The Fintech Open Source Foundation (FINOS) recently announced Wellington Management, one of the “largest” independent investment management firms, as its newest Platinum member.
In addition, Wellington’s Co-Head, Technology, Madeleine Dassule will “join the FINOS board of directors.”
As noted in an update shared with CI, this membership “highlights the value and long-term benefits that open source collaboration brings to buy-side firms, with FINOS being recognized as the neutral umbrella for all industry constituents of the financial services ecosystem to leverage and contribute to open source technology.”
Gabriele Columbro, Executive Director of FINOS, stated:
“On an industry-wide scale, we are seeing an increased diversity of organizations joining the open source movement and playing an instrumental role in driving innovation throughout the ecosystem. The engagement and open collaboration of buy-side firms and adoption of FINOS’ open standards drives fundamental technology principles, enhancing interoperability across the industry. The impact of transformation through open source continues to be measured by the global recognition of value among leading institutions.”
Year after year, FINOS continues “to expand the diversity of its corporate members, now showcasing the recognition of value in open source among leading buy-side institutions, including large asset managers and hedge funds.”
The addition of Wellington as a Platinum member empowers the drive of technology standards “in critical areas, such as interoperability with the sell side and industry-wide data.”
Leveraging the power of open source technology through projects contributed to FINOS, like FDC3 and Legend, buy-side institutions “enable direct connectivity with their counterparts and reduce vendor lock-in.”
Dov Katz, a Distinguished Engineer and Managing Director at Morgan Stanley and Member of the FINOS Governing Board, said:
“As we come together to tackle common technology challenges our industry faces such as application interoperability, we empower our clients and counterparties to manage workflows and establish connectivity better and faster. With buy- side firms like Wellington joining FINOS, we are further strengthening the ecosystem and harnessing the benefits from frameworks such as FDC3 to achieve our vision of continuous innovation to drive open standards and effective collaboration.”
Kim Prado of The Bank of Montreal, and Vice Chair of the FINOS Governing Board, added:
“Buy-side participation in the open source movement plays a pivotal role in establishing vendor-neutral collaboration with sell-side conglomerates. Through projects like FDC3, Wellington and other firms support the development of unified industry congruence. The addition of Madeleine to the FINOS Governing Board aids in addressing key challenges facing financial services.”
Wellington’s Madeleine Dassule, Co-Head, Technology, joins the FINOS board of directors. Dassule assumes her role “with the goal of leveraging the power of FINOS’ open source projects.”
As Platinum representative on the FINOS Governing Board, Dassule “represents the buy-side of the ecosystem influencing the direction of the foundation to deliver tangible business value to her respective industry and closely related counterparts.”
Dassule added:
“As our bank partners continue to innovate and introduce rich sets of data and analytics, we are eager to integrate these valuable insights into our portfolio construction and risk transfer processes. Advancement in desktop integration and interoperability will allow our investors and traders to leverage these tools in a manner that is frictionless and compatible with their existing workflows. We are excited to collaborate with the industry to further provide investment excellence to our clients.”
As covered, FINOS (The Fintech Open Source Foundation) is “a nonprofit whose mission is to foster 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.”