The financial services industry is in the midst of a profound AI transformation. As firms increasingly find ways to integrate Generative AI and agentic AI systems, the focus has shifted from if we can use AI to how we can use it responsibly and securely. FINOS, through its open source initiatives, has been a leading voice in establishing frameworks to guide financial institutions in this evolving landscape.
Why Banks and Cloud Providers Are Choosing Collaboration Over Fragmentation
At Sibos 2025, I had the pleasure of moderating a panel with Allison Nachtigall (Microsoft) and Aric Rosenbaum (Red Hat) on the benefits of bringing together financial institutions and technology vendors to define common controls and how open collaboration can accelerate modernization in the financial sector — from cloud adoption to AI risk governance.
Generative AI is transforming every sector, but in financial services its adoption comes with unique stakes: compliance, trust, and systemic risk. While large language models (LLMs) and other AI systems promise productivity gains across research, compliance, trading, and customer engagement, they also introduce challenges that generic benchmarks cannot adequately address.
This tension was at the heart of the recent FINOS workshop and techsprint in London, where engineers, architects, developers and open-source contributors working in the FSI converged to shape an Evaluation Framework for AI in Finance.
Interested in FINOS open source AI? Click the link below to see how to get involved in the FINOS AI Community.
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.
The FINOS TechSprint is an extended collaborative effort that invites developers to explore cutting-edge financial solutions using open source tools. The primary focus of the sprint is TraderX, a highly modular, open source trading platform designed to serve as a reference architecture for integrating various FINOS projects. This hackathon-style event runs through September, culminating in demonstrations at the Open Source in Finance Forum (OSFF) New York. Haven’t registered yet for OSFF NYC? Use the code OSFFNY24SOC to get 20% off your ticket and register here.
To unlock the full potential of open-source software, as it is with any modern-day software, it must have an integrated ecosystem of complementary solutions that add value.
That is the aim of the FINOS Tech Sprint 2024, which kicked off on July 16th with a gathering of existing FINOS projects and new teams creating new value (code, tests, documentations, GH issues, etc.) using existing solutions in the FINOS ecosystem and beyond.
Summary of Previous Calls and Meetings:
