Data challenges are universal and only grow more complex each year, but I’ve observed that many financial services firms still lack open source software capabilities to address basic data quality and accuracy challenges. Conversations with fellow delegates at the recent OSFF NYC further affirmed my belief that common reporting and regulatory compliance requirements are forcing software developers to re-implement ad hoc common concepts - such as soft-deletes, audit-logging, and as-of queries - in almost every system they build, regardless of scale. Beyond the sheer inefficiency of it all, this implies that firms are becoming overly reliant on the abilities of large (and expensive) engineering teams to build and maintain these capabilities correctly. Let’s consider how open source software might rise to meet this challenge.