For banks, new open source projects are creating new opportunities for innovation

For J.P. Morgan Chase, open source is about creating new opportunities to tap into connectivity and collaboration within its organization and with the larger banking community. That’s how William Quan, CIB Executive Director, described open source at a Fintech Open Source Foundation (FINOS) event late last year.

J.P. Morgan Chase isn’t the only financial institution that has discovered value from open source technologies and the communities that advance them. In fact, financial services firms and fintech companies are increasingly realizing that active participation in open source development is necessary to reduce development costs, attract top talent and innovate, according to a white paper produced by FINOS, Red Hat, and Wipro.

When speaking at the FINOS event, Quan told attendees that open source has given J.P. Morgan Chase “new perspective in terms of use cases and where we have opportunity to connect up internally but also externally on workflows.” He went on to say that open source is fueling industry collaborations, new ideas about the bank’s architecture and enable faster product creation.

The newly launched Data Analytics Visualization Program within FINOS illustrates J.P. Morgan Chase’s commitment to contribute to open source. The bank, a member of FINOS, will initially lead the program, and is contributing its open source data visualization engine, called “Perspective.” This Data Analytics Visualization Program is designed to help firms more easily and quickly understand data for better, faster decision-making, and supports open collaboration on technology and tools focused on user-driven data analytics and visualization.

According to Quan, Perspective is a real-time visualization engine that can help optimize the visualization of data. The engine connects various analytics models, real-time data feeds, and external data sources, and aggregates all of it so the data can be visualized more rapidly.

This helps the bank make quicker decisions and better serve customers, and also enables it to deploy analytics components and apps across different open source frameworks in a compatible way, Quan explained.

More recently, FINOS, which launched in April of 2018 to promote open innovation in the financial services community, created another project – the Cloud Native Computing Working Group. Chaired by Red Hat’s Diane Mueller, the group is working to define, build and maintain a collection of white papers and use cases that help members who are adopting containerized architectures. The group will also curate and promote the FINOS Service Catalog for use with the free, fully hosted Open Developer Platform on which FINOS members develop, test and collaborate.

The Cloud Native Computing Working Group has a call out for participation from FINOS members looking for guidance on cloud native technologies and who want to share best practices and requirements on containerized architectures, as well as FINOS program participants, looking for continuous delivery solutions for their FINOS hosted projects and a catalog of containers to publish their containerized solutions.

You can learn more about this work at the Openshift Commons Gathering in London, Jan. 30 at the The Savoy Place, an event focused on container technologies, best practices for cloud native application developers and the open source software projects that underpin the OpenShift ecosystem.

Mueller will start the day off with a talk on how to make collaboration work, followed by a keynote on OpenShift and the unified hybrid cloud by Red Hat’s Brian Gracely, director of OpenShift product strategy. Later in the day, there will be a panel about Open Banking on OpenShift. We’re looking forward to seeing you at OpenShift Commons Gathering later this month!