Landmark additions of BlackRock, Microsoft, Publicis Sapient, Syntasso, Tidelift and Tradeheader to accelerate industry-wide adoption of critical FINOS projects across the value chain

NEW YORK, NY - March 7, 2024 - The Fintech Open Source Foundation (FINOS), the financial services umbrella of the Linux Foundation, is pleased to announce the addition of new members to its ecosystem: BlackRock (NYSE: BLK), Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT), and Publicis Sapient (OTCMKTS: PUBGY) have joined as Gold Members, while GitLab (NASDAQ: GTLB) has elevated their commitment from Silver to Gold Membership. Additionally, Syntasso, Tidelift and TradeHeader have joined at the Silver Membership level.

"I am beyond thrilled to see so many global leaders from financial services and technology continuing to join FINOS to support our projects and contributors," said Gabriele Columbro, Executive Director of FINOS. "With household names like BlackRock and Microsoft, we now have critical mass in advancing our strategic initiatives in key constituencies like the buy-side and cloud service providers, while the commitments of GitLab, Publicis Sapient, Syntasso, Tidelift and Tradeheader show once again the value open collaboration in financial services delivers to all actors in the ecosystem."

New Members React

BlackRock, an asset management firm and provider of the Aladdin platform, joins FINOS with a focus on advancing the Financial Desktop Connectivity and Collaboration Consortium (FDC3) initiative. 

“BlackRock is thrilled to join FINOS, bringing more representation from the buy side to the organization. We are eager to continue leveraging FDC3 integrations and interoperability and partnering more with the FINOS community,” said Mike Bowen, Technical Fellow and Head of BlackRock's Open Source Program Office. “FINOS aligns with BlackRock's open source strategy and will help drive our advocacy for open-source solutions in financial services including our own technology platform, Aladdin."

"The FDC3 standard integration is pivotal as it lays the foundation for future extensibility of the Aladdin platform and strategic integration partnerships facilitated by the FDC3-compliant message bus and adapters. This collaboration will enhance trader workflows through data consistency and contextual awareness across platforms, inspiring additional use cases in the future," added Sitija Sarkar, Managing Director, Technical Fellow and Head of Aladdin UX Engineering 

Microsoft, aligns closely with FINOS’ strategic initiatives, particularly in cloud computing and artificial intelligence (AI). Microsoft's involvement underscores the importance of cloud and AI technologies in transforming financial services, offering scalable, secure, and innovative solutions to meet the industry's evolving needs.

"Microsoft is excited to share our new membership in FINOS and support its mission of fostering collaboration and innovation in the financial services sector. As a company that is committed to open source and cloud solutions, we see great alignment with FinOS's initiatives, such as promoting ethical and responsible use of AI, establishing common cloud controls, and enabling interoperability through FDC3. We look forward to contributing to these important topics and more as part of the FINOS community." - Allison Nachtigal, VP in Microsoft Industry Cloud

Publicis Sapient, joins with a focus on FDC3 and AI, alongside an interest in leveraging FINOS' training programs. 

"We're thrilled to collaborate with the FINOS community and to contribute to the growth and adoption of open-source financial services solutions. Publicis Sapient's long legacy of driving customer-centric digital transformation through innovation and swift delivery aligns closely with the FINOS mission to promote innovation and interoperability in financial technology." - Stephen Maltzman, Senior Vice President of Financial Services, Publicis Sapient.

GitLab has upgraded to Gold Membership, reaffirming its support for the FINOS community, strengthening collaborative development and cloud-native technology adoption in financial services. 

“As a proud and longstanding member of FINOS, we are excited to expand our support of the foundation this year. “FINOS’ mission aligns with GitLab’s commitment to open source contributions and stewardship. We look forward to continuing our collaboration with the financial services community to encourage open innovation to build secure software faster.” - Emilio Salvador, Vice President of Developer Relations and Community, GitLab.

“Syntasso is excited to be joining FINOS as we are strong supporters of open-source collaboration as a driving force for innovation. Our team has worked with many large, financial organisations struggling to solve common challenges and we believe that growing a shared, open, ecosystem with participation across organisations within the sector will drive solutions and benefits for all. We're keen to contribute the benefits of our experience working in this field for a large number of years and help drive cutting-edge ideas and solutions to support transformation within the industry”. - Paula Kennedy, Co-founder and Chief Operating Officer, Syntasso

“Tidelift is thrilled to be partnering with FINOS on its important work accelerating innovation in financial services through open source. Tidelift’s unique approach of paying open source maintainers to ensure their projects follow secure software development practices and contractually committing to continue those practices into the future has made a huge impact in helping our financial services customers confidently make long-term investments in the open source they use to power their applications.” - Donald Fischer, CEO and Co-founder, Tidelift

"TradeHeader is delighted to have officially become a corporate member of FINOS. We are actively developing the Common Domain Model, of which FINOS is the custodian, and its use in the development of the ISDA Digital Regulatory Reporting (DRR) programme. TradeHeader is fully committed to open source so we are also expanding our involvement in other FINOS projects, such as Legend, Morphir, and Common Cloud Controls. We think all these initiatives are critical to bring more efficiency in the financial industry." - Marc Gratacos, Managing Partner at TradeHeader.

"With almost 80 supporting organizations, now ready to collaborate in the open thanks to our Open Source Readiness program, a new chapter in our history begins," concluded Gabriele Columbro, Executive Director of FINOS. "Over the last twenty years, open source has been used over and over again to create new ecosystems, markets and displace obsolete technology monopolies. The financial services industry is truly ripe for this, so I am genuinely excited about what the next months and years will bring. It’s time to think big and our community is ready for it”.

The new member announcement comes on the heels of the launch of the Call for Papers (CFP) for the London Open Source in Finance Forum (OSFF) on June 26th, centered around FINOS strategic initiatives for 2024 that focus on critical areas such as Artificial Intelligence, Diversity, Equality, Inclusion (DEI), FDC3, FINOS Common Cloud Controls, Open RegTech, Open Source Readiness, and Zenith. These initiatives aim to foster innovation, accelerate open source maturity, and enhance collaboration across the financial services sector, and talks on these subjects at OSFF are essential to moving our FINOS Member goals forward.

For more information about FINOS, its strategic initiatives, and how to get involved, please visit the website.

To learn more about joining FINOS as a member, visit the Member Benefits page. 

Meet the new FINOS members in person at the Open Source in Finance Forum (OSFF), on June 26th, 2024, in London, UK and New York on September 30th & October 1st.

About FINOS

FINOS (The Fintech Open Source Foundation) is a nonprofit whose mission is to foster the 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. To stay up to date on FINOS news, events, podcasts, blogs, and more, sign up here.

Media Contact:

Grizz Griswold, Head of Marketing
FINOS
grizz@finos.org 

Footnote:

BlackRock’s Aladdin® platform is a financial technology platform designed for institutional use only and is not intended for end investor use.