Community Blog

Part 1: a new phase for open source in finance

I recently had the opportunity to speak at the Open Source in Finance Forum (OSFF) in London, a key event where the financial services industry gathers to tackle its most important questions. There, I sat down with James McLeod of NatWest Group for a fireside chat that crystallized a shift I’m seeing across the financial services landscape. Our conversation focused on the industry’s evolution from being passive consumers of open source to becoming active creators of value.

We are excited to welcome Hitachi as a new Silver Member of the Fintech Open Source Foundation (FINOS). As a global leader in technology, Hitachi's commitment to driving innovation and standardization in the financial services industry will bring immense value to the FINOS community. Their expertise in promoting best practices and enhancing security and user experience aligns perfectly with FINOS’s mission to advance open standards in financial services. Through their involvement, Hitachi will play a key role in shaping global regulatory compliance, improving security for financial applications, and advancing the use of open source software in the industry. We look forward to collaborating with Hitachi to further strengthen the financial ecosystem through open-source contributions and industry best practices.

You can read the full Hitachi press release from June 24th below.

In this episode of the FINOS podcast, Grizz Griswold interviews George Kichukov from GitLab to discuss the transformative effect of open-source technology in financial services. The conversation covers the adoption of secure open-source practices, the importance of a strong engineering culture, and the benefits of contributing back to the open-source community. George shares insights from his 20-year career, including his extensive experience at Citibank, and elaborates on his current role in improving software delivery at GitLab. The episode also highlights upcoming events like the Open Source and Finance Forum (OSFF) and the vital role of sponsors in fostering industry collaboration.

In this episode of the FINOS podcast, Grizz Griswold interviews Daniel Paes, a FINOS Ambassador. They discuss concepts like data mesh, data contracts, and the use of open source tools like Legend and CDM in data governance. Daniel shares his journey from a business intelligence analyst in Brazil to a principal director at a CloudOps and DataOps company in Canada. They also talk about the Open Source and Finance Forum (OSFF), upcoming events, and Daniel’s innovative projects like Runink. This episode offers insights into the adoption of open source tools in financial services and practical applications of data governance models.

During our recent Open Source in Finance Forum (OSFF) in London, we had the honor of recognizing some of the outstanding individuals making meaningful contributions and driving positive impact across the open source in financial services ecosystem.

We’re incredibly grateful for their efforts—and for the many others who continue to support and strengthen this growing community. We’re pleased to highlight the recipients of the 2025 FINOS EMEA/APAC Community Award Winners.

In this episode of the FINOS podcast, Grizz Griswold interviews Mike Long, CEO and founder of Kosli. They discuss the challenges of AI readiness and managing risk in financial services, focusing on the importance of common control definitions in SDLC processes. Mike shares his journey from studying AI and computer science to founding Kosli, emphasizing the role of automation in governance and compliance. The conversation highlights the significance of community and collaboration within FINOS to solve industry-level problems, touching on AI, regulatory compliance, and the future of governance automation. Mike also reflects on the evolution of agent-based solutions and their applications in current tech environments. Tune in for insights on making engineering processes more efficient and the importance of shared understanding in tech and compliance.

Just nine months ago we unveiled the draft AI Governance Framework (AIGF) on stage at OSFF New York, inviting the industry to stress-test and extend the first open-source control set for GenAI in finance (see announcement here). Since then, the Community has work-shopped, debated and iterated through dozens of pull-requests and in-person sessions — from the SEC’s AI Roundtable in Washington (SEC Blogpost) to May’s practitioner workshop in New York (NYC Workshop Blogpost).

Today, the day before OSFF London, we graduate those efforts into AIGF v1.0 — a production-ready playbook that any financial-services institution can plug into its existing three-lines-of-defence model.

AI-powered assistants are rapidly transforming how software is built, but when it comes to maintaining and modernizing the complex, interdependent systems that power global finance, code generation alone isn’t enough. Most generative AI tools operate in a local, developer-centric loop—with the IDE internal code representation as context to generate new code and suggest code updates. But modernization at fintech scale demands something more: deterministic, scalable automation that operates with precision across thousands of repositories and millions of lines of code.

That’s where the OpenRewrite open-source automated refactoring framework comes in.