New Codebase Contributions Meet Client Demands on the Buy-Side and Make Enterprise Development More Efficient

Morgan Stanley’s Dov Katz and RBC’s Kim Prado Become FINOS’ Board Chair and Vice Chair Respectively

New York, NY—September 11, 2020—Open source technology’s ubiquitous influence has changed the way business is conducted in almost every facet of the global economy. As financial firms see value in open source collaboration, FINOS (The Fintech Open Source Foundation), a nonprofit whose mission is to foster adoption of open source, open standards and collaborative software development practices in financial services, today announces two significant new codebase contributions--Morphir contributed by Morgan Stanley and EPAM GLUE. Also, the foundation announces new board leadership that underscore its positive momentum over the past year. 

“Our growth has been fueled by a growing community of developers, financial institutions, fintechs and consultancies who share a common vision for the future of the financial services industry,” said Gabriele Columbro, executive director, of FINOS. “With Dov Katz and Kim Prado leading our board, we are in a great position to continue expanding our footprint. Also, these new contributions are examples of how brilliant software design that addresses specific business problems can have a broader benefit on the entire industry.”

Morphir Business Modeling and Development Automation

A key challenge in app development is the efficient production of reliable systems. Every line of code that developers need to write slows down delivery and introduces the risk of bugs. By allowing developers to focus on pure business logic and automating the rest, Morphir drives faster delivery with fewer bugs. Morphir recognizes that an application’s business logic should be the center of stability across the vast and fast-changing tech landscape, empowering developers to work seamlessly in today’s multi-platform, multi-language world.

After using Morphir across internal businesses, Morgan Stanley recognized its potential value to the industry, particularly for initiatives that require sharing business calculations, logic, and rules across firms, for example regulations, smart contracts, collateral eligibility rules, pre-trade validation, or pricing.

“We’ve found that once developers become comfortable with the Morphir concepts, their creativity is unleashed. This was our motivation for open-sourcing, and we are excited to be working closely with FINOS,” said Stephen Goldbaum, an executive director at Morgan Stanley who co-created Morphir. “By opening to the community, we hope to use that creativity to establish an ecosystem of useful tools for anyone to take advantage of.”

EPAM GLUE Unifies Enterprise Data and Integrates Systems to Address Data Security, Auditability and Privacy on the Buy-Side

Buy-side firms are under enormous pressure to keep pace with rapid digitalization. EPAM has created an investment management ecosystem to address this problem. The foundation of this ecosystem is EPAM GLUE which is a unified entity and data model serving as a common semantic layer to all components. It provides a model to support flexible, hierarchical client, security and portfolio data structures as well as the complex legal entity relationships common to the industry.

“GLUE helps buy-side firms to build best of breed solutions, which address clients demands for more transparency, security, privacy and accountability, and also minimizes integration costs and implementation risks,” said Balazs Fejes, co-head of global business, executive vice president at EPAM Systems. “By open-sourcing GLUE through FINOS, we see a great opportunity for buy-side firms to deliver more value to clients.”

FINOS Continues Expansion with New Leadership and Growing Community

Dov Katz, a managing director and distinguished engineer at Morgan Stanley, who joined the FINOS board in 2017, has moved up to chair and Kim Prado, RBC’s global head of client, banking and digital technology, is vice chair. The board will also become a governing board as FINOS joined the Linux Foundation in April. 

“FINOS is helping usher in positive change in the financial community,” said Kim Prado. “By delivering open source projects that tackle common problems and raising awareness about the benefits of collaboration, the industry will continue to innovate and thrive.”

Dov Katz added: “FINOS has unlocked the potential for financial firms to contribute to the broader open source community. In the last year, we have seen a shift in the community towards most contributions being furnished by larger financial services organizations. What’s more, we see synergy between Morgan Stanley’s Morphir and Goldman Sachs’ Alloy initiatives: empowering business and tech to express their business domain as models while generating common code for their applications. This drives productivity and reduces the need to refactor code.”

Gab Columbro also added: “As we welcome our new board leadership, we also acknowledge the important work of our past chair, Ali Villagra, global head of Citi Velocity. We have had great success over the past year with her guidance and strong leadership and look forward to continuing that momentum.”

FINOS has grown to 33 members and counts 110 open source projects since its founding with major financial institutions, innovative fintechs and well-respected consultancies. To learn how to contribute please visit: https://www.finos.org/engage-with-our-community.

About FINOS

FINOS (The Fintech Open Source Foundation) is a nonprofit whose mission is to foster adoption of open source, open standards, and collaborative software development practices in financial services. It is the center for open source developers and the financial services industry to build new technology projects that have a lasting impact on business operations. As a regulatory compliant platform, the foundation enables developers from these competing organizations to collaborate on projects with a strong propensity for mutualization. It has enabled codebase contributions from both the buy- and sell-side firms and counts 33 major financial institutions, fintechs and technology consultancies as part of its membership. FINOS is also part of the Linux Foundation, which is the largest shared technology organization in the world.  For more information, visit www.finos.org or our Github organization at github.com/finos.

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Caliber Corporate Advisers

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