Meeting each month, the OSR SIG welcomes participants from across the FINOS banking community to share open source challenges in several aspects like legal, risk, compliance, cultural and technology toolchain, and to share experiences of how those issues were addressed by some of the most mature organizations. The SIG is chaired by experienced engineering directors from Morgan Stanley and Wipro. 

Visit Open Source Readiness for more information on how to join the SIG.

It’s well known that there are many barriers that banks need to overcome, from right across the regulated entity, to participate in open source. So how do we make progress and how you can influence it? Well, the open source way. 

The FINOS OSR SIG tackles these issues by managing a backlog of concerns that are raised directly in GitHub. By following an agile approach of building a backlog of issues that is prioritized so the most pressing issues are tackled first, each issue is added to the OSR kanban and answered by the OSR SIG, FINOS and the FINOS community by publishing the answers to an OSR Microsite.

Recent questions that have been answered by FINOS Open Source Readiness and the wider FINOS community include … 

• Considerations and Guidance for Electronic Communications Policies and Open Source
• Working with DLP Limitations to Open Source Access
• Considerations and Guidance for Records Management regards Open Source.

The Open Source Readiness SIG welcomes all financial services open source related questions and invites anyone to Raise Open Source Readiness Support Questions directly into the OSR repository on the FINOS GitHub organization. It’s highly likely others are experiencing the same issue and that we might even have an already open source solution for it, like our Open Source Reference Policy for Financial Institutions.

Open Source Readiness Roundtable at OSFF, London

With the exposure of the Open Source Program Office (OSPO) within the financial services industry, Open Source Readiness has been exploring the SIG’s synergy with TODO Group, a sibling Linux Foundation project  helping more broadly enterprises in their journey to open source. 

During the recent Open Source in Finance Forum in London, a Chatham House Rule roundtable was organized by FINOS that invited the OSR SIG, FINOS financial institutions and the TODO Group to discuss the barriers that hinder banks from contributing to open source in financial services.

Banks from across the FINOS community joined the roundtable at OSFF to explore issues related to open source return on investment, the mechanisms in place to mitigate inbound OSS vulnerabilities and how banks reduce OSS contribution frictions. 

During the discussion, OSR and TODO Group explored the experiences of banking OSPOs and learned that some OSPOs are solely responsible for setting internal open source related policies and delegate OSS consumption to larger banking infrastructure teams. 

We learned that some banks have larger OSPO Guilds that represent all areas of the bank and are accountable for InnerSource alongside open source activities. We also found that some banking OSPOs are accountable for policy-as-code, InfoSec, legal and supply chain.

There was consensus in the session that OSR could create an OSPO blueprint for banks to help accelerate OSPO creation. We also discovered that banks are lobbying technology providers like GitHub to provide features helpful for banking OSS engagement. 

During the roundtable, the appetite for measuring banking open source ROI was explored and consumption metrics, stargazer stats and total forks were agreed as compelling numbers. Cost savings for open source engagement was also seen as a desirable metric to measure.

Getting Involved with Open Source Readiness

Open Source Readiness is always looking for new participants to join the SIG’s monthly calls and also welcomes seasoned banking OSPOs to share and contribute their learnings to Open Source Readiness via the FINOS OSR Repository on GitHub.

Due to the success of the Open Source Readiness banking roundtable at OSFF London, FINOS is organizing a roundtable with new questions to explore at the FINOS Open Source in Finance Forum in New York City on December 8th. Please reach out to james.mcleod@finos.org if you’d like to participate. 

Email osr@finos.org for more information about the FINOS Open Source Readiness and add the series to your calendar so you’ll never miss a SIG and future roundtable discussions. The next meeting is on September 7th and we’d love to see you there!