FINOS’ Expansion Continued in 2021 as More Than 1,200 Contributors Now Participate in Driving Open Source Adoption in Financial Services

• Contribution and collaboration measured by commits jumps 30% percent YoY

• Added 19 New Members last year with 34% percent member growth YoY

• Received 11 new projects open sourced by members

New York, NY -- January 20, 2022 -- FINOS, the Fintech Open Source Foundation and financial sector project of the Linux Foundation, today announced its 2021 annual results showing unprecedented growth throughout the year. Led by the more than 1,200 contributors working on FINOS projects and a 34 percent increase in new corporate members, FINOS had their largest yearly growth on record. In total, FINOS now has 53 members leveraging its open source collaboration forum, including the most recent additions of Bank of Montreal (BMO), Fannie Mae and NatWest Markets in addition to 16 more fintech and financial services organizations this past year.

“The success we’ve seen over the past year is a testament to the growing interest for and increased mission-critical nature of open source in the financial services industry,” said Gabriele Columbro, executive director of FINOS. “As the recent Log4j vulnerability has reminded us, financial institutions and fintechs must continue moving along the open source maturity curve with the establishment of Open Source Program Offices (OSPOs) and investment from top leadership across the industry, areas FINOS has been historically at the forefront of. By fostering collaboration, making the case for mutualization on ever more valuable shared components, and allowing companies to focus on value-add projects, we are in a great position to accelerate even further the open source industry transformation we spearheaded over our first three and a half years.”

“There’s no doubt the next generation of financial technology innovation will be powered by open source, so FINOS, under the umbrella of The Linux Foundation, must play a critical role to ensure the open source backbone for the industry is secure and sustainable, as demonstrated by our involvement in last week’s White House meeting on open source supply chain security,” added Mr. Columbro.  

FINOS also added five new board members in 2021, which reflects an exceptional concentration of talent and intellectual capital atop the foundation. John Madsen, Chief Architect for Technology, Goldman Sachs chairs the board and Kim Prado, CIO, US Capital Markets, BMO is the co-chair.

FINOS Showcases the Leading Voices in Fintech, Open Source and Regulation

FINOS held its annual Open Source Strategy Forum (OSSF) in London and New York this fall with a strong in-person turnout despite the pandemic. 115 speakers and 97 sessions over four days in two locations, produced a lively discussion about the role of open source in financial services, regulation and what’s ahead for financial services industry collaboration. The event promotes deeper collaboration across finance, open source and technology and drives innovation across the industry in order to deliver better code, faster. Highlights included the keynote from Sultan Meghji, Head of Innovation for the FDIC, who set the direction for a new wave of open source powered regulatory innovation, and Nadine Chakar, Head of State Street Digital, who put out a compelling call to action for diversity in financial services technology. See the New York and London event reports. 

The State of OSS in Financial Services 2021 report

The foundation and its research partners, Linux Foundation Research, Scott Logic, WIPRO, and GitHub, also conducted the inaugural State of Open Source in Financial Services Survey, which included key stakeholder interviews to understand the state of open source adoption, contribution, and readiness in the financial services industry. Among the report’s findings were the need among top levels of financial institutions to fully embrace open source and work to implement governance frameworks, as well as work to instill a broader adoption of open source culture within organizations. Further, the report highlighted the obstacles and challenges to improving industry-wide collaboration and concludes with a set of actionable insights for improving the state of open source in financial services. Read more here.

New Members React to FINOS’ Growth 

Two Gold Members joined FINOS in the last month, showing an ever-increasing diversity of representation of different constituents of the financial services industry and underlining the across-the-board potential open source collaboration has in this industry. These new members, NatWest Markets and Fannie Mae, signal FINOS and open source’s expansion into lending and other FSI areas.

“As we have seen in recent news with the Log4j vulnerability, having open source maturity is essential for financial institutions to ensure safe consumption across the industry,” said John Mark Walker, Director, Open Source Program Office at Fannie Mae. “Fannie Mae is looking forward to collaborating with FINOS members to improve open source technologies and practices.”

Matthew Harvey, Head of Cross Product Sales and Development at NatWest Markets, explained “We have learnt that the use of proprietary integration standards with our customers represents a barrier to adoption and increased joint cost. Our engagement with FINOS has allowed us to take the first step of integrating our applications to support better workflow between Sales and Trading. We are also excited to be taking the next step of contributing some of our own work to also support better desktop interoperability for our customers, technology partners and the broader desktop ecosystem for mutual benefit.”  

"Our decision to join FINOS demonstrates our commitment to the natural open source contributor progression of 'learn, consume, participate, contribute, and lead,” said Jennifer Scott, Head of Digital Technology NatWest Markets. “NatWest Markets started engaging with FINOS at the project level, specifically FDC3 which helped facilitate this interoperability. We have continued to see the benefits of the full ecosystem of FINOS in projects, events, and the community at large as we've advanced along the open source maturity curve. In 2022, we're looking forward to redefining industry standards as new FINOS members."

Key Hires and New CTO Add to FINOS’ Growth

In 2021, FINOS continued to expand its team, led by the addition of Jane Gavronsky as its first CTO. A leader of the financial services industry, Jane works with FINOS members to develop and implement open source solutions that address the most prominent problems facing the financial services ecosystem.

“It’s been an honor to join FINOS at a time of such rapid growth and expansion,” said Jane Gavronsky, CTO of FINOS. “The benefits of open source technology are being realized by the financial services industry, with FINOS leading the way. I look forward to continuing to work collaboratively with our member financial institutions, fintechs, consultancies and nonprofits to build the future of finance.”

Expectations for 2022

• Increased collaboration and usage of open source software to address regulatory compliance use cases. Regulatory adoption of open source best practices through the FINOS Open Regtech initiative.
• Acceleration along the open source maturity curve among fintechs and financial institutions, a need aligned with the findings of the State of OSS in Financial Services report and now increasingly top of mind in response to the global impact of the recent log4j and colors/faker issues by a new survey on the state of open source in financial services.
• Growth in adoption of FINOS open source projects in mission critical implementations, leveraging platforms and standards such as Legend — Perspective, FDC3 and several others that are being widely used across the industry.
• Furthering the foundation’s commitment to strengthening open source supply chain security and compliance for its projects, and more broadly continuing to lead investments on more system open source ecosystem sustainability for key financial services open source components.

To learn more about joining FINOS as a member, visit the Membership Benefits page. To consume and contribute to FINOS projects, visit the FINOS Projects Landscape.

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 over 50 major financial institutions, fintechs and technology consultancies as part of its membership. FINOS is also part of the Linux Foundation, the largest shared technology organization in the world. Get involved and join FINOS as a Member.

Media Contact:

Ross Stevens

Caliber Corporate Advisers

ross@calibercorporate.com

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