the conference. And really since where we started, we are, we're really proud. And so thank you so much again for taking the time out of your day. We know this is a busy industry and for being here. As I said, last time we were in London was 2022.

I think this is our third edition in London. Again it's really heartwarming to see you guys. Last time that we ran this event in New York in November, we had over a thousand registrants. I'm glad to see that London is catching up to New York. And I have to say, don't tell the Americans, but this is where the core of our [00:01:00] community and our contributors are.

Maybe I'm biased as a European. One thing that I'd ask you today, and that's actually something that I've seen new in New York last time, we had so much social interactions during the conference, I have to say this is not an industry that typically engages that much on social, for multiple reasons, but there you got the hashtags we really would appreciate If, especially if you like some of the news and announcements we'll have today if you can engage on our social accounts, on those hashtags, by the way, it's London Climate Action Week.

We have some really interesting news later on so hopefully you'll find this interesting. Before we get started, I want to thank our sponsors. This would not be possible without them. So a quick shout out to our leader sponsors, FinOps Foundation and Hedera. Our contributor sponsor, GitLab.

Our community sponsors, Canonical, Contraplane, Syntasso, and Turntable. Our digital sponsors G Research, ScottLogic, and [00:02:00] NatWest. We actually also support the Diversity Scholarship. So once again, thank you so much to our sponsors let's give them a good round of applause.

In case you want to get connected, you might have noticed there's not a lot of 3G, 4G, 5G coverage down here. Here's the Wi Fi should be in the back of your badge as well. And last but not least if you're not familiar with it, all of our events run under our community code of conduct that you got a QR code.

You want to pull it up. But unsurprisingly, we ask you to be kind, be respectful and make this a welcoming event for everyone. Thank you so much for abiding to that. And, with that I would like to bring on stage one of our long term supporters, contributors, and our chair [00:03:00] of the board.

Actually, you can see he's got seven or eight titles there. Is executive sponsor for three of our strategic initiatives. Please join welcoming on stage Rhyddian Olds from Citi.

Rhyddian Olds: There's a gab slide and he's got lots of click bombs all over the place, so I'm probably going to get it wrong at some point. Yeah, so thank you for all coming here today. It's wonderful to see everybody back on stage. in London for London's OSFF and to see you all. I want to start by thanking the FINOS team, the brilliant FINOS team for putting on such an amazing event again in, in London after two years.

So please give them a huge round of applause.[00:04:00] 

And in particular, I'd like to thank Jane for. But running a pretty tight ship whilst Gab was on paternity leave, she's done an amazing job. Phenos has continued to grow and grow and throughout she's main maintained this totally calm Jane exterior professional, but with that trademark cheeky smile.

I know there's a few challenges along the way but as you'll see today, Phenos has continued to succeed and grow under her leadership. And then after all that, Gab walks in at the last minute and over the mic. But it's lovely to have you back as well Gab. So thank you Jane, I'm sure you're glad he's back.

And I'd like to thank you all for making FINOS and OSFF what it is. We now have, 85 members. That's 50 percent up on the the last time that we were in London. So it's an amazing, diverse community. It brings out the absolute best of open source, together with an incredibly strong group of [00:05:00] financial services companies and solution and service providers, cloud service providers, consultancies, and open source champions.

Let's think about it. Where else would you see an industry organisation with membership this strong but where the members are so heavily engaged in building these mutually 

 

Rhyddian Olds: beneficial solutions? Very active. And it's this mutual benefit that makes Finosity such a valuable forum for its members to work together.

It's the community that really makes this membership so compelling and why companies are continuing to invest in Finos. We've always said that although open source is primarily about the technology. It's more than just code contribution. And behind each of these household names joining us, are passionate contributors.

Engineers, project managers, technical writers, UX practitioners. All of these are required. It's not just about the code [00:06:00] contribution. And as we continue to grow, there's more to come, as you will see later today. Not only that, but as the membership grows, so the strength and depth of the community grows, and we're tackling broader and deeper problem spaces, we're getting into more and more detail.

solving real problems such as well we can, the stuff that we can see here modern, interoperable UI development how to safely leverage cloud solutions for financial services and how financial services can stay use AI Stay compliant with regulation. We'll see a lot more about this today as we go through as well.

These are all hugely relevant to our industry. And this gives me the chance to share some exciting news in case you missed it. Earlier this year, Finos launched a project sandbox where you can try. Finox projects in a live environment. The goal is for developers to to reduce the friction for developers [00:07:00] to evaluate and consume and ultimately contribute to hopefully provide an avenue for the business folks to see the art of the possible.

It's so key to for business folks to actually see and touch stuff that's working. We know it's very hard in financial services to, to onboard new software. And so the the Finox sandbox is a huge opportunity to get. for them to get acquainted in the Finnos world.

Now at Citi, there we go, there was a click bomb, at Citi, we are immensely proud of our contribution to Finnos. And these are some concrete examples of the benefits that mutualizing the cost of solving these common solutions brings for everyone. And I'll talk a little bit about what it means to Citi.

So GitProxy, this is a project that grew up Entirely out of the need to contribute to open source. How do you do it in a compliant manner? How do you keep your comms folks happy? And GitProxy solves that [00:08:00] problem. But it was foundational to the community that grew up around GitProxy for open source readiness, which enabled our So by contributing we got back the ability to setup an OSPO in a way which our company was very comfortable with.

Common Cloud Controls. This was borne out of the cloud security teams, but we knew that automating the compliance and the risk mitigation of using cloud solutions would be immeasurably better. We can do it. Now we've got deep pockets as many of these companies have, but wouldn't it be much better to have something which is more of a common industry standard that becomes acceptable to regulators?

And then we got the AI readiness SIG, which has been stood up recently, and as with every other industry, AI is going to transform. from financial services. There's a really good panel talk on it later. But no industry is as heavily regulated as ours, and so it's absolutely essential as we work through this, as we [00:09:00] navigate this that we work out together how to use AI safely in compliance with regulation and benefit our customers.

As Chair of the Governing Board it's been a great year and I'd like to finish by also thanking the Board for their unwavering support. But in particular I'd like to thank Madeline. I could not wish, have wished for a better Government. vice chair and board partner over the past year. So please welcome Madeline to the stage.

Madeleine Dassule: Good morning. It's wonderful to be here today. What an amazing room, and I still think New York was bigger, that's a challenge for the London crew. Although I am a native of France, so I belong to both sides of the pond. This room's a [00:10:00] really amazing testament to the impact and growth of financial services open source and it really is a testament to all the work that all of the individuals that you guys all are participating, working together and collaborating.

Every day. So one of the great strengths of FinOS is that it's a backbone for us to share code, but it's also a backbone for us to broaden and strengthen our relationships. And when I look around this room, I see an amazing group of talented individuals who can really make a difference in millions of people who interact with financial services lives.

If we mutualize costs, we bring them down. If we bring innovative technology to financial services if we take the things that we have in common and we share and we build our value prop above the line we can really make a huge difference and it's millions and millions of people who benefit from the World Financial System.

I know financial services is not always viewed as the lofty industry, [00:11:00] but hopefully you can all take that with you. Thanks. So we did this in New York and people really got a lot out of it. So I'm going to ask each of you to get your energy up a little bit, take 30 seconds and meet one person sitting near you, or not sitting near you and just introduce yourselves.

Right now.[00:12:00] 

10 seconds.

Thank you. We're

gonna keep going now. The

slides aren't that interesting, but we gotta keep going now. Cause we're on a clock. Thank you. Maybe we'll turn this into a Finos [00:13:00] tradition. But The energy is exhilarating and it's really exciting that everybody is happy to meet a person or two and really, this is what the whole conference is about, so hopefully take it the whole day and keep introducing yourselves and meeting people and build out that network effect, so combine that energy we just saw.

with the response that we got to the 2023 survey on open source and financial services. Over 90 percent of our respondents think that open source is useful and valuable to their own companies and to the industry at large. So pretty amazing opportunity here and the sky's the limit really in what we can do.

Finnos was founded by the sell side for sure but there really is a network effect going on and we are growing across the entire financial services ecosystem. The buy side is hitting critical mass with Fidelity and Blackrock. 72 was the first buy side joiner. We're starting to see. and Market Data Providers and Payment [00:14:00] Providers and Cloud Services and Consultants who are showing interest in joining at various paces.

GAP's gonna have some new joiners to announce a little bit later but the, hold on, let me do this So I just wanted to highlight TradeWeb, Google, Microsoft really exciting new ads. And just, as you think about the financial services ecosystem FinOS is about all financial services, right?

So we're going to stop using the word banks. to refer to the industry. And as you interact with other counterparts, bring them to Gab, bring them to Jane and they will be happy to bring them into the fold in the community. Speaking of the community we want to take a moment to recognize the contributions of our new ambassador class.

So please join me in giving a round of applause to our, to Olivier, Luca,

Sam, Peter, and [00:15:00] Cody. Thank you so much for all that you do for the community. And of course, our Technical Oversight Committee members are hugely important. Eddie, Paula, Chris, Matthew, and Vincent. so much. So this is a moment for a public service announcement. The QR code is here. You probably can't quite fill this out from your seats, but please make sure to fill this out.

We absolutely want to hear from you. It's really important for FinOS to understand what's going on. what the feedback is in terms of where open source is in the industry. We do this survey every year so please fill it out. It's really important to get that feedback loop so that we can continue to evolve based on your feedback and thoughts.

Not just what we see amongst ourselves of the board and the team. And a couple things before I hand it off to Gab. I would like to thank Jane for her leadership while Gab was on paternity leave. She was amazing. And congratulate Gab [00:16:00] on being a father again. Thank you.

Gabriele Columbro: Thank you, Madeline. Thank you, Radian. This is heartwarming to see and hear all this positive feedback. We have a packed agenda today. And hopefully what I would like to set out as a goal is to understand whether we are indispensable for this industry yet. What do I mean by that?

We're part of the Linux Foundation. And the Linux Foundation hosts some of the largest And most critical projects in the world, arguably without Linux we wouldn't be, looking at the technology landscape that we look at today. There would be no clouds just for a start. So my hope is that as we go through the presentation We'll see where we are in our mission.

We think we can be and we should be indispensable for the industry, like open source is, frankly, indispensable for any other industry. [00:17:00] And so let's see what we, how are we doing here. So let's start with our first announcement. Today we're very proud to announce that eight new members have joined the foundation.

To the most attentive of you, some of these logos were already in reading slides, it was a bit of an Easter egg. I am very excited to welcome landmark names like DTCC, Faxit, Intel, JSCC, AWS, Provectus, State street and testify sack to the foundation. Thank you so much for joining us

here. You got the press release there, but my goal again, hopefully through the presentation is to share this is not just marketing. These folks are joining for a very specific reason, which, as Madeleine said, will drive the betterment of the industry, but of course everyone here is to drive their own business goals.

And that's the beauty of open source. I often refer to [00:18:00] as a positive sum game. So we're very excited to start to see new constituencies now that we have also, clearing houses, intermediaries. This is getting really exciting, I think, and I hope you guys share some of that excitement.

It's not only about the new members, but it's also about the members that continue to upgrade their commitment and their support. So I want to thank Interop. io for becoming our latest gold member. Now since there's been a little bit of talk about that, and it turns out that in the last two weeks I have been lagging on sharing baby pictures, I figured that I will put that on I'm not sure I'll be able to concentrate for the next hour now that I look at this picture as that's our new addition to the community, and I just want to take a second to, I think Jane sorry Rydian and Madeline said it to thank the team.

I was really proud to come back to so much progress. A huge shout [00:19:00] out, of course, to Jane, but to really the rest of the team. Sounds like I need to go and paternity leave more often, because things have gone really well. Maybe I, maybe I'm not so needed anyway. But again, this is I think a testament to the growth, not just of the community but of the Phoenix team.

Introduce yourself. Hopefully you get to meet them. We have almost 15 people from the team today here. As we talk about our role in the industry these are the four themes that we're gonna go through today. We see Finas as any foundation as the neutral steward for the commons for this industry.

As Viridian said, we enable institutions to get the most return on investment on actually engaging, contributing to open source. We'll talk about how we're mutualizing innovation. Open innovation is, a concept that is beyond open source but open source is probably the main vehicle for open source, for open innovation in this time and age.

And then last but not least, Radian hinted to it this is not just about technology. [00:20:00] We think that through open source we can address some of the, most pressing C suite challenges in the industry. So hopefully by the end of the day, you'll be energized and understanding what FINOS does better.

So let's start with the first topic. When people ask me what a foundation is about again, fundamentally a neutral steward for intellectual property, especially when you collaborating on it. But in fairness. When you try to explain this role to a known lawyer and trust me, I'm not a lawyer it quickly gets meddled into, patent, copyrights, trademarks I just say not the most exciting topic for an open source developer.

But this year, we've seen a trend that hopefully can exemplify the role of a foundation. How many of you are familiar with Terraform? Okay, quite a bit. So you probably know that the company behind Terraform, AshiCorp, [00:21:00] earlier this year switched their license to a non open source license.

And to be clear, that's perfectly their prerogative. They were the sole owner of the copyright of that software, and so they decided for, understandable business reasons to change their license. But so the community decided to fork and create an actual openly steward project, which happens to be under the Linux Foundation called OpenTofu.

Similarly, how many of you are familiar with Redis? Huh, quite a bit. This is a trend that we're seeing. Redis changed their license, and the community decided to fork and create an openly governed project under the Linux foundation called Valky. Now, as I said, this is no judgment. This is completely their prerogative, but it's also important for consumers to know that open source doesn't necessarily mean neutrally owned and that [00:22:00] the value of a foundation is to make sure that something is going to be open source now and it's going to be open source forever.

And this is not just about changing licenses. Arguably, projects like Kubernetes or Linux itself wouldn't be where they are if they were not, if they were controlled, at least from a copyright standpoint, by a single company. And we've seen these examples in Phenos as well. The CDM, FPC3, those were projects that were originally started by an individual organization or, A trade association and then moved into Finos to ensure this long term neutrality and ensure that consumers can de risk their investment, can know that they can rely on a long term set of licenses.

And so when AWS, who joined us as a silver member late last year, sorry, early this year, approached us with a very interesting high throughput computing grid project that they wanted to collaborate on with their peers and their competitors. We were [00:23:00] absolutely excited that's the first and foremost, the paramount use case for a foundation.

And so I'm very excited to announce that today the HTC grid project has been accepted for incubation into Finos. Incubation is our first stage that every project goes through and we hope that being in the foundation encourages competitors, customers. Peers to collaborate to the project.

The team is here at the project booth. So I hope you get a chance to learn about this project which I think could be a very interesting one for the whole community. Now, a quick note here there's a whole new frontier of why foundations are important. You might have heard, open source ai, open source LLM, let's just say that the community itself hasn't yet agreed really what open source AI means. And so there's a lot of open washing going on out there. One more reason for a foundation to exist to help steward the industry. [00:24:00] And this is what we're trying to do through our AI strategic initiative. So let's move to our second role for a foundation.

enabling organizations to contribute to open source and get ROI out of it. This has been the first and foremost thing that Finos did for many years. Most of you know that, 10 years ago, open source and financial services was not a thing. So for the first few years, we worked with the largest banks and financial institutions to codify what it takes to, for an organization, for a regulated industry to consume and contribute to open source.

If your firm is not able to contribute or consume, check out our Open Source Readiness Body of Knowledge, osr. alfinos. org. This is really standing on the shoulder of giants. It's been a huge effort, collaborative from all these firms that decided to really open source their knowledge and their practices of [00:25:00] how to do open source.

And that really lifts the whole industry. And if you don't want to look at the long set of documentation pages. We have free training and the certification that you can take. This is a huge, I think, hugely valuable resource. Years and years of the largest organizations in the industry contributing to open source.

And this has been recognized, few years ago, you wouldn't have, you Covering the open source journey. industry. Open source was not even a thing. Again, specifically in trade press. Again, it's not just about marketing. If you want to take a look at our SpringBot case study, you'll see how our open source projects are used, at Deutsche Bank, for example to really accelerate innovation and, as part of their core business processes.

This brings me to one exciting example. UBS joined us in [00:26:00] 2020. I would say not the most open source friendly organization at that time. But slowly, but steadily, every year we've seen progression. In, in 2021, they signed the Contributor License Agreement. In 22, there is the first pull request.

Then they started leading 1 over 6. I'm very excited today to announce that they contributed the VIEW project. And I would like to bring in Emily, who's coming all the way from Hong Kong to talk to us about VIEW. Welcome, Emily.

Emily Kei Kei Cheung: Hello, I'm Emily from UBS, and I'm sure you all know financial services cannot run without open source. Just think about how much we rely on Linux, Apache, Git, ReactJS, the list can go on forever. We can all collaborate. and build a [00:27:00] solution once in open rather than all of us doing it multiple times, the same thing in close.

One of the most common and complex UI problem with large amount of fast and slow moving data. A very typical trading and risk UI problem. requirement just with simple steps to allow developers to create the UI from scratch. This is our FinOS project view. So all the details are on the slides if you want to contact us.

And if you want to get started with Vue. And I would like to take the opportunity to thank all the [00:28:00] Vue contributors. And especially the collaboration with Scott Logic team. And please come and see us in the breakout section later. Thank you. Thank you so much.

Gabriele Columbro: Thank you. so much, Emily. We are. We're very excited about this contribution. So moving on, we actually regained some time back. Wow. I'm going to get less in trouble. Maybe. Moving to our third role that we play in the industry, I think this is one of the most exciting ones. We're an engine for collective open innovation.

There's a lot of areas in this industry, especially when it comes to innovation, that are non differentiating. I think AI is a huge example. We'll talk a lot about it today and during the breakout [00:29:00] sessions. You might have seen this figure before. We shared it in New York in November but this was originally shared by our executive director, Jim Zemlin.

This figure is the full payroll if we were to average out an average salary for all the over 650, 000 contributors that work at the Linux Foundation, or that contribute to Linux Foundation projects, better said that will amount to about 26 billion dollars. I guess I should update this figure in pounds.

That is more than the Microsoft's innovation budget, just to give you a figure. So that's the type of collective innovation that we can achieve together, especially when we work on pre competitive, non differentiating stuff. So Phenos over the last two years has really been focused on creating the venues for this innovation to happen.

Zenith. We launched in 2023, is our shared [00:30:00] innovation SIG at zenith. thenos. org. Meet every couple of weeks. They're really working on again, mutualizing emerging technology work, doing pilots in a way that is open. And it's available and hopefully faster than, faster and I guess more with higher potential to get to production than what we see in a siloed approach.

And we didn't touch on it, we'll talk about it quite a bit today. AI readiness is a SIG that we announced earlier this year. There was overwhelming agreement with our board and our members that all Organizations in our membership and in the industry are undergoing, the AI revolution and they're all trying to figure out How to do that in safety and compliance So on the basis of on the lessons that we learned through open source readiness, it was very clear that we could play a role in creating a governance framework that could again lift all boats.

[00:31:00] This is non differentiating, the type of non differentiating innovation that we're talking about. But it's not just about readiness. And as you go through the day, hopefully you learn that beyond the readiness SIG, which is absolutely critical in terms of consuming AI in this industry, we're actually looking at even bolder known differentiating pre competitive approaches.

And that's how our open financial LLM exploration, look, let's be clear. We don't have to do an open source LLM just because we have to do it just because it's hype. But there are plenty of use cases that we believe are pre competitive and that we're actively exploring with our members to ultimately come up with truly open source benchmarks, datasets, models.

This is a very exciting area for us. Several members have joined because of this initiative. And we're also exploring the idea of [00:32:00] creating research funds. Most financial institutions. Are in search of, deep talent in this area. And most academic organizations couldn't do, couldn't, would love to have a much better access to industry and to the use cases that really matter in the industry.

So if you're interested, you got the QR codes there to join the AI readiness, seek to join open financial lamb exploration and, to hopefully help us create a research fund that can. Connect these two worlds ultimately with the outcome being to accelerate open source LLM and ai.

As I said, the community rallied behind this initiative. We just launched a couple of months ago. We have some landmark names leading the initiative. We had over 200 participants. And today, as I said before. We have three, actually four members joining us primarily for this initiative, as you'll see in the precedence.