Community Blog

On March 5th FINOS hosted its first Open Source in FinTech event of 2019 at Moody's Analytics Accelerator. Over 100 financial services professionals, technologists, and developers convened to discuss what it takes to build and sustain a decentralized ecosystem. Thank you to everyone who made it out on a cold Tuesday evening.

The centerpiece of the evening was a panel discussion between Patrick Nielsen, co-founder of Clovyr and Dan Guido, CEO of Trail of Bits. The panel was moderated by Rob Underwood, Director of Programs at FINOS. The conversation spanned a whole range of topics including how "decentralized" is much more than just blockchain technology; the new information security imperative; trends in crypto custody; and even quantum computing.

Following the panel, Amber Baldet, co-founder and CEO of Clovyr, tied the event together with her overview of the FINOS Decentralized Ecosystem Growth Program, and the ways in which that initiative provides a useful platform for discussion and development amongst those creating an ecosystem of decentralized projects, protocols, and tools, especially in financial services

Thanks again to everyone who was able to come out Tuesday. And whether you were able to join us or not, we've made the talks available for viewing: 

As our members get more involved in open source development, license compliance is inevitably a major focus. But while there's no shortage of information out there about the various open source licenses, it’s not easy to find practical information about license compliance that's accessible to the developers on the front lines of compliance.

To help address this, FINOS has collaborated with open source attorney Jilayne Lovejoy to produce the Open Source License Compliance Handbook, a reference guide to practical compliance information for the most common open source licenses. We're excited to release the Handbook today as an open source resource for our members and the broader open source community!

Scott Logic has recently joined FINOS (Fintech Open Source Foundation), an organisation which promotes open-source within financial services. I thought this would be a good time to share some of my own personal thoughts about the benefits of open-source, and how the financial services industry needs to think more about the community, than the code this community creates.

Open source in financial services is here to stay. It has developed into the default industry computing model. But two questions remain. First, where are you on the adoption curve? The other is: what can you do to maximize the benefits?

OpenFin CEO and FINOS Board member Mazy Dar sits down with TABB Group's senior analyst Dayle Scher to discuss trends he's observing in open source and open standards for desktop interoperability, including the FINOS FDC3 Program. Dar is enthusiastic about the use of open source in finance to help resolve workflow and technology issues.

A lot has been going on in the FINOS Community over the last couple of months. So much that, until today, I haven't had a chance to stop and reflect on what our Community has accomplished in less than 7 months since FINOS, the Fintech Open Source Foundation, was launched.

Most importantly, I see that the progress our Community is making will positively impact the global financial services industry, from those who drive and deliver technology across the organizations to those, end users, who consume the services. We all benefit from the improvements and advancements that our open source Community is bringing to the financial services ecosystem. 

The tl;dr is quite simple: our industry is increasingly eager and ready to embrace open collaboration as a prime way to deliver innovation and efficiency. It's time to catch up with, and maybe even surpass, Silicon Valley and there's an opportunity for all of you, companies and individuals, to benefit from this shifting paradigm and disrupt the way we build financial technology.

FINOS Community,

Today is #GivingTuesday, a day when we turn our attention away for a moment from holiday shopping for family and friends and tune into important causes within our communities and around the world.

Perhaps the most important ingredient that makes open source projects successful is diverse and vibrant developer communities. To create thriving open source communities for the long term, we must support efforts to expand computer science education, especially amongst communities that have traditionally been underrepresented in both technology and financial services.

This article originally appeared on IoT Evolution here.

Voice may be the last frontier for cloud, or it may be the best.

While the industry in general has been focused on cloud computing since the turn of the century, voice continues to be the most popular form of communications, becoming even more popular with the advent of voice activated assistants, natural voice technologies, AI integrations and more.