Cut support and operations costs. Modernize IT systems to better service customers and associates. Provide more personalized engagement opportunities that are channel-agnostic. These are just a few of the pressing challenges today’s financial services companies face. One way to help overcome these challenges is the adoption of open source technologies and more collaborative models like open banking.

Historically, the financial services industry has been more conservative when it comes to adopting new technologies and participating in more collaborative ecosystems – even if they have the potential to drive innovation and boost productivity. That may be due to the legal, IP, and compliance regulations that dominate the industry. So, for fintech developers to fully move out of their comfort zones and into open banking -- defined as a network of financial institutions’ systems that fosters secure data sharing through application programming interfaces (APIs) – they will need secure continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines across the open source community software supply chain. That’s where the Fintech Open Source Foundation (FINOS) Open Developer Platform (ODP) comes in.

What is FINOS?

FINOS, which launched in April of 2018, promotes open innovation in the financial services community. The nonprofit aims to give highly regulated and competitive financial entities a safe, collaborative space where source code can be freely shared – increasing the bench strength of any one firm with like-minded individuals solving the same problem, enabling traditional banks to accelerate growth and become more competitive. The ODP is a free, fully hosted developer platform upon which new applications can be built.

Tools, such as Red Hat OpenShift for continuous delivery, and others for code hosting, automated security, and intellectual property help ensure license compliance and reduce risk and make it possible for ODP to enable a more secure and compliant software development life cycle, following a continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) model that lets developers work across the multi-cloud environment.

Red Hat plays its part in enabling this by providing common, OpenShift infrastructure services that operate consistently across on-premise and public clouds. It uses the industry-leading open source container orchestration framework, Enterprise Kubernetes, for running existing and cloud-native applications in any cloud.

Under the ODP framework, open source contributors have fully-managed developer access to open application programming interfaces (APIs), open data, and hosted developer facilities. At a recent industry event, one banking executive discussed that having the ability to develop projects with other FINOS bank partners will enable the bank’s APIs and software to become more useful – and both it and other financial institution members will reap value from community-assisted growth.

Key FINOS Event

On November 14-15, FINOS will host the Open Source Strategy Forum (OSSF) in London, with presenters covering topics essential to successful open source engagement. Day one will provide in-depth, practical knowledge on the fundamentals of open source collaboration through three tracks: Business value and strategy, policy and process, and tools and technology.

Day two of the forum offers working sessions and implementation presentations, providing attendees with a collaborative, hands-on experience.

Red Hat will participate in three sessions on November 14 on solving for DevOps with reference architectures and elements, overcoming barriers to open source collaboration, and managing open source vendor relationships.

As financial services use new technology to extend market reach, technology operations are tasked with supporting and scaling these solutions in a way that integrates with bank operations and processes to ensure regulatory compliance. Red Hat’s Alessandro Petroni, director and head of strategy and solutions for FSI, will present “Supporting Innovation and Stability in FSI Solutions Development with Open Source Platforms,” at 11:30 a.m., November 14, at FINOS OSSF. In the session, he’ll talk about unifying the needs for innovation and stability through an open source platform as well as how fundamental capabilities such as cloud readiness, scale, auditability, transparency, ease of integration, and product lifecycle standards can benefit both fintech and finserv.

Diane Mueller, Red Hat’s director of community development for cloud platforms, will speak on two panels at the event. In the first, “Overcoming Compliance Barriers to Open Source Collaboration Infrastructure,” she’ll be joined by Jamie Jones, principal architect at GitHub, and Maurizio Pilitu, director of infrastructure for the FINOS Foundation. The session begins at 2:15 p.m. After that, stick around at 3:15 p.m. for Diane’s business and strategy panel with Duncan Lawie, enterprise architect for Credit Suisse Group, and Colin Charles, managing consultant at GrokOpen. The panelists will discuss “The Enterprise Open Source Vendor Relationship.” It’s a topic that’s likely top of mind for many. Managing enterprise-wide open source projects typically requires thousands of changes, and it’s not for the faint of heart. If a bank doesn’t have to vet all those code changes, and can rely on a partner, that means there’s more time to put resources toward innovation and customers.

And if you’re attending OSSF, don’t miss day two of the forum, when Red Hat’s Andrew Downs, Chris Milsted, and Sam Marland will host a hands-on workshop with Red Hat OpenShift and the Open Developer Platform covering the next-gen vision of ODP and demonstrating how Red Hat OpenShift works to support banking application development. The workshop starts at 10:00 a.m. and will cover:

  • Cloud and container fundamentals
  • How Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform uses containers to speed development
  • How containers, Kubernetes, and other innovative community projects play a critical role
  • How DevOps can be simplified with Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform

After the workshop, stick around for a panel at 11:40 a.m. on “Management Consulting to Accelerate your Open Source Journey,” presented by Malcolm Herbert, chief technologist with Red Hat Consulting, and Andrew Aitken, GM and global open source practice leader with Wipro.

OSSF 2018 will take place November 14-15 at CCT Venues Plus-Bank Street, Canary Wharf in London.

If you haven’t yet registered, use our code RHVERTFREE to get one of three free tickets for OSSF 2018. If you aren’t able to get a free ticket, use our code RHVERT50 for a 50 percent discount (limited to the first 25 registrations received). Both offers are available on a first come, first served basis. And if you’re unable to attend in person, be sure to check out the FINOS project space on GitHub.


About the author

Alessandro Petroni leads the business and technology strategy to accelerate the adoption of Red Hat open source technologies in the FinServ/FinTech industry working with customers, technology and service partners across product management, engineering, marketing and sales. In this role, he leads Red Hat in assisting banks and other financial services firms in the go-to-cloud journey, adopting DevOps, influencing Red Hat R&D to focus on solving Finserv line of business' challenges developing open source reference architectures and open collaborative environments.

Prior to Red Hat, Petroni spent sixteen years serving top financial institutions including Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch Bank of America, Societe Generale, Citicorp and Deutsche Bank. He has covered leading roles as consultant covering engineering, operations, software development, and consulting. As banking IT director, he has implemented distributed solutions for capital markets and retail banking, managing large international teams. He graduated with a Master of Computer Engineering and Business Administration from the University of Trento, Italy and lives in New York.

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