The Fintech Open Source Foundation (FINOS), the financial services umbrella of the Linux Foundation, recently confirmed the addition of new corporate members, “including Google Cloud, Société Générale, American Express, Point72, Mirantis, and The Digital Dollar Project.”
Building upon its 19 new Members in 2021 and its recent addition of Wellington Management Company to its Governing Board, FINOS now “has 57 corporate members ushering a new era in open collaboration across the global financial services industry.”
These new members, as well as the entire FINOS ecosystem will “meet in London on July 13 at its annual Open Source in Finance Forum.”
This addition of new members “reinforces FINOS’ position as the arena of choice to build the next generation of financial technologies on common standards and open source components for financial institutions on both the sell-side and buy-side, fintechs, cloud companies, regulators, industry consortia and individual contributors.”
FINOS continues “to see growth in the number and diversity of its corporate members across the world, with more than a 35% increase in the number of members year-over-year, fueling a community of more than 1,200 active contributors.”
This announcement is particularly significant “as the engagement of cloud vendors and new buy-side firms signals widespread reception of open source return on investment across the technology value chain as a whole.”
Gabriele Columbro, Executive Director of FINOS, said:
“We are at a pivotal moment in our evolution as a Community, where literally every constituent of the industry has come to the realization that open source collaboration has the concrete potential to bring to life the vision of a highly efficient, interoperable and developer-friendly global financial technology stack.”
Columbro added:
“From cloud and open source leaders heading the charge to some of the historically most conservative firms in the world now rolling out Open Source Program Offices (OSPOs), we are incredibly proud to see global recognition of the value in open source and of the role FINOS played in this evolution.”
As noted in the update shared with CI, Google Cloud becomes “the first global cloud service provider joining FINOS as a Gold member.”
Google Cloud will “contribute to critical efforts for cloud deployments in financial services like the FINOS Open RegTech and Compliant Financial Infrastructure initiatives, aimed at driving adoption of FINOS open source projects in the cloud.”
Zac Maufe, Director, Financial Services, Google Cloud, remarked:
“For more than 20 years, Google has helped shape the future of computing with its technology leadership and support across the open source ecosystem. We are thrilled to join FINOS and its community of companies and people dedicated to open source. As the financial services industry accelerates its adoption of cloud technologies, FINOS open source projects will deliver valuable support to both our customers and the financial services tech community at large.”
Société Générale (SocGen), a French multinational investment bank and financial services company, “joins FINOS as a Gold member, representing an important addition to the European sell-side representation in FINOS.”
This comes on the heels of the Linux Foundation “amplifying its global focus with the recently announced inaugural European World of Open Source: 2022 Europe Spotlight Survey, a testament to the truly global nature and potential of the open source Community.”
Alain Voiment, CIO for Group digital foundations and corporate functions, Société Générale said:
“Société Générale implemented an ‘Open Source First’ policy in 2017 and established it’s Open Source Program office (OSPO) in 2020. Over the years, our focus has been to evolve in the open source journey by deriving benefits from infrastructure layer to applicative layer to business value add while engaging our developers’ community. As we become a more ‘tech enabled’ company leveraging the power of IT, digital, and data, we continue to foster our innovation capacity in bringing added value for our clients. Collaboration with FINOS is the right step in this direction and there couldn’t be a better time to embark on this journey.”