Open Source Strategy Forum NYC 2021 Recap

Last week we held our second FINOS Member Meeting and Open Source Strategy Forum of the year, this time in New York. We were back at New World Stages, where we held the conference in 2019, and had high expectations for our return to the theatres. We weren’t disappointed. With more than 250 in-person attendees, there was a tremendous energy throughout both events as people reconnected and also met for the first time. Reflecting on the content and conversations, three words do well to represent the days: momentum, interoperability, and community.

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

Momentum

It seems like every year at OSSF we talk about the positive momentum driving FINOS projects, members, and community to achieve new successes for open source in financial services. This year was no different as we recognized FINOS’s continued growth and record number of members, projects, and contributors. As one individual from a new member firm responded to a question about securing FINOS membership in record time, “How did I do it? Because it’s worth it.”

In the first keyonte of OSSF NYC, John Madsen of Goldman Sachs, took us back to the early days of FINOS and touched on the Foundation’s momentum, citing the breadth of financial services functions the Foundation now covers along with the growing number of significant contributions from major financial services firms.

Open source readiness continues to be discussed in our community and our Open Source Readiness SIG and recently developed Open Source Maturity Model provide valuable tools, insights and resources that will help keep this momentum going.

During his presentation, John also highlighted a number of themes, initiatives, projects, and opportunities that were discussed throughout the day including engaging with regulators, partnering with the Linux Foundation, developing standards, and the role of data in financial services including through projects like Legend and Morphir. 

These varied projects, the opportunities for projects and teams to work together, and our diverse community are invaluable to keeping the momentum going.

Interoperablity

Many “flavors” of interoperability were discussed and presented in both the Member Meeting and OSSF. 

FDC3 announced a new (free) training course exploring the vision, key concepts, benefits, and value of workflow-driven design and how the FDC3 standard makes it easy to get started with application desktop interoperability.

Symphony highlighted recent contributions to FINOS including Symphony Bot Developer Kits (BDKs) for Python/Java, and also their commitment to open source through a roadmap that addresses fullstack developers, workflow developers, and working more closely with FDC3.

The Legend and Morphir teams were joined by Microsoft to talk about integrating Legend, Bosque, and Morphir to deliver open solutions to common challenges related to understanding and meeting regulatory requirements. 

We were also treated to an incredible fireside chat between Brad Levy of Symphony Communication Services and Nadine Chakar of State Street covering many topics including the value of an integrated business model and operations in supporting client needs. As Nadine aptly put it, “We see the benefit of inviting vendors, partners, and clients into the ecosystem.”

Community

We are grateful to our growing community for the continued support, hard work, idea generation, and overall engagement that makes this all possible and also rewarding. Throughout the two days we heard from many different voices in our community, and below we highlight just some of those talks.

Jo Ann Barefoot of the Alliance for Innovation Regulation and Sultan Meghji of the FDIC (and an open source veteran), engaged in a stimulating (and often entertaining) conversation about bringing together the regulatory, banking, and open source communities.

Many of our colleagues and partners from other Linux Foundation projects joined us to present and discuss topics including Hyperledger on blockchain deployment in finance; Open Mainframe on the new generation of mainframers; Linux Foundation Networking on operationalizing open source projects; Joint Development Foundation (JDF) on establishing and delivering recognized industry standards; and FinOps on managing cloud spend with efficiency and transparency.

We were delighted that our speakers also discussed ways that the open source and financial services communities can promote inclusion, including through a talk from Mojaloop on “Digitizing Financial Inclusion” and from GitHub and EY on “Engaging the FSI Community for a Good Cause.”

Keeping on the theme of inclusion, 5 standout women in our industry shared their insights, wisdom, and experiences from their impressive careers in finance and technology. Thank you Ali, Jane, Kim, Rita, and Tamara for your valuable and poignant examples, stories, and reflections on achieving success while remaining true to yourselves.

Last but certainly not least, we were 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 all of their dedication and hard work.

You can see all of our award winners here

Thank you to all of our attendees, speakers, and sponsors for making this a memorable, in-person event. We hope to see you again next year - or even sooner!

Interested in joining the FINOS Community? Click the link below to see how to get involved.

This Week at FINOS Blog - See what is happening at FINOS each week.

FINOS Landscape - See our landscape of FINOS open source and open standard projects.

Community Calendar - Scroll through the calendar to find a meeting to join.

FINOS Slack Channels - The FINOS Slack provides our Community another public channel to discuss work in FINOS and open source in finance more generally.

Project Status Dashboard - See a live snapshot of our community contributors and activity.

Events - Check out our upcoming events or email marketing@finos.org if you'd like to partner with us or have an event idea.

FINOS Virtual "Meetups" Videos & Slides - See replays of our virtual "meetups" based around the FINOS Community and Projects since we can't all be in the same room right now.

FINOS Open Source in Finance Podcasts - Listen and subscribe to the first open source in fintech and banking podcasts for deeper dives on our virtual "meetup" and other topics.