On the way, I bumped into Fidelity colleague Sean Walsh, who was staying at a different hotel. Sean had been part of the Fluxnova journey with us over the past year, so it felt fitting that the day started with exactly the kind of connection OSFF is known for: informal, human, and rooted in shared work.

By the time we reached the QEII Centre about thirty minutes later, we were both very happy to get into the air-conditioned lobby.

Inside, the conference already had that unmistakable OSFF energy: people collecting badges, spotting colleagues, reconnecting with old friends, and scanning the room for familiar faces. Within minutes we had met up with other Fidelity colleagues and reconnected with partners from Deutsche Bank and NatWest, who had collaborated with us on Fluxnova.

That moment stayed with me.

The badges said Fidelity, Deutsche Bank, and NatWest, names synonymous with huge financial institutions and enormous responsibility across the global financial system. But in the lobby, that was not how it felt. It felt like old friends reconnecting after a year spent building something meaningful together.

That, for me, is the magic of open source.

At one level, open source in financial services is about governance, standards, contribution models, resilience, and production-grade software. But underneath all of that, it is about people: trust, shared effort, humour, empathy, and the willingness to solve hard problems together.

Community is the engine of open source. OSFF London 2026 reminded me of that again and again.

The Themes Emerging from the Keynotes

One of the things I enjoy most about OSFF is how the themes of the day begin to reveal themselves naturally through the keynotes. No one needs to force the narrative. If you listen carefully, you can feel where the industry is moving.

Gabriele Columbro, Executive Director of FINOS, opened the day with his usual energy and ability to connect strategic industry direction with the practical reality of open source collaboration.

Very quickly, one theme became impossible to miss: agentic AI.

FINOS had already hosted a wider OSFF London Week around the main event, including technical workshops, AI governance training, and an AI in Finance Leadership Summit. By the time the main conference began, the AI conversation had moved well beyond experimentation. The discussion was about execution, governance, control, interoperability, and how financial institutions can adopt AI safely and responsibly at scale.

This was not AI as a side topic. It was AI as a forcing function.

Again and again, speakers returned to the same set of questions:

How do we govern agentic systems?
How do we define authority and assurance?
How do we build control layers that regulators, risk teams, engineers, and business leaders can trust?
And where there is no competitive advantage, why should every firm solve the same problem alone?

That last question became one of the loudest messages of the day.

The Power of Neutral Shared Control Layers

A recurring theme throughout OSFF London was collaboration where there is no competitive advantage.

Financial institutions will always compete. They should compete on customer experience, product quality, reliability, service, and innovation. But there are many areas where duplication creates cost and complexity without creating meaningful advantage.

AI governance is one example. Open-source resilience is another. Regulatory implementation, patching workflows, control frameworks, architecture standards, and interoperability patterns all came up throughout the day.

The message was not that everyone should work together on everything. It was more practical than that: where the industry faces the same foundational problem, and where the solution requires trust, transparency, and broad adoption, open source gives us a way to mutualise the effort safely.

That is where FINOS continues to play such an important role. It provides a neutral venue where firms can collaborate under clear governance, shared rules, and a community model that makes cross-firm work possible.

Fluxnova: From Shared Problem to Shared Platform

For Fidelity, one of the strongest moments of the day came during the Fluxnova keynote.

Craig Kitching, Head of the Digital Automation Platform at Fidelity Investments, joined Miguel Capitao, Head of Technical Architecture at Deutsche Bank, for the keynote “From Innovation to Industry Adoption: Fluxnova in Financial Services.”

At a technical level, Fluxnova is about process orchestration, BPMN and DMN workflows, auditability, transparency, and reducing vendor dependency. But the story behind it is just as important.

Several institutions faced a common challenge. Rather than each firm solving it independently, the community came together under FINOS governance to create a neutral, open, production-grade path forward.

Craig spoke about how Fidelity is already using Fluxnova in production. What I particularly appreciated was that the talk did not frame open source as an abstract ideal. It showed open source as a practical delivery mechanism: something that can help large firms reduce fragmentation, improve visibility, scale automation, and give engineers a meaningful way to contribute to shared infrastructure.

For engineers, open source is not only about code. It is also about identity, ownership, and pride. When teams contribute in the open, they represent their firms, but they also represent themselves. They build reputation, learn from peers, and see their work matter beyond the walls of their own organisation.

That is a powerful motivator, and one of the reasons community matters so much.

My Session: Stewardship as a Scaling Model

Later in the day, I made my way up to the fourth floor to check the room where I would be presenting my own session: “Operating Open Source at Scale: Community-Driven Stewardship of Critical Engineering Tools.”

The first thing I noticed was the temperature. After the heat of the main hall, the room felt wonderfully cool. I remember thinking that if people knew this was the best air-conditioned room in the building, my talk would be standing room only.

Thankfully, people came for the topic too.

My session focused on community-driven stewardship: how large organisations can operate open source at scale, not simply by consuming software, but by building the internal communities, ownership models, contribution pathways, and recognition mechanisms needed to sustain it.

Stewardship is becoming increasingly important for large companies that rely on open source. It is about reducing risk, improving sustainability, and increasing the value organisations get from the open-source technologies they already depend on. Critical engineering tools do not look after themselves. They need people, attention, governance, and long-term care.

The engagement after the session was encouraging. The questions and conversations reinforced something I have believed for a long time: open source success is not just a tooling problem. It is a people and operating model problem.

You can have the best platform in the world, but without community, ownership, and trust, it will not scale.

A Marathon Day That Did Not Feel Like One

By the time the day ended, I had been at the conference centre for over ten hours. On paper, that sounds like a marathon. In the moment, it felt much shorter.

That is usually a sign of a good conference.

There were keynotes, breakout sessions, hallway conversations, project updates, quick catch-ups, longer discussions, and plenty of moments where a theme from one talk connected directly to something said in another. The auditorium was full, the turnout was strong, and the energy felt every bit as vibrant as last year.

The major themes were clear:

1. Agentic AI is moving from concept to production reality.
2. Governance needs to be embedded as code, not bolted on afterwards.
3. Neutral shared control layers can reduce duplication across the industry.
4. Open-source resilience and faster patching are becoming urgent.
5. Regulation needs to become more digital and machine-readable.
6. Community remains the human foundation underneath all of it.

But what I will remember most is not just the agenda.

I will remember the walk through the heat. The relief of stepping into the lobby. The moment of seeing colleagues and partners from other firms and realising that, despite the company names on our badges, we were simply people who had shared a journey together.

I will remember Craig and Miguel on stage showing what cross-firm collaboration can become. I will remember the conversations after my own session. I will remember the sense that open source in financial services is continuing to mature, not as a side activity, but as a serious operating model for solving shared industry problems.

That is what OSFF London 2026 captured for me.

Open source works because community works. And community works because, behind the institutions, strategies, and standards, there are people willing to trust each other enough to build something together.

Author: Neil McGonigle, FINOS Ambassador, Fidelity Investments

Fidelity, Deutsche Bank, and NatWest are separate companies. Unless otherwise noted, the opinions provided are those of the speaker, not necessarily those of Fidelity Investments or its affiliates.