Like most large enterprises today, banks and other financial services firms are aiming to become technology businesses. Meanwhile, CTOs, CIOs, and IT managers are under constant pressure to decrease costs and deliver on large transformation projects. The present pandemic condition has left brands having to support remote working on an unparalleled scale, placing greater emphasis on cloud and security.
IT departments got to strike a careful balance between cost and delivery. Therefore, more and more financial services organizations are turning to enterprise open-source software. According to Red Hat’s research, 93% of IT leaders from all parts of the financial services industry said that enterprise open source was significant to their respective organizations. The majority (83%) also stated that the enterprise open-source has been instrumental in allowing them to take complete advantage of cloud architectures. This is allowing banks to implement hybrid cloud strategies and build cloud-native applications.
Open source allows firms to innovate quickly and provides a level of flexibility and agility that would have been difficult to achieve if they were solely reliant on proprietary software. Besides adopting enterprise-grade software products and solutions, banks can become leaders in setting technology trends and influencing software development through deeper collaboration with open source communities. This helps to draw in and retain the absolute best developers.
The magnification effects
From the outside, it might look as the financial services industry is ahead of the curve. Think of the various online and mobile banking applications and services that we take for granted today. The fact is that most traditional banks are reliant on aging systems that are uncapable to keep up with the pace of change in this sector. They face a difficult challenge to stay competitive and be at the forefront of financial services technology.
In addition to using enterprise open source from a trusted vendor, major gains can be made by organizations that are prepared to work directly with open source communities, in what’s known as ‘the upstream’. This is right where the code is developed, in a shared process. From here, the software can be downloaded for free, or, it can be consumed through a trusted open-source vendor that hardens the software, securing it, stabilizing it, adding lifecycle management, and service level support, to make it good for use in an enterprise; otherwise known as the ‘downstream’.
Upstream communities are the engines of innovation, made up of developers and thinkers, diverse individuals, and organizations from around the world, all dedicated to building new software. Collaboration in open source communities is a fluid model that allows banks to contribute directly to the development of new code to help create and refine a particular piece of software. It’s a way of extending a team several times over; supporting open source projects and contributing around just a few hours of developer time per week and gaining the output of hundreds or thousands more. Creating a magnification effect!
In the driving seat
Participating in open source is far different from buying an-off-the shelf product. It enables an enterprise to play a leading role in product development by nurturing a solution that addresses a particular business requirement. Most of the organizations from the same sector can work together to get the capabilities they need. That’s ground-breaking in a heavily regulated industry such as financial services. Also, it is likely that the code will become freely available, providing an opportunity for other developers to access it via a set of open APIs. The software is frequently updated and improved by the many developers maintaining it. As well as being the captains of their destiny, banks and their in-house developer teams gain added kudos for being involved at the bleeding edge of emerging technology.
FINOS (Fintech Open Source Foundation) is one example of a community that was established by banks to encourage greater collaboration on open-source projects. It began as Symphony, a messaging and collaboration tool designed for the banking community conceived on the back of open-source software that developers from a prominent investment bank used to create a secure messaging platform. It was then adopted by developers from other banks who went in to add voice and video capabilities. Symphony is now a major business valued at around $1.4bn, and the concept has expanded into what is now FINOS. However, FINOS at the moment focuses largely on software development for investment banks, which limits the impact it can have on other aspects of financial services such as insurance or retail banking.
Moving at the speed of innovation
Cloud migration and hybrid cloud adoption are central to any major digital transformation project. Banks need the agility and elasticity the cloud gives them to extend reach into new virtual and geographic markets. The framework is known as Kubernetes – one of the fastest-growing open-source projects in history – enables companies to automate the management of large numbers of containerized applications across a hybrid cloud environment. Linux-based Kubernetes has become the industry standard for container orchestration. Red Hat has been contributing to the Kubernetes’ development since its inception.
Given the opportunity, banks have to be actively contributing to the development of Kubernetes. The upstream model gives them the capability to do this. They can marry their resources with all that the community has to offer to shape the products based on Kubernetes and solutions to target their business requirements. It’s a model that promotes continuous development, benefitting the banks themselves and the wider community.
Banks are not averse to the upstream model by any means. Real-world examples include a major financial services organization that joined a community to drive the development of a critical piece of middleware. The bank’s developers worked side-by-side with the open-source community to create new software and features for the business process management platform. The community’s involvement allowed them to deliver the project in record time and at a considerably lower cost. Subsequently, the bank is now an active member of the open-source community, regularly contributing new ideas and code to drive projects. This model has ensured the bank can build the features it needs to enhance its product portfolio. A clear demonstration that leveraging global communities is a smart and cost-effective way to drive software development and transform digitally.
A strategic development
So, surely all financial services organizations are signed up to open source communities? Well, not quite. Specialist open source projects like FINOS do exist and there are more examples of community-led projects like Symphony out there. However, these open source projects are the exception rather than the rule. Most developers operating in the financial services space are tucked away behind the company firewall. Like banking itself, software development can be a stringent and highly regulated process. It’s time to change this. In today’s fast-paced digital economy, the policy of keeping your developers in a closed environment is no longer tenable. If you’re going to continuously innovate then you need to bolster your in-house teams with the wealth of talent that’s available outside of the firewall. On the flip side, developers flock to organizations that are engaged in upstream development because it gives them exposure to exciting community-led initiatives.
There are lots of different ways an organization can contribute to upstream communities and gain access to a global network of developers. They can invest in a community and support it financially, they can provide technical leadership or advocacy, but the most common model is to contribute code. By doing so banks and financial services organizations can discover, or help to build, software that can be adapted for a specific business need. Enterprise organizations that participate in existing open source projects can stay ahead of the curve, significantly reduce costs and speed up time to market.
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