Fintech
AWS joins Microsoft and Google Cloud in open source push for financial technology
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Quick dive:
- The Fintech Open Source Foundation has welcomed seven new members, including hyperscaler AWS, market infrastructure provider DTCC, and chipmaker Intel, the organization announced Wednesday.
- AWS has joined hyperscale competitors Microsoft and Google Cloud in the FINOS alliance. The nonprofit has the support of several financial services firms, including Capital One, Citi, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, and Morgan Stanley, as well as technology providers Red Hat, Databricks, and CloudBees.
- “By joining FINOS, AWS becomes part of the effort to improve the financial services industry’s technology ecosystem through open source initiatives,” Gabriele Columbro, executive director of FINOS and general manager of the Linux Foundation Europe, said in an email.
Diving information:
Open source software requires vendor and enterprise buy-in to deliver on its promise of lower costs, stronger security, and less vendor lock-in. The addition of the largest hyperscaler to its ranks brings the growing FINOS alliance one step closer to achieving that goal.
The new members strengthen the nonprofit’s position as a “common good” for cooperation on financial services technology standards, Coumbro said. It’s also another feather in the cap of the broader open source community.
FINOS is part of the larger Linux Foundation and adds to the FinOps Foundationwhich welcomed AWS to its ranks in October. The FinOps Foundation also counts Microsoft and Google Cloud among its members. The consortium announced the general availability of version 1.0 of its FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specifications framework, called FOCUS, on June 20th.
FINOS has several key initiatives underway, including an open standard Common Cloud Controls Project to streamline compliance checks, a desktop Application Interoperability Consortium called FDC3 and a AI Governance Working Group launched in May.
As banking becomes a digital business, financial companies have embraced open source as an innovation accelerator and eraser of technical debt.
“Financial services value streams are evolving rapidly and driving greater specialization of capabilities,” David Tomljenovic, principal research director at Info-Tech Research Group, told CIO Dive. “As a result, there is a movement towards modular systems and a move away from integrated monolithic systems.”
Organizations like FINOS and the nonprofit group Banking Industry Architecture Network are charting a path for standardization and interoperability in fintech solutions, Tomljenovic added.
AWS contributed to the FINOS portfolio with its open-source, cloud-based high-performance computing solution called HTC-Grid.
FINOS also extended its scope to sustainability when the Linux Foundation shut down its project open source climate community in the financial services unit. Existing OS-Climate projects, which include a common climate data platform, an ESG reporting specification standard, and a climate risk and resilience toolkit, have been added to the FINOS portfolio, the Linux Foundation said in an announcement.
The goal of the merger is to create common technology and standards for ESG reporting in the banking and finance industry, the Linux Foundation said.
The merger is part of FINOS’ broader commitment to extending the value of open source beyond the developer community.
“The strategic value of our open source and open standards projects is now widely recognized not only in the technology and data engineering departments of financial institutions, but directly in the most critical areas of the business,” said Columbro.