When it comes to digital experiences in financial services, customer expectations have never been higher. In today’s competitive marketplace, a financial institution’s brand is built — or broken — on its customer experience. Your customers are comparing you with their last digital experience, whether it be your direct competitors, your near competitor, and even your non-competitors, such as Uber, eBay, WeChat, WhatsApp, or Amazon.

Successful financial institutions realize that in order to meet or even exceed these growing expectations, they must go beyond simply getting customers to use online or mobile banking as an add-on to existing products. Throughout the organization, the customer must be at the center of every business decision, driving the entire organization. Financial institutions should not simply react by building a defensive strategy against traditional and non-bank competitors. True success will be found by enabling better engagement through data-driven customer insights. In order to achieve this, your development teams need to think differently, using technologies and methods that have not historically been part of the corporate DNA, which will help you attract superb talent and ensure that you're constantly innovating.

Open source is the foundation for so much of the software innovation that has shaped financial services today. The technologies at the core of customer engagement, such as cloud, big data, and containers are all built on open source foundations, using open source operating systems, tools, and technologies. 95% of IT organizations use open source software as part of mission-critical IT portfolios—whether they know it or not. Demands for efficiency, agility, and innovation require organizations to always look for new technologies. But it's not just about the technology. No matter how amazing our technology is, it’s not enough.

Successful IT culture today is open source. Open source communities showed us that transparency and agility create better software. The culture of open source is moving beyond software to change all areas of our lives. Especially in financial services, leaders have demonstrated that adopting open source can help you be more efficient, agile, and innovative.

No one understands the power of innovation through open source better than Red Hat, and we are proud to have our SVP of Engineering, Matt Hicks as a speaker at The Open Source Strategy Forum on Wednesday, November 8 in New York City. This is a one-day conference for executives and senior technologists from financial services. We hope you’ll join us and hear of the insightful ways that technology, processes, and—perhaps most critically—culture of open source can help you to become a digital leader.