Open Source Strategy Forum London 2021 Recap

This year’s London Open Source Strategy Forum was all about coming together as a community of people, working together to develop best practices, projects, and standards that provide value to us individually, to our companies, and to the financial services industry.

In this brief recap we’ll dig just a little bit deeper into the ways OSSF London 2021 brought the community together.

Connecting with People

It’s been some time since many of us have been able to meet in person and while we may “see” each other regularly in video conferences, it was heartening and energizing to speak face-to-face with the people we interact with regularly and to meet new people as well. Over the two days of our Member Meeting and OSSF, over 150 individuals from banks, technology companies and consultancies, across a variety of roles, enjoyed discussing relevant topics such as data, modeling, cloud, DevOps, inner source, and much more. 

We did find in general that attendees were much more engaged this year than we've experienced before. There was unity in the connections we were making with the community, but especially in the connections the community made with each other. 

While you can’t see recordings of the Member Meeting discussions you can watch many great presentations, including several with some great interactive discussions:

Open Source Sustainability and our Corporate Social Responsibility

Open Banking, Open Source, and Open Standards

Collaborating on a Model and Data Standard

InnerSource in Financial Services

Connecting on Projects

One of our primary reasons for holding OSSF is to provide a forum for individuals across our community to talk about the best practices, projects and standards that will help the industry. This year was no exception and it was fantastic to see project leads, contributors, and individuals new to the community talk about their projects, explore new ideas, and even think through how projects can be used together to build a stronger, more valuable ecosystem of technology.

Some of the discussions we are particularly excited about are around:

State of Open Source in Financial Services

An Open-sourced Solution to Data Governance? How Legend May Be the Answer to Data Quality Concerns in the Financial Industry

FDC3: A Review of Industry Activity

Leading the way

The Member Meeting and OSSF also provide a great opportunity to hear and think about how we shape technology in financial services, particularly when it comes to open source, and this year in London didn’t disappoint. We heard from a number of thought leaders including Russell Green from Deutsche Bank and Nick Cook, from the Alliance for Innovative Regulation and formerly the FCA Innovation Hub. As Vice Chair of FINOS, Russell was able to provide an insightful look into how the Foundation has matured as well as how Deutsche Bank’s own open source efforts continue to grow. We also enjoyed hearing from Nick Cook and FINOS’ Jane Gavronsky about the tremendous opportunities to change the way regulation happens.

What we think is interesting to note about this year, vs when we started OSSF - the thought leadership around open source in financial services is starting to come from the FSI sector itself - not just vendors / consultants who are well versed in open source. The ratio of talks in this version of OSSF from thought leaders that are working in banks are higher than in years past, and continue on a great pattern of growth each year.

We were also very pleased to recognize many of our individual and corporate contributors in our Member and Community awards. We are grateful to individuals and companies like these, and many others, for leading the way.

You can see all of our award winners here

And you can see all of our videos from OSSF London 2021 here

And And - listen to our FINOS Open Source in Finance Podcast for a first hand account wrap up of OSSF London 2021

Thank you to all our attendees, speakers, and sponsors for making this a memorable, in-person event. We hope to see you again soon and also look forward to a great Member Meeting and OSSF in New York next month on November 9th and 10th.